An Afternoon Wander Through the Bywater

Downriver, Where the Colors Get Louder

I crossed into the Bywater on a Thursday in March, when the humidity had not yet become a personality trait and the jasmine along Chartres Street was doing its annual campaign to make you fall in love with something, anything, immediately. The Bywater begins where the Marigny ends, roughly at Press Street, and it announces itself not with a sign but with a shift in volume - the shotgun houses get more colorful, the murals get larger, and someone is always playing a trumpet on a porch, not for tourists but for the dog sleeping at their feet.

I started at Bacchanal Fine Wine and Spirits on Poland Avenue, which is technically a wine shop but functionally a backyard paradise - you buy a bottle inside, grab a cheese plate from the counter, and carry it all to a courtyard where a live jazz trio is playing under string lights and a magnolia tree that has seen some things. The wine is good. The scene is better. I sat at a picnic table next to a woman painting watercolors of her own glass of rose, and neither of us spoke, which felt like the correct social contract.

Walking north on Dauphine Street, the Bywater unfolds like a gallery without walls. Every third house is painted a color that would be illegal in a homeowners' association - electric teal, mango, a purple so deep it looks like a bruise on a plum. The ironwork is extravagant, the porches sag with earned grace, and the oak trees form a canopy so thick the sunlight comes through in coins on the sidewalk.

I stopped at the Joint on Mazant Street for a pulled pork sandwich that arrived wrapped in butcher paper, smoky and tender and dripping enough to require a full stack of napkins. The pit had been going since five in the morning, and you could smell it from two blocks away, a column of hickory smoke rising over the roofline like a beacon for the hungry.

The Bywater is where New Orleans goes to be itself without performing. There are no balconied hotels here, no hand grenade cocktails, no bead-strewn strangers. There are instead: a guy welding a sculpture of a pelican out of bicycle parts in his driveway, a community garden with tomatoes the size of softballs, a cat sleeping on the hood of a Buick that has not moved since Katrina. The neighborhood flooded badly in 2005 and came back stranger and more tender, like a bone that heals thicker at the break.

By late afternoon, I had walked maybe twelve blocks and felt like I had traveled a great distance. I ended up on the levee at Crescent Park, watching the Mississippi push its cargo ships south, the water the color of cafe au lait, the sky turning the particular shade of lavender that New Orleans owns the patent on. I did not want to leave. I did not leave for a long time.