A Crescent City montage, courtesy of Wikipedia. From top left: A typical New Orleans mansion off St. Charles Avenue, a streetcar passing by Loyola University and Tulane University, the skyline of the Central Business District, Jackson Square, and a view of Royal Street in the French Quarter.
"New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria, more than it does New York.... Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico form a homogenous, though interrupted, sea."
— A. J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana (quoted in A Confederacy of Dunces)
Ah, the Big Easy, famous for Mardi Gras, voodoo, and Jazz. Commonly associated with the Cajun culture, despite being a few hours away from any of it. Also, hurricanes. The French have a consulate there. Another claim to fame is the food; you can find almost any kind of seafood (except lobster) here. The squeamish can rest easy about how well-cooked their food is.
- Some streets are narrow, because they were originally built for horse and carriage. Do not complain, they indicate that a natural disaster has never annihilated the surrounding area and created room for a wider road.
- Tourists think they're cute by pronouncing the name of the city "N'awlins". To not incur the wrath of a local, just go with "Nu-OH'rlins"note . Once you've lived here a couple years, your speech will naturally slur it down, but don't force it.
- If you ask for directions in New Orleans, don't expect to hear "North", "South", "East", or "West". Due to the Mississippi River which curves through the middle of the city,
you'll likely hear something like "Go up on Saint Charles Avenue" if you wish to leave the French Quarter and go Uptown, for example, even though to outsider's eyes, Saint Charles Avenue "appears" to go south and wind back up to going north. Although it sounds complicated, it's really not that hard to figure out when you look at a map. If you wish to study the geography a bit further, a good guide can be found here.
- Another thing to remember: "Eastbank" and "Westbank" are in reference to the location of the river. This is probably what would trip up visitors the most, since there are fragments of the East Bank that are geographically west of the West Bank, and vice-versa.
Related tropes:
- The Big Easy
- It's Always Mardi Gras in New Orleans
- Jazz
- Southern Gothic: New Orleans is a favorite setting for Southern Gothic works, especially in vampire fiction, perhaps because of the associating the area has with Voodoo.
New Orleans in popular media:
- Season 9 of The Real World
- All Dogs Go to Heaven
- Chief Wiggum PI, the fake spinoff of The Simpsons
- The James Bond movie Live and Let Die.
- K-Ville
- New Orleans a 1947 film starring Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong.
- Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! features its Earth-C counterpart, "Mew Orleans."
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, though it averts most tropes associated with the city
- Abby Scuito from NCIS hails from the city and would like to point out that the jazz is played after the burial. There is now an entire NCIS spin-off that is set in New Orleans.
- Left 4 Dead 2's "The Parish" campaign takes place in the French Quarter.
- Anne Rice. She authors some quite exquisite scenery about the Big Easy: Exit to Eden, Interview with the Vampire, Belinda, Feast of All Saints, Blood Canticle, Blackwood Farms, Taltos, The Witching Hour, Memnoch the Devil, and The Tale of the Body Thief.
- The Princess and the Frog
- Werner Herzog's The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
- HBO's Treme, from the creators of The Wire, explores the aftermath of Katrina.
- Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island
- The Expendables' main operations are based here. Oddly, the city is established in the first film by a sweeping crane shot of... Baton Rouge.
- The first Gabriel Knight.
- A Street Car Named Desire
- Gone with the Wind — Rhett and Scarlett honeymoon in New Orleans
- FoxTrot — Roger and Andy honeymooned here too.
- A Confederacy of Dunces, which many locals consider the most accurate portrayal the city has ever gotten.
- Déjà Vu
- The Skeleton Key, though only a few scenes are set here (mostly when the protagonist's Black Best Friend explains to her about hoodoo). The rest of the time, it's set in the countryside.
- One Calvin and Hobbes strip has Calvin wonder where people go when they die, to which Hobbes responds that he believes they play saxophone for an all-girl cabaret in New Orleans. "So you believe in Heaven?" "Call it what you like."
- New Orleans is Vampire: The Requiem's setting of choice, likely due to its association with vampire fiction.
- Features several times in Rick Riordan's mythology books:
- Nico di Angelo spends some time in New Orleans before The Sword of Hades starts. Apparently, he likes celebrating death here (his father is a death god).
- Hazel Levesque (also a child of the same death god) of The Heroes of Olympus fame has her homeland in New Orleans, and parts of her flashbacks are set here. She attended a segregated school located in the city alongside Sammy Valdez, Leo's great-grandfather, which means that Leo's ancestral home is here too.
- The Kane siblings travel to New Orleans in The Red Pyramid to meet Anubis. Much like Nico above, he apparently likes the whole "celebrating death" thing (this time, it's because he is a death god).
- Chronicles Of Nick
- The Originals, the spinoff of The Vampire Diaries, is set here (and revels in its setting).
- American Horror Story: Coven
- New Orleans is completely destroyed in the opening episode of Aldnoah.Zero when a Knight Castle crashes into the center of the city at relativistic speed, setting off an explosion comparable in destruction to a nuclear blast.
- "The Masks", one of the later episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959), takes place during Mardi Gras.
- In Barefoot, the protagonist's family is from New Orleans, and the scenes set there were filmed on location.
- Pretty Baby takes place in the former Red Light District of Storyville, shortly before and during when it was shut down in 1917.
- In the Phineas and Ferb fanfic Finding Dad, Phineas and Isabella travel to New Orleans to look for their missing parents.
- The setting for Infamous 2, except it's called "New Marais".
- The setting for the Benjamin January mystery series, set in antebellum New Orleans with a heavy focus on the racial politics of the era.
- Girls Trip takes place during the annual Essence Fest.
- Cloak & Dagger
