Someplace you'll never visit in New Orleans

Homedale Inn is a bar

I just wrote to a prospective guest that until we open the calendar for next year, he should read our blog.  I provided the caveat that I don't always (ever) know how useful the blog is to prospective guests but some people enjoy reading it and I certainly enjoy writing it.  

There is nothing worse than a blog that just regurgitates a list of festivals or recipes or boilerplate cadged from the tourist information bureau.  There is nothing worse than a blog that has no personality.  We don't try to sell you anything here.  If you want personality, well, our inn has it in spades.  

Over breakfast, we like to talk about the city we live in, even the parts we know are out of the way and that you'll never see.  New Orleans is much, much more than the French Quarter and the Garden District.  It is much, much more than what you read in the guide books.

Homedale Inn isn't much to look at from the outside

Here's what Mayor Mitch Landrieu had to say during his State of the City speech the other day, which was held in the Carver Theater, a few blocks behind our house:

"The world deserves a better New Orleans.  It's time for us to claim it, to own it, to accept the awesome responsibility that history has laid at our doorstep."

I wrote that down because I'm going to hire Whalehead King to write it in calligraphy and frame it for us.  Some people think he's a talented artist.  His paintings hand all over our inn.  Talk about personality.

What the mayor was trying to say is that the world is a better place when New Orleans is a better place.  Imagine a world without New Orleans.  The very idea gives me the shudders, and not just because I live here.  New Orleans is like no place else on God's green earth.

The Homedale marquis is pretty much homemade

The pictures I'm using are pretty crummy looking because I took them on a crummy day, with storm clouds looming the whole time. You can tell the Homedale Inn is a local place because of the beer signs on either side of it's masthead.  Neither beer, neither Jax nor Regal are served inside.  They aren't brewed anymore.  They are old New Orleans beers that live on in sweet, sweet memory.  Dixie Beer is still around but it isn't brewed in New Orleans anymore.

Max Beer Logo outside the Homedale Inn

Regal Beer logo outside the Homedale Inn

The Homedale Inn is located off Canal Boulevard, which begins at the end of Canal Street.  It isn't a place tourists visit, being too far out of their way.  Doesn't matter.  Plenty of things happen in New Orleans that visitors don't know anything about.  Those are the things that keep the culture fresh and vibrant.  Those are the things that make things work the way they work here.  Visitors are welcome, of course, they always are, but most visitors don't seek out places like the Homedale Inn.  I like it there.  Frau Scmitt?  Not so much so.

We could use a little musical interlude here, and, because we just mentioned Dixie Beer, I've chosen Al Jolson singing Swanee.  I know he's performing in blackface and I just talked about the Carver Theater.  According to their website, "The Carver is recognized by the National Register of Historical Places with 'exceptional significance' as a watershed in development of first-rate theaters for blacks in New Orleans."  This is not a celebration of stereotypes that are apparent on every level of this performance, only a historical artifact.

I always like it when Jolson spells out D-I-X-I-E.  The name Dixie for the South comes from New Orleans, but that's the subject of another post.  I also like it when Jolson whistles in this song.  The song was written by George Gershwin, who also wrote Porgie and Bess:

Back on topic, did you know there's a dress code at Homedale Inn? Nobody's ever turned me away, but I tend to be a snappy dresser to begin with.  Everyone at the Homedale Inn seems to be.  Here's their website if you're interested.

Homedale Inn is located at 618 Homedale Street, New Orleans, LA

I would like to finish up with some vintage New Orleans based television commercials.  I'm fond of the one for Seafood City at about 2:13 where the guy is cured of passing out by eating a crawfish.  That shop was a few blocks from our house.  It's a Walgreen's now.  McKenzie's was at the intersection of our street with North Broad, where Tastee Donuts is.  There are layers and layers of history in New Orleans.  I think Frankie and Johnny Furniture is still around, but I may be thinking of a bar Uptown.



And now, to end on a really highbrow note, a little Porgie and Bess.  "Summertime," of course is a jazz standard that you'll hear sung on Frenchmen Street just about any night.  Most people don't know it was originally written as opera.  It's very different when it's played and sung as opera:



Here it is performed by Ella and Satch:

À votre santé,
La Belle Esplanade bed and breakfast.