New Orleans - Red Hot & Cool

Haunting jazz riffs, incomparable cuisine and a provocative past serve up a heady brew that is uniquely New Orleans

- Michael Alpiner

As technology continues to advance and grow more complex and impersonal, there are still destinations where we can escape, places to connect to our own sense of celebrity and to dream of a glamorous and glorious past. Follow the scent of Cajun spice and the bluesy wavelengths of sound to the Gulf-side stronghold of New Orleans where a classic past harmonizes perfectly with the beat of the contemporary traveler.

It has been nearly fourteen years since Hurricane Katrina saturated this city that lives eight feet below sea level, devastating lives, and landscape. However, there is a spirit in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz – music with soul, with wings, that cannot be caged even by nature’s random cadence. Jazz great Dave Brubeck once said, “Jazz is the first sign of the return to freedom.”

A trip to New Orleans will transport the visitor back in time 100 years to the birth of jazz when it seemed the streets existed only in black and white. In reality, one of the most notorious Red Light Districts in New Orleans, called “Storyville,” was the brainchild of city councilman Sidney Story who was looking for a way to regulate the proliferation of prostitution that plagued New Orleans at the time.

Storyville, which ultimately became the last “vice district” in New Orleans, told its infamous tale from 1897 to 1917, when it was replaced by a more sober and respectable neighborhood.

Flash forward to June 29, 2019, and the opening of the Marquee Resort in New Orleans, a stone’s throw away from the border of Storyville. There, the spirit of Storyville and the jazzy narrative that followed it is expressed through the resort’s mascot and patron saint, Story Val, made real in a 3D iron sculpture created by Lisa Fedon, which is suspended on the far wall of the iconic lobby.