New Orleans

New Orleans sits below the level of the river beside it, held there by levees, and every photograph of the waterfront is an image of water standing above the city. Ships at the wharves are higher than the streets behind them, and once you notice it in these pictures you cannot stop noticing it.

The French Quarter is the original city, laid out in 1721 on a grid around a parade ground that is now Jackson Square. Most of what appears in the photographs is Spanish rather than French — two fires, in 1788 and 1794, destroyed nearly all the French building, and the reconstruction happened under Spanish rule. The ironwork galleries are Spanish colonial by way of the nineteenth century.

St. Louis Cathedral faces the square and has been rebuilt twice. The Pontalba buildings either side, from 1850, are among the oldest apartment buildings in the country.

Cotton ran the economy. The Cotton Exchange opened in 1871 and Degas painted his uncle's cotton office here in 1873, the only painting he made in America. The wharf photographs show bales in quantities that ran to hundreds of thousands of bales a season.

The World Cotton Centennial of 1884 was the city's World's Fair, and it lost money spectacularly, but the photographs of the Main Building — then the largest structure ever roofed — are worth seeing.

Mardi Gras photographs from the 1890s onward show the krewes, the floats and the crowds on Canal Street. Rex dates from 1872 and Comus from 1857, and the parading tradition here descends in part from Mobile.

The streetcars are constant. The St. Charles line has run since 1835 and is the oldest continuously operating street railway in the world, and it appears in an enormous proportion of the surviving street photography.

Around six hundred images name New Orleans.

The City That Burned in 1904 and Rebuilt in Two Years