Tremé

The neighborhood begins where the French Quarter ends, but spiritually it’s a different planet. Tremé — the oldest African American neighborhood in the United States, founded by free people of color before the Civil War — doesn’t announce itself. There’s no welcome sign, no tourist information kiosk. You just notice that the streets have grown quieter, the bars smaller, the music more real. I walked into the Candlelight Lounge on a Wednesday night and found a brass band playing to maybe twenty people, none of them tourists, and the floor was vibrating through the soles of my shoes.

The history here accumulates in layers that take time to feel. Congo Square, now part of Louis Armstrong Park, is where enslaved Africans were permitted to gather on Sundays and play music and drum — a practice that directly fed the roots of jazz, blues, and everything that grew from them. Standing there on a Tuesday morning, pigeons picking at the ground, the city humming around me, I felt the weight of what had happened in this specific place with a clarity I hadn’t expected from a city park.

The Backstreet Cultural Museum is essential — a single room crammed with Mardi Gras Indian suits, second line regalia, and jazz funeral photographs that document the rituals giving New Orleans its spiritual backbone. Donald Harrison Jr. grew up here. Louis Armstrong grew up adjacent. The neighborhood that invented the music that changed the twentieth century is still, somehow, mostly itself — not gentrified into glass condos, not converted into a theme park, just still there, still making music, still burying its dead with a trumpet and a second line that dances grief into something almost like joy.

Eating in Tremé means Dooky Chase on Orleans Avenue, the restaurant that fed Civil Rights leaders and musicians for decades, whose red beans and rice and fried chicken are not, by any measure, things I’ve managed to stop thinking about. Leah Chase cooked there into her nineties. The building holds that weight in its walls, in the way the regulars eat quietly and with purpose, in the way nobody performs for anyone.

When to go: Any time of year, but the neighborhood is most alive during second line season — September through May, when various Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs lead second lines through the streets on Sunday afternoons. Check the schedule in advance, then simply follow the sound of the brass.