RE-MAKING NEW ORLEANS HOME
TRAVELER'S LETTERS • NEW ORLEANS
The Places I've Called Home —
For a Night or Two
Maybe that's also why, even after living here, I still love staying in New Orleans.
I've stayed all over this city, and every place has somehow given me a different version of her.
The Apartment Above the Ice Cream Shop
There was the adorable little apartment above an ice cream shop, tucked inside a building with a beautifully preserved tiled lobby. The kind of lobby that makes you stop before you walk through it.
I remember looking around and imagining another version of New Orleans entirely. A doorman standing there in uniform. People coming and going decades before I ever wandered in with an overnight bag.
The building had lived a whole life before I borrowed a tiny piece of it.
See where I stayed →“The building had lived a whole life before I borrowed a tiny piece of it.”
A Little Life in Lakeview
Then there was the Lakeview duplex near Pontchartrain.
That stay wasn't about feeling like I was visiting New Orleans at all. It was about pretending, just for a little while, that I lived there again.
A neighborhood. A duplex. The lake nearby.
No grand hotel lobby downstairs. No French Quarter balcony outside the window. Just that wonderful little feeling of waking up in a New Orleans neighborhood and thinking, Okay. I live here today.
See where I stayed →
The Warehouse District & the 2 A.M. Argument
And then there was the cool two-bedroom in the Warehouse District.
Which came with a slightly different New Orleans experience.
At some point around 2 a.m., I found myself in a screaming match with the neighbors because they were being unbelievably loud.
Was I irritated? Absolutely.
But somewhere in the absurdity of arguing with strangers in the middle of the night, I had to laugh.
Because once upon a time, I stayed up with the New Orleans night too.
I knew exactly what it felt like to look at the clock, realize it was 2 a.m. and somehow feel like the night was nowhere near over.
Apparently, I had just switched sides.
See where I stayed →
Just Off Napoleon
And then there was the first-floor apartment just off Napoleon.
A home that had been divided in that very New Orleans way, with an adorable local family living right above me.
I wasn't checking into someone's idea of New Orleans.
I was sleeping underneath someone's actual life in New Orleans.
You could hear the little rhythms of a family above you. People coming home. Mornings beginning. A neighborhood carrying on around you.
Because sometimes the best way to visit New Orleans isn't to stay somewhere that makes you feel like a tourist.
It's to borrow somebody else's version of being a local for a few days.
See where I stayed →New Orleans Changes Depending
on Where You Wake Up.
Stay in the Quarter and she feels historic and theatrical.
Stay downtown and she feels energetic and glamorous.
Stay in Lakeview and suddenly you're getting coffee and driving along Pontchartrain like you've lived here for years.
Stay inside an old converted home tucked into a neighborhood and you get to hear the city doing something tourists sometimes forget it does:
living.
Maybe that's the secret to traveling New Orleans after you've already fallen in love with her.
Don't try to recreate the same trip.
Stay somewhere different. Walk out of a different front door. Meet a different version of the city.
I know New Orleans.
And somehow, every time I stay here...
