Back to the Big Easy

In New Orleans, the author Walter Isaacson and his wife, Cathy, are rediscovering his hometown in their convivial new digs.

- By Nancy Hass

The journalist Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time magazine and biographer of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, comes to his love of New Orleans honestly: He was born and raised in the raucously omnivorous, ebullient city. Like many homegrown Southern intellectuals, he went north to make his reputation in the New York literary world. But all those years he was building his career, Isaacson never quite left behind the lyrical city of his birth, with its hothouse atmosphere of sophistication, culture, and inspiration.

New Orleans, in particular, with vernacular architecture and design that is an eccentric mashup of Creole, Greek Revival, Italianate, and Edwardian influences, among others, is hard to quit, especially for those with creative imagination. Traditional Southern manners prevail here, but there is always a whiff of off-kilter fun in the air. Isaacson and his wife of 38 years, Cathy, a lawyer, still spend part of the year in their Upper West Side apartment near Central Park, but their spiritual home is in New Orleans, where they are deeply rooted in the community, serving on the boards of philanthropic and educational organizations.

For decades, they kept a grand, double-height parlor floor apartment in the French Quarter in an 1840s Creole townhouse smack in the middle of the nonstop revelry ("I love the live music in the streets and the parades," Isaacson says). But once he took a faculty position a couple of years ago at Tulane University in Uptown New Orleans (he is the Leonard Lauder Professor of American History and Values), commuting to the campus from the house on Royal Street through the quarter's wingding alleys became a bit too much of an obstacle course.