New Orleans: French or Spanish?

I spent a wonderful week in New Orleans in May 2018. This posting reflects the little learning I picked up while there about the urban morphology of the French Quarter part of New Orleans in particular. I was there to immerse myself in local music - blues, soul, jazz - but there's so much more to experience and learn about here. (You will see my other post here about Katrina.).

One of the questions in my mind after walking around the streets of the French Quarter, was why so much of the architecture felt Spanish, when the whole place was known as the French Quarter. Check out these streetscapes....

This useful article notes:

Although New Orleans’ early residents were indeed French, the architecture of the French Quarter is actually Spanish. To pay a war debt, France gave up control of Louisiana to Spain, who controlled the colony from 1763 until 1803. 

Several fires destroyed the original French architecture of the Vieux Carré during Spain’s forty-year rule of New Orleans, so the charm presently found at the heart of New Orleans can be credited to the Spanish from when their administrators rebuilt the city.  

The flat-tiled roofs, tropical colors, and ornate ironwork of the French Quarter are Iberian touches brought from across the Atlantic. In order to prevent fires, the Spanish-controlled government mandated that stucco replace wood for construction material and that all buildings be placed near the street and near each other. Where there used to be yards and open spaces surrounding buildings, the French Quarter was now rendered both more intimate and more secretive, with continuous façades, arched passageways, and gorgeous rear gardens and courtyards hidden from street-view.

The map (above) was one of the exhibits at the Cabildo Museum, on Jackson Square, heart of the old French Quarter. You will see the red area described as "Nueva Espana". New Orleans is located just above the compass sign, in the heart of Louisiana, and in Nueva Espana. Many of the streets in the French Quarter also have signs giving some explanation...

Here's how the original "French Quarter" was planned in 1728...

You can see that what is now known as Jackson Square (the park area by the Cathedral), fronted onto the Mississipi. There were other ideas at the time, because of threats posed by foreign vessels (including English ships) approaching up the Mississippi. Like this....

The legend that goes with this map image, reads like this:

Philip Pittman, “A Plan of New Orleans.” Watercolor, pen and ink, [1765]. Thomas Gage Papers. Map Division, Maps 8-L-13
By the time New Orleans was transferred from French to Spanish control under the 1763 treaty of Paris, it could boast a bastioned enceinte (surrounding enclosure), though it lacked the ditch, glacis, and outworks that would have made it possible to resist an attack by artillery. As with many fortified places, each bastion was identified by a name.
Pittman’s plan was drawn to provide information to British forces that had recently taken possession of neighboring West Florida.

It is information like this, which can be pieced together from books and museum exhibits, that enable visitors to build up a picture of how this rather wonderful and interesting city came about. An extraordinary mix of French and Spanish colonial history, with a smattering of local Creole, and a background of New Orleans being a centre of the black slave trade.

Another map, this one shows urban morphology changes after the first layout of "French Quarter", and subsequent urban expansion...

The shape of the original "French Quarter" is clearly visible. Then on either side similar street layouts are visible as New Orleans expanded - with the dark areas being built in 1841. The fainter lines show the new street networks planned by 1880.

One of the other very interesting pieces of the New Orleans puzzle is the Battle of New Orleans - one of the centre-piece battles in the US War of Independence. The role of the French and Spanish and local Creole populations in working together to resist the English Motherland's desire for control of the area and surrounding seas, and to enable the revolting local English-speaking colonists to defeat the English army is intriguing to say the least. A useful account of some of this is here, and includes information like:

In 1777 Benjamin Franklin, American
representative in France, arranged for the secret
transport from Spain to the colonies of 215
bronze cannons; 4,000 tents; 13,000 grenades;
30,000 muskets, bayonetes, and uniforms; over
50,000 musket balls and 300,000 poiunds of
gunpowder....

This is a never-ending story, but this post ends here. Recommendation: a great place to visit. Fascinating. And I haven't mentioned the live music venues, the food, the creativity...

And just a little bit of jazz