Founded to serve as the capital of France's vast overseas empire, New Orleans has gone on to survive wars, invasions, floods, hurricanes, plagues, fires, and financial panics. Today it is a romantic city of secret gardens, handsomely restored mansions, murmuring fountains, legendary ghosts, Creole cuisine, and hot jazz. Both sin and saintliness, high-life and low, flourish under tropical skies; and its centuries-long flirtations with disaster have given its people a reckless, pleasure-loving philosophy that is acted out in its streets and squares, courtyards and terraces.
New Orleans's colorful atmosphere and strange history are magnificently captured in this handsome volume-a tour not only of the famous sights but also of the many places tourists seldom see. Here, too, are the stories of the heroes and the villains, great ladies and prostitutes, who have inhabited the city's curiously ornamented buildings-and of the phantoms that haunt those buildings still. The text is illustrated by superb photographs reproducing all of New Orleans beauty, from the serenity of the surrounding plantations and bayous to the French Quarter, the riverfront, the celebrated restaurants, and the mad excitement of Mardi Gras. Romantic New Orleans is a portrait of a unique city, drenched in history, which seems miraculously to have returned from the whirlpool of time.
