Living on Craps Street Pt. 2

An erstwhile amble down St. Claude Avenue, in old and funky New Orleans.

St. Claude Avenue was first laid out in 1798. It was carved from a malarial back-swamp, several hundred yards from the Mississippi river and named by Claude Treme, a hat maker from Paris, after his Patron Saint (if not himself). The Avenue was originally called Rue des Bon Enfants, 'Good Children Street', a name long forgotten here in New Orleans but one that I stumbled across, along with others, Conti, Dauphine and Royale, streets familiar to denizens of the French Quarter, while on a trip long ago to a sister city, the sleepy town of Jacmel - an adventure in Southern Haiti… (another story for another time).

When St. Claude Avenue enters, stage left, it isn’t really St. Claude; it’s Rampart Street. It’s right on the edge of the Quarter and loiters amongst the palms and oaks. At its start it has a spring in its step and is marked by a rather splendid portrait of, well, yours truly.

There I am, emblazoned on a metal box that hangs out in the neutral ground at Esplanade. I say portrait, but that might be doing a disservice to Gainsborough et al. It’s a flattering representation, seemingly executed by a 12-year-old. A splendid likeness of me looking very white indeed with a white shirt and a white face and what might be a red scarf around my neck. I assume it’s a scarf, but it might represent a horrific and bloody flesh wound - a slashed throat outcome of a particularly virulent shaving accident perhaps, or me as the victim of some mad local Jack the Ripper (or this, being the French Quarter, ‘Jacques le Ripeur’).

Either way, I’m very flattered to have been included in the ranks of such other local music luminaries as Oliver ‘Who shot the Lala’ Morgan, James Rivers, Irma Thomas and Allen Toussaint, whose portraits occupy similar metal fuseboxes on other nearby streets, though they fortunately seemed to have escaped the attention of the crazed Machete wielder.