New Orleans Flags

The balcony at 2212 Esplanade Avenue

Remember our neighbor?  The amateur vexillologist who made a minor change to the 2200 block of Esplanade Avenue a few months back?  He hung the flags pictured above as a semaphore that the race is on to Bourbon Street?  He is a nice enough fellow, if a bit eccentric.  If you stay at La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast, you just might run into him.  He's usually out front wearing a hat and chomping on a cigar.

Anyhow, he gave me a present today.  He's very generous.  Because of him, we've got a new look.

A New Orleans bed and breakfast inn

No, he didn't give me a few gallons of new paint.  Though he seemed a bit miffed when we repainted 2216 Esplanade Avenue in a color scheme to rival his own, there's no real competition in New Orleans.  It's the same as there are no strangers here, either.  There are only friends you haven't met yet.  There is no oneupmanship in New Orleans.

2212 Esplanade Avenue

2212 Esplanade Avenue's neighbor

Since both our houses appeared in the New York Times (at the bottom of the link), neither of us really has anything to complain about.  

Anyhow, he gifted me with two flags.  He said, "I noticed that you have two mounts for flags, but you aren't using them.  I thought you should fly something appropriate."  I thanked him and brought them inside to show Frau Schmitt.  We unfurled them on the lobby floor.

A lobby full of curiosities

"What are we going to do with these?" Frau Schmitt asked as she looked them over.  "We can't hang these outside.  Nobody will know what they mean."  

Frau Schmitt is usually right about these things.  In this case, she was only half right.  In fact, until this morning, we had two empty mounts for flag poles.  As of this afternoon, they are full.  I make the trip to Mike's Hardware on Elysian Fields Avenue to purchase two flagpoles.  She was right, however, that no one knows what the flags mean.

I knew one of them.  It's the flag of Haiti.

Haitian flag and another flag

I wasn't sure about the other, so I knocked on our neighbor's door.

"That's the flag of Corsica," he said.  "I gave you two flags that are important to New Orleans.  As you know, many of the free people of color who settled in our neighborhood came from Haiti.  New Orleans, which has been called the most norther Caribbean city, has long deep ties to the Haitian Republic."

Fair enough, but what about the Corsican flag?

Corsican flag and another flag

"Napoleon was Corsican," my neighbor told me.  And that explained that.  Our house now flies two flags that have deep connections to the city we love.

A votre sante.