The city's smellscape

Riding around in a car there's a curtain of glass and steel separating you from the sounds, sights and smells of the streets. Roll the windows down if you want to, but there’s still no way that you’re going to get the kind of intimate experience of the city that you would get on the back of a pedicab. Lest this sound like some clumsy pedicab propaganda piece, let me hasten to say that the street-level intimacy I’m talking about is not necessarily pleasant. Sometimes it's pure bliss, but not always.

I mentioned sounds, sights and smells, so let's begin by considering a couple of examples from the auditory realm. Having nothing between you and the melodies of the musicians on Royal Street may be nice. On the other hand there’s that car with the shock and awe stereo system blasting out something that resembles the sound of a jackhammer, only less melodic and about a hundred decibels louder. That will make you wish fervently for some windows to roll up.

What about the city's sights? You may well appreciate the improved opportunities for admiring the Spanish colonial architecture from the passenger seat of the pedicab; but sit in that same seat for long, and you'll start to feel like you’re on an urban safari in which Rattus norvegicus (the common rat) is not early as rare and elusive as we all might wish.  (Early on in my pedicab career I saw a rat darting between a drain and a dumpster, and without thinking I blurted out: “Wow, look at that rat!” to which one of my riders responded: “Umm… I don’t think that’s the tour we paid for.”)

Then there’s the olfactory experience, to which the remainder of this post will be devoted.

On the plus side there's the warm, sweet fragrance of frying beignets at Cafe du Monde.

In the minus column, there are those piles of manure left behind by the carriage mules and police horses. (Read here about the controversy this has been creating lately.) In the interest of full disclosure, I've been working lately as a buggy driver in addition to the pedicab gig. The company I work for, Royal Carriages, recently had an hour-and-half meeting to discuss creative solutions to the mule poo problem. (Our mules wear "diapers", but they're not entirely effective. Of course, the horses used by the mounted police don't wear diapers.)

Back to French Quarter fragrances: The block of St. Phillip between Chartres and Decatur is especially nice. At the Chartres end, there's the enticing smell of Creole/Italian cooking coming from Irene's; at the Decatur end, there's the French Market Restaurant with its exquisite, spicy and distinctly New Orleans boiled-seafood aroma. I think they're pumping it out to the street on purpose. No doubt New Orleans has much better restaurants, but as far as I'm concerned, 1001 Decatur might just be the sweetest smelling spot in the city.

When it comes to picking the Quarter's stinkiest spot, I don't think that there would be much controversy in the pedicabbie community. The stench of vomit is common up and down Bourbon, but the corner of Bourbon and Iberville is the foulest by far. Not just the corner actually, but that whole right-angle stretch from Canal and Bourbon to Bourbon and Iberville to Iberville and Royal. I'm not sure what it is that makes that bit so bad. It must have something to do with the cluster of oyster houses there. If you think about it, they have to be discarding gillions of oyster shells, and all those juices are dripping out of the dumpsters and draining right into the streets.  

It was a fellow pedicabbie who suggested that I devote a post to the smells of the city, so I decided that it would be a good idea to solicit input from my colleagues for this piece. I put the word out on the our Facebook page, and I got an enthusiastic response, the highlights of which I now pass on to you my readers. (The quotes are in italics. My comments are in plain text.)

• You can't forget about marijuana. There have been a couple of occasions in which I have become aware that someone was smoking pot on the back of my bike. Strangely enough I didn't smell it those times. I'm guessing that the smoke just drifted along behind us like exhaust from a car. But whenever I ride past someone who's toking on the side of the street the acrid odor is unmistakable.
• The jerk chicken man on Frenchmen St. This is a Jamaican dude with a barbecue grill. I bought his chicken once. It was OK, but definitely one of those things that doesn't taste nearly as good as it smells.
• You can smell those crust punks from 50 feet away sometimes. Three different people mentioned the body odor of crust punks.
• You can't leave out the sweet olive trees and confederate jasmine during springtime. 
• Piss-covered, passed-out frat boy with a hint of sugary Hand Grenade vomit. 
• Coffee roasting at the P&G plant in the Marigny that wafts over to us in the Quarter sometimes.
• Standard coffee and Aunt Sally's in the Marigny. Candy and coffee. Are there any better smells?

One colleague was so inspired by this whole discussion that he proposed a scratch-and-sniff map of New Orleans. Sounds like a great idea! I wonder how you would go about capturing the essence of crust punk body odor for a scratch-and-sniff map.

Of meterologists and movie makers

The American Meteorological Society is holding their annual convention in New Orleans this week. Late this afternoon I picked up a convention-goer, and as he settled into the seat, he asked me: "Is it going to rain this evening?"

I started to give him my best guess when I remembered who he was. I whirled around in my seat to look at him in disbelief. "Seriously? You're asking ME?"

Looking back on the incident, I'm wondering if he was collecting data for the forecast. Maybe they factor the intuition of pedicabbies into it or something.

Speaking of the forecast, it was supposed to rain today. A couple of times during the course of the day, it acted like it was actually going to start up, but it never amounted to much. I did get a good drenching, but not from Mother Nature. They were filming a movie (Now You See Me) in the French Quarter, and they had this big rain machine creating quite a downpour at the front of Cafe du Monde off and on all day.

The movie people and the New Orleans police department were working together to control the flow of traffic past the spot. I started getting angry because every time I went that way they would let a bunch of cars go, including those that were behind me in line, but they wouldn't let me pass for a really long time. It seemed totally unfair until I finally figured it out. Cars passing in the background would presumably make the scene look natural and authentic; but a big yellow tricycle pedaled by a 45-year-old with freakishly large calves might draw all the attention away from Morgan Freeman, Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, and Mark Ruffalo. You can't blame them really.

You've heard that Mark Twain quote about how everyone always talks about the weather but no one does anything about it, right? Well we've got several thousand people in town who have gathered from across the nation to spend four days talking about the weather. (At least, I assume that's what they're talking about).  Meanwhile, just a mile or two down the river, we've got movie makers who are actually doing something about it -- albeit on a fairly small scale.

By the way, the movie's supposed to be out in January of next year. I can't wait to watch it and look for the scene where I'm not there.

Southeast Asia - Southeast Louisiana fusion

In recent discussions about immigration and assimilation, the salad bowl and the melting pot are often set out as opposing metaphors. (Try Googling "melting pot, salad bowl". I got over 250,000 results.) In the case of New Orleans I believe that a third metaphor is more apt: gumbo.


With gumbo, you've got the base, the roux. Gotta have a good roux! Then you can add your vegetables: bell pepper, celery, and onions are standard. And okra of course. (I've heard that gumbo is actually some kind of African word for okra.) You can even put tomatoes if you want, though a lot of locals might take you for a Yankee poser. Don't forget the Tony Chachere's. And the filé powder, which can be added as part of the cooking process or set out on the table as a condiment. Then you add the chicken and sausage, or seafood, or some combination thereof. The possibilities are almost limitless. My mother-in-law, whose Cajun credentials no one should dare question, likes to boil eggs, peel them, then let them stew in the gumbo where they take on the roux's rich brown hue as they soak up the flavor.


In the case of  the city of New Orleans, the roux would be French-Creole culture. Each successive wave of immigrants -- German, English, West African, Croatian, Sicilian, Honduran, and others -- has enriched the stew without compromising its essential character. The Vietnamese community is a particularly interesting example. They came over in the 1970s. They have managed to maintain their identity while integrating so thoroughly into the city's institutions that it would be hard to imagine New Orleans without them. If you go to Cafe du Monde, which will soon celebrate its 150th anniversary, the person serving your beignets and cafe au lait will almost certainly be Vietnamese.


If you really think about it, it isn't all that strange that the Vietnamese have acclimated so well to warm, wet New Orleans. After all, Southeast Asia and Southeast Louisiana both bear the legacy of French colonial history. Many Vietnamese immigrants were Roman Catholic. Many were also fishermen by trade, so New Orleans' seafood industry must have offered a familiar element. Then there's rice as a dietary staple. (I'm open to correction, but I can't think of any other American city where rice is so central to the cuisine.)


I worked my first wedding as a pedicabbie last week. The bride was a New Yorker, of European stock as far as I know. The groom, however, was a New Orleans native of Vietnamese ancestry. The wedding was held at the Saint Louis Cathedral, America's oldest cathedral and the French Quarter's most iconic landmark. After the vows, the newlyweds and guests poured out of the church and formed a second line, twirling colorful parasols as they danced and paraded through the streets of the French Quarter behind a brass band. My fellow pedicabbies and I -- there were five of us I believe -- brought up the rear, bearing the groom's elderly relatives. I felt a touch of amusement, a bit of pride, and plenty of pure pleasure to be a part of this. 


The next day I was working the Saints game, and I stopped to ask a couple of traffic cops for permission to make a left turn at a place where the street was blocked. One of the policemen turned out to be Vietnamese-American, and we struck up a brief conversation.


"I'm so glad to see this here!" he said referring to the pedicab. "It reminds me of home. We have these in Vietnam, you know? We call them rickshaw."


The fact that they have rickshaws in Vietnam was not news to me, but somehow I had failed to make the connection. Had my previous day's passengers ridden rickshaws in their childhood days? Was it possible that I had taken them on their first rickshaw ride in 40 years or more? Was the sweet irony of the situation lost on them?  (Not so long ago many Americans would have viewed the rickshaw as a symbol of Asia's poverty and backwardness; these days pedicabs are commonplace on the streets of almost all of our major cities.) I don't know what my passengers were feeling, but I like to think that they felt more or less the same mixture of pride, amusement and pleasure at seeing us embrace their tradition as I felt at seeing them embrace ours. 


It is only now in retrospect that the beauty of that whole scene is beginning to really register. Elderly Vietnamese-New Orleanians riding in rickshaws at the tail end of a second line parade. Something old something new indeed! How strange! How apt!

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Bonus trivia question: Which Rolling Stones song (more recently covered by Old Crow Medicine Show) pays tribute to New Orleans' second line tradition?


Answer: Down Home Girl, which contains the following lyric:
I'm gonna take you back to New Orleans 
Down in Dixieland
I'm gonna watch you do the second line 
With an umbrella in your hand