Mobile

Mobile will tell you, with a certain practiced patience, that Mardi Gras began here, not in New Orleans. The first celebration was 1703, when French colonists on the Mobile Bay marked the pre-Lenten holiday in a settlement that would become one of the Gulf Coast’s most layered port cities. New Orleans got the famous version, the tourist infrastructure, the national brand. Mobile got to keep something more interesting: a Mardi Gras that still belongs primarily to the people who live there, with mystic societies that trace their lineage back two centuries and parade routes that wind through neighborhoods the visitors don’t find.

I arrived in March, a week after the main festivities, which meant the city was in that particular state of cheerful recovery — beads still caught in the live oaks, a certain satisfied quiet on the streets of the De Tonti Square Historic District, where the antebellum townhouses and Greek Revival mansions make the neighborhood look like a stage set for a Faulkner adaptation. The live oaks here are some of the largest I have seen anywhere, their roots cracking the sidewalks, their canopies meeting overhead on the residential streets to create long green tunnels.

The city’s history reads like a list of imperial handoffs. French, British, Spanish, American: each administration left something behind. The French gave it its street grid and its carnival tradition. The Spanish gave it the Fort Conde, reconstructed downtown where it sits with a certain ambassadorial oddness among the modern civic buildings. The antebellum period gave it the mansions and the Azalea Trail, which in late February turns the entire city pink — the azaleas so dense along some streets that the air smells faintly sweet even indoors.

The food I found more interesting than I expected. The Gulf oysters are excellent — the bay’s cooler, brackish water producing a particular flavor — and there is a Vietnamese community along the bayous southwest of Mobile that arrived after the fall of Saigon and has been making shrimp boats work in Gulf waters for fifty years. Their crawfish supply the region, and on the outskirts of town you find Vietnamese-Cajun fusion at restaurants where the crawfish arrive boiled with lemongrass and garlic alongside the Zatarain’s spice.

When to go: February for the azaleas and the tail end of Mardi Gras season, when the local parades run without the tourist infrastructure of New Orleans but with genuine civic joy. October through November is the other strong window — mild weather, the azalea gardens at Bellingrath thirty minutes south are beautiful, and the city has a pleasant, unvisited quality.