Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
New Orleans and visited for several months in 1872 and 1873, painting one of his ac-
knowledged masterpieces,
A Cotton Office in New Orleans.
It turned out the Degas family history in New Orleans was rife with juicy controversy.
It had been only a dozen or so years earlier that a historian of the city unearthed the fact
that although Degas's brother René was a prominent member of a racist political group,
the Crescent City White League, a branch of the family was descended from a black wo-
man who had six children with the brother of Edgar and René's grandmother. In addi-
tion, René had been a serious cad who left his blind wife for a neighbor. He brought the
neighbor back to France, where he started a second family, scandalizing everyone and
causing a rift in the clan—the New Orleans side changed its name from Degas to Musson,
René's first wife's surname—and a battle over inheritance that lasted for generations.
Anyway, the house they all lived in was on Esplanade Avenue, a boulevard of lazy
opulence that forms the northeastern boundary of the French Quarter and runs for three
miles from the Mississippi River to the steps of the museum, which is located in City
Park. A signature address in New Orleans, it was a symbol of the city's distinct visual
aesthetic, its lovely sense of hothouse dilapidation, the “atmosphere of decay,” as Ten-
nessee Williams fondly described it. Esplanade was known especially for the magnificent
live oak trees that lined its median strip, their branches spreading out over the avenue
to form an elaborately webbed green awning.
I wrote about the street the last time I was in New Orleans, right after Hurricane
Katrina. The high winds that accompanied the storm killed some of Esplanade's trees,
tore off myriad branches and defoliated others, ripping gashes in the shady canopy as
though a vindictive model had taken a knife to a painter's canvas. It was heartbreaking
to behold at the time; New Orleans overall lost more than eight thousand trees, and City
Park, among the nation's largest urban parks—a gorgeous greensward of thirteen hun-
dred acres that includes a golf course, a botanical garden, a football stadium, and a chil-
dren's amusement park as well as the museum—looked bulldozed.
Of course, there was worse to witness. My three weeks in New Orleans after the hur-
ricane were the saddest of my journalistic life, which, as journalistic lives go, has been a
pampered one. I've never been a war correspondent or seen up close the ravages of fam-
ine or the aftermath of a volcano eruption or a tornado or a nuclear accident. But arriving
in New Orleans in the fall of 2005, five weeks after the storm, I found much of the place
buried in detritus. Towers of garbage and muddy cars that would no longer start lined
the streets, whole blocks of houses were marked by waterline stains, the lawns in front
of them deathly gray, spongy to walk on. It was a lesson for me in disaster, namely that
ruinousness isn't simply shocking, which is what comes across on television, the gasp-
inducing images creating a potent visual aesthetic of calamity that can be appreciated for
