Happy Birthday, New Orleans!
Royal Tours New Orleans • May 7, 2018
Happy Birthday, New Orleans!
One of the most vibrant cities in America has it roots in France, was once owned by Spain, and continues to this day to feel as European as it does American. Once known as La Nouvelle-Orleans, the City of New Orleans was founded in the Spring of 1718 at the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville. Bienville settled on the current location after having scouted the area since his arrival with his brother Iberville and a small band of explorers in late 1699.
Originally settling near present-day Biloxi, Mississippi, Bienville and his explorers began looking for other locations to expand the French empire at the behest of King Louis XIV. Bienville selected this site for several reasons: it was on relatively high ground and along a sharp bend in the Mississippi River which created a natural levee (the Quinipissa Indians, recognizing this fact, once had a village here), it was at an Indian trading route and portage between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain via Bayou St. John (that trading route became the basis for parts of Esplanade and Bayou Road), and it offered control of the Mississippi River at a safe distance from English and Spanish settlements.
The city was named in honor of then Regent of France, Philip II, Duke of Orleans, and it was intended from its founding to be an important colonial city for France, lending it control over trade through the Mississippi River. While John Law would soon try to sell New Orleans to Europeans as a veritable utopia in an effort to get them to move here, Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix more accurately described it as a place of a hundred wretched hovels in a malarious wet thicket of willows and dwarf palmettos, infested by serpents and alligators. But, both he and the city’s second engineer, Adrien de Pauger, predicted great things for this fledgling city.
By 1722, Nouvelle-Orleans had replaced Biloxi as the capitol of French Louisiana.
Happy birthday, New Orleans. You’re looking pretty good for 300!
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N orma Wallace, a name that evokes intrigue and fascination, was a prominent figure in New Orleans during the early and mid-20th century. As a powerful and resourceful madam, she operated a network of brothels that thrived despite the constant threat of law enforcement. Beginning in 1920, she would operate brothels for the next 45 years, a span that has not been beaten in the history of New Orleans.