The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story Read Free

other.” Either way, it was at once familiar and entirely exotic, and I realized that even the most regular of out-of-towners could not begin to understand New Orleans with all its mysteries and complexities—good and bad. You had to stick around, so I did.
    In the decade or so after I first opened that door on St. Philip Street, Edwards would win the election in a landslide, stand trial for extorting money in exchange for riverboat casino licenses, and receive a ten-year sentence to the federal penitentiary, which he is currently serving five hours north of New Orleans in a place called Oakdale, which is also the home of Enron’s Andrew Fastow. The man for whom I had fallen, A., came in and out of my life for long stretches, and I took a series of increasingly better apartments in the Quarter, including one in a former stables which had been renovated by Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman who stood trial for conspiring to assassinate JFK. Another, on the third floor in the 1200 block of Royal, had eighteen-foot ceilings and was so high up I could see the lights of the river bridge from the balcony at night, and so infested with termites that my high heels punched holes in the floor.
    I still wrote for Vogue , where I’d worked since 1988, and I still had my apartment on the Upper East Side. But as the months and years passed, I realized that I was spending far more time in New Orleans than in New York, where I voted, paid taxes, and—occasionally—turned up at an office. It made no sense but it was a ratio that became more or less permanent when I found my last apartment on Bourbon Street.

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    I HADN’T REALLY been looking, but on the street one day I ran into Betty, a woman I knew from Mississippi who owned three fabulous places in the Quarter—an apartment was available in one of them, would I like to see it? Of course I would, so off we went to a not very interesting, mostly residential block on Bourbon Street, but when she opened the green painted gate and led me down a moss-covered brick walkway, we were in an entirely other world. There, behind the seemingly simple red Creole cottage that fronted the street, was an enormous courtyard shaded by an even more enormous stand of banana trees, a two-story slave quarter with a balcony across the front and a breezeway running through the first floor, and a back courtyard walled by bamboo. I told her I’d take it before setting foot inside.
    My part of the compound, the slave quarter, was built in 1810 as the kitchen and living space for the slaves, and later paid servants, for the family who lived in the house up front. (A Creole cottage, consisting of four large square rooms with no halls and a rear gallery, is a relative of the French half-timber house, and would’ve been the home of a middle-class merchant, as opposed to the grander, more formal townhouses that were the city residences of River Road sugar planters.) When I was there, the cottage apartments were taken by mostly absentee renters, so the whole place was, in effect, mine.
    I reined in the bamboo, planted six kinds of jasmine, and put huge pots of lemons and satsumas, kumquats and Key limes any place there was room. I had never gardened in my life, but the courtyard, bounded by tall old brick walls and the always damp, smooth stucco finish of the houses, was like a terrarium. When wind or hail or a bit of cold would cause the tops of the bananas to die off, Betty would come over with her giant machete and we’d hack them down. Within months, they’d be back, their trunks the size of telephone poles, their leaves grazing the top of my second-story roof. Betty maintained they were so big because they were planted on the site of the former outhouse, and it’s true that everything we put beneath them—gingers and ferns, elephant ears and Kashmir bouquets—grew like crazy, but so did everything else. “If it smells like sex, it grows here,” Ellen Gilchrist once wrote, and the best embodiment