Creole New Orleans

Three houses on Esplanade Avenue

Frau Scmitt and I know a secret.  It's not about the ziploc bags full of water and pennies.  I covered that a couple days ago.  And it's not that only the orange house in the middle of Esplanade Avenue is a B&B, that the blue house and the green house are just our neighbors.  The secret is that Frau Scmitt is from Germany.  The second half of it is that your humble narrator hails from Connecticut.

Regular readers won't be surprised by this revelation, but people who take the city bus tours will be.  The buses regularly stop in front of our house so that people can take pictures.  Why?  As the tour guides like to say, these three houses are textbook examples of Creole color schemes.  

Frau Scmitt and I picked the colors for La Belle Esplanade, at 2216 Esplanade Avenue.  The person who chose the colors for the blue house at 2212 Esplanade Avenue is Greek.  We run into her at the Greek Festival every spring.  As to who chose the color scheme for the green house at 2222 Esplanade Avenue, we're not at liberty to say.  They're not native New Orleanians; they're successful transplants.    Whenever I run into them, I'm reminded of the motto on the Connecticut State Seal.

Sigillum Reipublicae Connecticutensis

The banner sez: Qui Transtulit Sustinet, "He Who Transplants, Sustains."  I always like the original version of the seal better, where the Hand of God is involved:

Colonial Connecticut Seal

The houses are painted in Creole colors, don't get me wrong.  When I go into some of the more out-of-the-way neighborhoods, these are the kind of colors I see.  Not everything colorful is Creole, however.  I was talking to a historian recently and he told me that, when they were built, all the houses on the block were probably white. 

There is an orange house around the corner from us and I'm pretty sure the colors weren't chosen because of any lingering ancestral Gallic joie-de-vivre.  It's an unsubstantiated hunch somebody told me about.  

I was reading the New Orleans Advocate today when I came across an advertisement for a new exhibit at The Historic New Orleans Collection (THNOC) in the French Quarter.  It features the work of the photographer, Richard Sexton.  I met him once when he was standing at the very tip of Gayarre Place, the park across the street from us.  We introduced each other and I googled him afterward.  He's legit.  

As if having his own website isn't enough, Mr. Sexton also has a new book out, Creole World, a collection of his photographs, some of which are on display at THNOC.  I had forgotten all about our chance meeting until this morning when I saw the advertisement for the show's opening in the newspaper.  The illustration chosen to represent the show was a photo of La Belle Esplanade and her immediate neighbors.

Photo taken by your humble narrator

I had a sense of deja-vu.  It was like that time my mother called to tell us we were in the New York Times.  (We're in the article's last illustration if you don't want to read the whole link.  You should read it.)

That day I met Sexton came flooding back to me.  You know what else came flooding back to me?  A few weeks ago, Frau Schmitt came home with a copy of Creole World.  I went to the shelves in the lobby where we keep all the New Orleans books and I sat on the couch to see if our inn is really in this book.  I started from back to front, which is always bad advice, but I finally found the picture.  We're featured on page xli, in the introduction.  We've got the whole page to ourselves, except for our neighbors.  

This remains my favorite picture of La Belle Esplanade:

A photo from 2012

It was taken by our first guests.

I always say that this is your home while you stay here.  Why?  Because home is where the heart is.

A votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade Bed and Breakfast.