Countdown to Mardi Gras

In New Orleans and along this part of the Gulf Coast Mardi Gras season (yes, it's a season here, not a day) is well underway.  As they say, laissez les bons temps roulez!

The French Quarter has the best over-the-top decorations.

But the whole area is decking itself out.

More restrained Mardi Gras decoration in New Orleans' Garden District 

Stands set up for children to watch the Mardi Gras parades (about 40 in all!)

A tree festooned with beads on St. Charles Avenue

This last pic was taken from the St. Charles streetcar, which takes you from the edge of the French Quarter several miles uptown.  The cars are ancient and in wonderful condition.  We were (momentarily) homesick for Toronto.

Back to Mardi Gras -- a traditional seasonal delicacy in this part of the world are king cakes, which apparently you eat anytime after Epiphany (the Twelfth Day of Christmas, in early January) but especially in the run-up to Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras.  They are like big gussied-up doughnuts with a pecan praline, cream cheese, or chocolate filling.  Very yummy.  Ours had a little plastic baby (Jesus?) inside it and the rule is the person who gets the piece with the baby has to buy the king cake the following year.  I got the baby!

Around the house

During our stay here we're not always out and about.  In fact, most of the time we're just "at home," reading, cooking, watching TV; going for walks with Isabel, or the occasional jog, around the neighbourhood; and -- blogging!  While there are more dining options in Bay St. Louis, like in St. Marys we very rarely go out for dinner; this makes eating out a special occasion (and also helps keep the credit card bill in check).

There are two favourite spots for relaxing at the house. The front porch, which is wonderful, and where we would have spent a lot more time but for the coolish weather...

.... and, you guessed it, the couch! The couch is very comfy and much in demand for afternoon naps, especially by Isabel.

Here's the view from the couch looking back through the dining room to the kitchen and back door.

Except at breakfast and cocktail hour, the kitchen is pretty much Joey's preserve.

No, in this photo he is not taking a cleaver to the dog -- just a bad case of double-tasking!  (With a TV in the kitchen, like most every other room, the cook sometimes gets a little distracted.)  I think it was local country-style ribs he was preparing that night.

Or maybe it was fresh Gulf flounder.

We have two bedrooms: we sleep and relax in one...

... and the other doubles as Joey's dressing room and quiet (TV-free!) zone.

Speaking of TV, last night we watched the finale of season 4 of Downton Abbey.  We love it but DA ennui is starting to set in -- one more season and they should call it quits (IMHO).

It's a great little house -- we'll miss it.

Longwood

Longwood is an estate on the edge of Natchez, Mississippi.  What a place!

Bucking the prevailing penchant for houses in the classical revival style, planter Haller Nutt built this "Oriental villa" in 1858-61.  For his very wealthy client, Samuel Sloan, an architect from Philadelphia, designed the largest octagonal house in the U.S.

The magnificent first floor plan of Longwood with central rotunda

As many will know, there was a bit of a rage for octagonal houses in the mid/late-nineteenth century; the design was thought to be more efficient and salutary.  We have some rare surviving examples in Ontario, one of which is the Bird House, also known as Woodchester Villa, in Bracebridge.  (In the early 1980s I was involved in the acquisition of a heritage easement on the property as a condition of an Ontario Heritage Trust grant for its restoration.)

Bird House, Bracebridge (photo credit: Woodchester Villa)

Longwood is, well, a bit grander -- 32 rooms and over 10,000 square feet!  But the most interesting thing is the story of its construction.  Or rather how the construction came to an abrupt halt at the beginning of the Civil War.  I imagine the Philadelphia architect dropping everything and fleeing back up home, but certainly some of the key tradesmen did leave for points north when news of the war reached Natchez.  After the war the plantations and money were gone and construction never resumed.  Today the house is frozen in time, looking much as it did over 150 years ago -- but not finished and furnished like the other Natchez mansions; nor devoid of its furnishings but otherwise intact, like the wonderful Drayton Hall near Charleston; nor a ruin -- but a house whose basic structure was completed and most everything else left undone.

On the exterior you can't really tell, except for the windows.  The photo above shows windows on the main floor boarded up, not because they are damaged or missing and have not been restored, but because they were never installed in the first place.  What would these windows have looked like?  Two have been installed on either side of the front door by the Pilgrimage Garden Club which owns and operates the property.

Inside only the ground or basement level, originally intended mainly for the servants, was finished and that is where the family lived.  On the main or principal floor, as it's called in the plan shown above, this is what you see looking through the central rotunda to the hall and the main entrance.

And this is what you see looking up -- way up! -- from the rotunda to the cupola and dome above.

While Longwood is an ambitiously exuberant pile, the overall effect today is rather eerie and sad.

Abandoned construction tools in one of the unfinished rooms

Mansions of Natchez

Many big houses and estates in Natchez are open to the public.  They are owned by the city or charitable groups like historical societies, are operated as inns, or in one case (Melrose) by the National Park Service.  Although it may not be obvious from the photographs, most are not in the greatest condition.  While a bit troubling, the shabbiness does help lend an air of authenticity!

So for those, like me, who love columns...

Magnolia Hall, 1858

Inside the portico at Magnolia Hall

Joey and garden fountain at Magnolia Hall

Stanton Hall, 1857

View from the portico at Stanton Hall

Auburn, 1812 (portico is original, wings added in 1850s)

Front doorway at Auburn

Rosalie, 1823 -- rear facade

Melrose, 1845 (currently undergoing repair -- columns should be white!)

Joey at front entrance to Melrose

To Natchez

We just spent a couple of days in Natchez, Mississippi, a wonderful old city about three hours away on the east side of the Mississippi River.  (Thanks to Thade Rachwal for recommending it.)  We were able to rent a pet-friendly little house just south of town.

On the way we stopped at The Myrtles, a pretty plantation house north of Baton Rouge.

Detail of verandah ironwork at The Myrtles 

A club of Miata lovers was having lunch at the restaurant there.  Our friend Cathy Nasmith would have fit right in.

Natchez, on a high bluff commanding views of the mighty river, was founded by the French in 1716 and was the first capital of Mississippi.  But it really came into its own in the early/mid-nineteenth century as a busy port for the export of cotton.  While there are no plantations close by -- the land is better across the river on the Louisiana side -- many plantation owners (or planters) preferred the higher ground around Natchez as the location for their mansions and estates.  Just before the Civil War, Natchez had the most millionaires per capita of any city in the U.S.

Mississippi River from Natchez, looking north

Mississippi River from Natchez, looking southwest

Fortunately for its architectural heritage Natchez emerged from the war pretty much unscathed.  With the cotton and steamboats long gone, that heritage, and the tourism it draws, underpins the local economy.

A lunch we'll remember

This took place a week or so ago and I've been of two minds about writing about it (the reasons for which will become apparent).  But even if nothing much happened it left an impression, and so here goes...

It was a nice day and we went on a long drive up through rural Mississippi, with no fixed destination. We ended up in the middle of the day in a small town called Columbia, a county seat, and sure enough there was a prominent courthouse at one end of the main street.  The town reminded me a little of Goderich, Ontario, but was poorer and not so interesting architecturally (at least I didn't feel inspired to take photographs).

We got out and walked Isabel while at the same time looking for a place for lunch.  Hating chain restaurants, we're always on the lookout for local hangouts and we found a promising place on a side street; we put the dog back in the car (it was not a hot day) and went back for lunch to a restaurant called the Round Table.

Let's just say the Round Table exceeded expectations, in more ways than one.  It was in a shabby-looking late nineteenth century house and the sign said the restaurant had been established in 1940.  It had the air of an old-fashioned rooming house (if that's not redundant -- whoever heard of a new-looking rooming house?).  In fact it had been a rooming house when the then owner, a Ms. Ida Rawls, "with the assistance of several elderly ladies who lived in her home at the time, served meals practically around the clock to weary workers" (this from the back of the menu).  The workers were from a parachute factory (apparently the only one in the U.S.) and nearby oil fields and, in the war years, Columbia, like practically everywhere else, was booming.

Today, like practically everywhere else in the American heartland, not so much.  But the Round Table still survives.  (Maybe the parachute factory does too, but I doubt it.)  The name should have suggested something, but we were quite unprepared for what awaited inside.  We walked into a room in which there was a single, very large table, seating at least 14.  Everyone sat at the table, which was basically a sitting buffet in the sense that the table and the food on it revolved (although not the outer ring where you ate), like a big lazy susan.  I had never seen this style (?) of dining before; one of the other patrons said later there was only one other one of the kind in the state, and that health regulations didn't permit them anymore, but that the surviving ones had been grandfathered (which didn't make sense when you're talking health regulations!).

We were hungry.  The food was fabulous and we would go back in a flash if it weren't so far.  Fried chicken, meatloaf, mac and cheese, black-eyed peas, collard greens, rutabagas, cream corn and, for dessert, banana pudding, possum pie (made with pecans), and coconut pie -- this was maybe half of the homemade dishes and delicacies on display and just a spin of the table away.  Oh, I wish I'd had the camera (a complete revolution of the table would have made a great little video).

But of course the other thing we were not prepared for was having lunch with total strangers.  As it was getting on, there were just four other people there, who had pretty much finished -- a husband and wife beside us and across the table a man about 60 and his friend, a man mid-30s.  Being Americans, and Southerners, they engaged us immediately, welcoming us to Mississippi.  This was nice, but we felt a bit in the spotlight.  One of the first questions, when they found out we were Canadian, was whether we liked our health care system; that led to a chorus of complaints that theirs was a mess (I rather dumbly said, "I thought you'd fixed it," meaning Obamacare, but -- fortunately -- they all treated that as a joke.)  The discussion got more awkward from there, especially after the couple left, and there were just the two guys, who didn't seem to be in a hurry.  They asked about our gun laws and the younger man confessed to being a gun collector -- he said he and his father (who was not the other man) together had several hundred guns!  We ventured to ask something we'd vaguely wondered about -- whether we could purchase a gun in the U.S.  They thought that, as foreigners, we probably couldn't at a store, but we could from a private owner, and the younger one said he had three guns out in his truck we could buy (he was joking, I think).  The worst was the discussion of the President; according to the younger man: "Obama couldn't run a Macdonald's."  The older one then gave a version of the ridiculous "birther" argument that Obama was not a U.S. citizen and was therefore not legally President.  We kept our mouths shut.  They obviously got a lot of their "information" from Fox News!

By the way, it is easy to suspect veiled racism behind comments about the "foreignness" of President Obama.  But, later, Joey offered another theory about why Southerners in particular seem to fall prey to this: for decades they've had Southerners in the White House -- the two Bushes, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan (OK, the last was not strictly speaking a Southerner, but he could put on the folksy charm of one).  With Obama maybe there are just too many degrees of separation, and his personality doesn't help.  Not making excuses!

I should say it must have been pretty obvious we were gay and, while the conversation got uncomfortable at times, there was no hint of homophobia.  Fortunately gay marriage did not come up!  We all left the Round Table together and went our separate ways.

100 Men Hall

Intriguing name, eh? We've been there twice, first to have a tour and then last night for a concert.

While it may not look like much from the outside, the 100 Men Hall is perhaps the most interesting place we've seen here.  Within walking distance of our house, it has its origins in a local African American group named The One Hundred Men Debating Benevolent Association. Established in 1894, the association was a social organization whose primary purpose was to “assist its members when sick, bury its dead in a respectable manner and knit friendship.” Despite the name, the group was founded by 12 members and its charter stipulated that it "may from time to time give entertainments for the purpose of replenishing the treasury.”

And so it did.  It built the hall in the 1920s; along with the local churches, the 100 Men Hall became the centre of the African American social scene in Bay St. Louis. Events and fundraisers from plays and pageants to wedding receptions and dances took place there. During the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the heyday of New Orlean’s rhythm and blues music, many great stars performed regularly -- from Big Joe Turner, Etta James and Guitar Slim to James Booker, Professor Longhair and Deacon John.  The hall is now a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.

Mississippi Blues Trail plaque in front of the 100 Men Hall

Almost as fascinating as its cultural history is the story of its preservation.  Let's just say that if the hall was in Ontario its owners would definitely be in line for an Architectural Conservancy of Ontario award!

A recent documentary of the history and rescue of the hall includes an image of the building, which already had been going downhill for years, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  The place was pretty much a wreck and on the verge of demolition (note the "call before demo" scrawled on the front wall).  Miraculously it was saved by a couple from California, Jesse and Kerrie Loya.

Joey with Kerrie Loya in front of the bar in the hall

Jesse Loya, a long-time musician (guitarist), fell in love with the hall and its past and was determined to save it and and bring it back to life.  His wife, Kerrie, who gave us the tour, became equally passionate about the place, although at first she was more than skeptical they could take on such a gargantuan project (even saying to Jesse at one point, it's either the hall or me).  Fortunately Jesse had construction experience and the pair did much of the restoration work themselves.  They also got a lot of community support and a grant from the state.  The hall is their home too -- the living quarters are in the old "green room" and an addition they built on the back!

Kerrie is now the executive director of a non-profit organization that operates the hall.  She has people on her board who are descendants of the original 100 Men Hall members.

The monthly concert was last night and of course we had to go.

The band on this occasion was the House Katz, the "house" band of the hall, Jesse Loya's band.  Curiously we figured the audience numbered about 100, men and women, black and white.  Cool jazz.  We even got to dance a bit.

Kerrie Loya with Jesse Loya and other members of the House Katz on stage