New Orleans, on foot

Begin with New Orleans. A deltaic city sited 1718 by the French at the bend of the Mississippi where it nearly meets Lake Pontchartrain — built on Holocene alluvium between cypress-tupelo swamp, brackish-tidal marsh, and the river itself, with 50% of the metro area below sea level. Culturally: one of the most distinctive African-Diaspora-and-Creole urban traditions in North America, with continuous Sunday gatherings at Congo Square from the 1740s, the foodways and music that became gumbo and jazz, the Mardi Gras Indian and second-line traditions still practiced weekly, and the Vietnamese-Creole community in New Orleans East that has been one of the country's most successful refugee-resettlement-and-foodways integrations since 1975. The trail walks the city's working ecological-and-cultural infrastructure.

↓ begins at

Walk to Congo Square at the back of the French Quarter, in what is now the southwestern corner of Louis Armstrong Park. Stand on the open ground. From at least the 1740s through the Civil War, this was the only site in the slaveholding United States where enslaved Africans and African-Americans were legally permitted to gather, drum, and dance — every Sunday, hundreds to several thousand people, preserving direct West African and Caribbean rhythmic structures that became the foundations of ragtime, jazz, second line, blues, and through them most of subsequent American popular music. The Sunday afternoon drum circles still happen. If you're here on a Sunday, listen.

↓ is rooted in

Walk to the French Market in the lower French Quarter — the oldest continuously-operated public market in the United States, on its current site since 1791 (and on the Choctaw trading site for centuries before). The Wednesday morning Crescent City Farmers Market satellite (8 a.m.–1 p.m.) is the closest thing to a working farmers-and-fishers market inside the Quarter; the vendor stalls year-round sell pralines, beignets, file powder, hot sauce, andouille — heritage foods of continuous Creole, Cajun, Choctaw, and African-American practice. The market sits inside three centuries of continuous commerce.

↓ is provisioned by

Walk into the Tremé neighborhood and to the Backstreet Cultural Museum at 1531 St. Philip Street. Founded 1999 by Sylvester Francis (1946–2020), a lifelong Tremé resident who spent four decades photographing every second line, jazz funeral, Mardi Gras Indian parade, and baby-doll outing he could reach. The collection is the principal continuing public archive of African-American New Orleans street-tradition material culture: ~50 Mardi Gras Indian suits, Skull and Bones gang costumes, social-aid-and-pleasure-club banners, second-line parade umbrellas, ~25,000 photographs. Next door is St. Augustine Catholic Church (1842) — the oldest Black Catholic parish in the United States — and the Tomb of the Unknown Slave on the church grounds.

↓ documents

Drive to the Lower Ninth Ward and to 1317 Tupelo Street. Visit by appointment. The House of Dance & Feathers is the backyard museum founded by Big Chief Ronald W. Lewis (1951–2020) of the Choctaw Hunters — a continuing site of Mardi Gras Indian and Black-Masking material-culture documentation. Hundreds of Lewis's own beaded patches and feathered crowns are here, alongside the working tools of suit-making and decades of dance-video documentation. Lewis built the museum to show outsiders what is happening; the practice itself happens with or without the museum. The Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum a few blocks away on Deslonde Street holds the broader neighborhood-history archive.

↓ is held by

Drive thirty minutes south across the Crescent City Connection bridge to the Barataria Preserve unit of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park — 23,000 acres of cypress-tupelo swamp, bottomland hardwood, and freshwater marsh. Walk the Bayou Coquille boardwalk through ~700-year-old bald cypress. American alligator in the bayou; barred owl in the canopy; prothonotary warbler in the spring; pileated woodpecker year-round. The visitor-center exhibits include a working model of subsidence and saltwater intrusion — the delta-loss processes happening in real time around the preserve.

↓ rests in

Drive east on I-10 to the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge — 23,000 acres of brackish-tidal marsh and bottomland hardwood inside the New Orleans city limits, one of the largest urban national wildlife refuges in the United States. Walk the Joe Madere Marsh boardwalk. White ibis in flocks of fifty; tricolored heron and roseate spoonbill in summer; pintail and gadwall in winter. The refuge is also a working post-Katrina recovery site — much of the interior marsh was scoured by storm surge in 2005 and has been rebuilding, with active marsh-creation and canal-spoil-bank breaching, for two decades.

↓ extends through

Drive to Versailles / Village de l'Est in eastern New Orleans. The neighborhood is the home of ~14,000 Vietnamese-Americans whose original community was settled in 1975 through the Archdiocese of New Orleans. On a Saturday morning, arrive at Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church (14001 Dwyer Boulevard) by 6 a.m. for the parish farmers market — operating every Saturday since the early 1980s, almost entirely in Vietnamese, selling water spinach, bitter melon, lemongrass, perilla, multiple bok choy varieties, fresh-caught fish from the community's commercial-fishing fleet, and prepared bánh mì, xôi, chè. The 2006 Chef Menteur landfill campaign that this community led — and won — is documented in *A Village Called Versailles*. Buy lemongrass.

↓ is provisioned alongside by

Drive Uptown to the Saturday morning Crescent City Farmers Market at 200 Broadway. 8 a.m.–12 p.m. Producer-only — every vendor grew, raised, caught, or made what they sell, within a defined ~200-mile foodshed. SNAP/EBT and Market Match doubling. The flagship of the Market Umbrella network, in continuous operation since 1995. Eat what's in season: in spring, red swamp crawfish from the Atchafalaya pond fishery and strawberries from Ponchatoula; in summer, Creole tomatoes from Plaquemines Parish; in fall, satsumas; year-round, fresh Gulf shrimp and fish from the boats.

↓ is fed by

End the trail at a table — at Dooky Chase, at Willie Mae's Scotch House, at Café Reconcile, at Liuzza's by the Track, or in a friend's kitchen. Order or make gumbo. The dish is the clearest culinary expression of the city's three principal foodway lineages converging in a single pot — the *gumbo* word from Bantu *kingombo* meaning okra, the West African inheritance carried by enslaved cooks; the *file* from Choctaw *kombo* contributed by Indigenous traders at the colonial markets; the dark roux from French and Acadian immigrant cooks. Gumbo z'herbes for Holy Thursday with seven or nine or eleven greens. Seafood gumbo on Friday in Lent. Chicken-and-andouille any day. The dish, like the city, holds three rivers in one bowl. Rooted in life.