Staying in a New Orleans B&B vs. a New Orleans hotel

City of New Orleans Recycling Center

Esplanade Avenue is a beautifully named street.  An esplanade is a beautiful city promenade.  An avenue is, well, an avenue.  We live on Esplanade Avenue, which is pronounced es-plan-AID, not ESS-plan-ahd.  When in doubt about New Orleans street names, pronounce them wrong.  You'll save a lot of time that way.

City of New Orleans Recycling Center on Elysian Fields Avenue

I love the names of New Orleans' streets.  They are evocative.  Music Street, Humanity Street, Frenchmen Street, Marengo Street...the list goes on and on.  There's even a Colapissa Street.  

We don't recycle glass in New Orleans, and this is something that surprises most people.  After all, glass is the first of all recyclable products.  Even the Romans recycled glass.  Not here, though.  Everything else.

If you stay at a hotel in the Central Business District, or you eat in one of the chi-chi green restaurants in New Orleans where most of the help except the management is tattooed and pierced and the food is certified organic and farm-grown, they'll have a special trash can for glass.  They're fooling you.  Most of it ends up in one of the landfills in Jefferson Parish.  The rest of it is trucked to garbage dumps just outside Slidell.

City of New Orleans Recycling Center

The city of New Orleans Recycling Center is located on Elysian Fields Avenue, another beautifully named street.  It sounds nicer if you say it in French, of course.  Then, it's Les Champs d'Elyseés.  There's a similarly named street in Paris, we're told.

We have a far-flung correspondent in Iowa, of all places.  She wrote  a comparison between what it is like to stay at La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast, a humble boutique inn located on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans, and staying at what she called an "unnamed national hotel," also in New Orleans.  I'll name it.  It was the Hyatt Regency on Loyola Avenue.  It was the big Hyatt between City Hall and the Superdome.  I love it there.  They don't recycle glass, either.  It's like walking through the set of Logan's Run.


I'm not suggesting that a young Michael York is shooting anybody at the Hyatt Regency, only that I tend to get lost wandering around the Hyatt on Loyola Avenue and I'm reminded of the movie's gloomy and poorly lit trailer:

There are reasons to stay at a big chain hotel in the New Orleans Central Business District (CBD), like the fact that it's the place that hosts a conference or convention.  We don't live in the most convenient neighborhood for business.  Ours is a neighborhood that has been built for idle picturesque leisure and wiling away pleasant hours as one day turns into the next.

You don't have to be 35 years old or younger to enjoy Esplanade Avenue.  If that sentence doesn't make any sense to you, you should watch Logan's Run.  You'll also learn that Farrah Fawcett always had talent.

Regular readers know that we write these posts with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind, and we've just hit our maximum word count, after which Google spiders and robots won't read anymore to pull this post up in search engine searches.  It's an opportune time to break the narrative, such as it is, and continue the next time with what our Iowa correspondent had to say.

Across the street from the New Orleans Recycling Center

Until then,
A votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.