-"New Orleans: The First 300 Years" is a part of WYES's New Orleans Tricentennial Salute, which is made possible by the Arlene and Joseph Meraux Charitable Foundation, dedicated to improving the quality of life in St. Bernard Parish and implementing innovative strategies to creating lasting, positive change for the entire community.

And by The Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum, research center, and publisher dedicated to preserving our area's distinctive history and culture.

Details on current exhibitions, books, and programs available at hnoc.org.

Additional funding provided by the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation.

Visitors, and locals, too, can start their story with "One time in New Orleans..." Learn more at neworleans.com.

And...the Feil Family, the City of New Orleans, and the Edward Wisner Donation.

[ Jazz plays ] [ Piano plays mellow tune ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Bienville approaches the Carolina Galley and sees that the captain, Captain Louis Bond, and he recognizes the name.

Bond knows Bienville's older brother, through their various warfare in French Canada, and Bienville declares to him that this is a French colonial possession and that Iberville, his famed older brother, is just upriver, armed and ready and able to eject the English from this incursion.

And so Captain Bond buys the bluff, turns around, and sails away.

So, had Bienville not successfully bluffed him here, we quite possibly could've had an English colonial history and, to this day, we call the general area where that happened English Turn.

♪♪ -The city's relationship with the Mississippi River been since its very beginning.

The Natives and the first citizens fished in it.

♪♪ They depended on the river to bring people into town.

There were no roads in here.

The river is shaped in a giant bend, 92° bend, called Algiers bend.

This place is called The Crescent City because of that bend.

♪♪ -There were twists and turns, when it came to the decision of locating what became New Orleans.

The French decided they needed a strong presence in Louisiana to block the Spanish in Florida and the British along the Atlantic Seaboard.

In 1698, the French Crown dispatched an expedition headed by Canadians Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville; and his younger brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville; to plant the flag.

Almost 20 years later, after establishing other outposts in the region, Bienville decides upon a new location, 95 miles upriver, that looks unlikely, at first glance.

-Bienville had, really, a set of lousy options.

This was the least lousy.

So the site itself was perfectly horrendous for a city: low-lying, flood-prone, hydric soils filled with water, prone not just to Mississippi River floods, but hurricanes, but it was, this selection of lousy sites was in the context of an absolutely strategic region: the one point that linked the entire Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and South Atlantic system to what proved to be the wealthiest valley on Earth.

-Bienville learned from the Native Americans that there were two ways to gain access to the location: first, from the river, which could be slow and often perilous.

-If the water was low and you got caught on a sandbar, you were stuck there until the water rose.

Steamboats were 100 years in the future.

-Plus, a back-door entrance, from the Gulf of Mexico and into Lake Pontchartrain and then up Bayou St. John.

New Orleans is pretty much an island.

It's set between the lake and the river and, through years of manmade drainage, has actually sunk below sea level in some places.

Ultimately 350 square miles, the city was first laid out in a grid pattern and was a mere 11x6 blocks.

♪♪ [ Suspenseful music plays ] The cost of settling a colony is getting expensive and, due to the lavish spending of Louis XIV, France incurred much debt.

One possible solution: Make the Louisiana Territory a concession.

The first attempt, by the wealthy Frenchman Antoine Crozat, failed.

Scotsman John Law has a big idea and major connections.

After the death of Louis XIV, his successor is great-grandson Louis XV, but he is only 5 years old.

A friend of Law's is named regent.

-It's Philippe, the Duke of Orléans, so, along comes Law, with this already successful general bank that he establishes with Philippe's permission.

-For Law, solving the French regent's problems had the potential of being personally lucrative.

-It was a huge speculation project, the likes of which had never been seen on this scale before: the promise of material riches, natural resources extracted from this vast land, gold and silver, as well as mineral wealth.

And key, critical component of this was the establishment of a plantation economy that would specialize in tobacco and this is key because tobacco is very valuable at this time.

-Law receives an exclusive 25-year charter on the colony.

-He would populate it with 6,000 recruited immigrants, as well as well as 3,000 enslaved Africans coming out of the Senegambia region.

So why call it New Orleans?

To flatter the royal patron.

-But, things go wrong.

There are no apparent mineral riches and establishing a plantation economy is difficult.

Tobacco doesn't grow very well.

There are floods and other natural disasters.

-But the colony continued.

The colony survived.

-Land clearing in New Orleans began in spring 1718.

-There were alligators everywhere.

There were gnats and mosquitoes and flies of all kinds.

Reptiles slithering was described.

They had the disease to fight; the hot, humid climate, so it was a very rough start in the colony.

-The colonists did have some neighbors: the Indians, Choctaw and Chitimacha among them.

-First of all, they acted as guides for the French explorers coming here.

They acted as translators for the various tribes that lived in the area and, more importantly, they provided food for colonists, who, on the brink of starvation in those very, very early years of French being in Louisiana.

-This area would become the capital of a territory that would encompass 828,000 square miles.

Arriving in 1727 from France were the Ursuline nuns.

They provided schooling for the daughters of the colonists and medical care for the burgeoning community.

By the 1750s, New Orleans had become a pawn in the European struggle for dominance in North America.

At the end of the French and Indian War in 1763; or Seven Years' War, as it was known in Europe; France ceded to Great Britain Canada and the Louisiana Territory east of the Mississippi River.

A year earlier, Spain received New Orleans and Louisiana west of the river.

The Spanish put down revolts by local slaves and colonists, gave refuge to Acadians driven from Nova Scotia, and settled Canary Islanders near the city, where the descendants, the Isleños, live to this day.

President Thomas Jefferson felt strongly that the United States should own New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory.

In 1802, he wrote to Robert Livingston, the US minister to France... -There is, on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy.

It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants.

-France had long enjoyed the riches gained from the sugar cultivated on Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, one of its possessions in the Caribbean.

Napoleon wanted the Louisiana colony to serve as Saint-Domingue's breadbasket, feeding the colonists and slaves on that island.

In 1803, after losing the slave insurrection, Bonaparte no longer needed Louisiana and agreed to a financial transaction that would change the course of a young America.

-Napoleon has war debts he wants to settle.

He has what eventually become the Napoleonic Wars on his horizon.

He wants to unburden himself of this Louisiana colony.

He needs cash.

The Americans are willing to buy, not only New Orleans, but are eager to buy the entire colony, and Napoleon unloads it, probably a mistake that France regrets to this day.

♪♪ -Even though Napoleon was willing, the actual transaction was a tad complicated.

This room was the site of a transfer of ownership of the Louisiana Territory, not once, but twice.

-In November of 1803, in order to effect the transfer from France to the United States, it had to take the colony back officially.

So, in the Sala Capitular on the second floor of the Cabildo on Jackson Square, the documents were signed, officially retroceding Louisiana from Spain to France.

And then, a month later, on December 20th, in the same room, they signed another treaty, transferring Louisiana from France to the United States.

And, of course, out in Jackson Square, on the Place d'Armes, as it was known then, they lowered the French flag and raised the stars and stripes.

It was a great transaction.

We got a tremendous amount of land, which now forms about 15 or 18 states in the United States; the Mississippi River, tremendous commerce; and we borrowed money from other people to do it.

-As New Orleans expanded, so did the distinction of who was born here and who was not.

-You have Black Creoles, you have white Creoles, and you have the mixed-race Creoles, you know.

They were all Creoles.

[chuckle] Descendants of those who lived here prior to the Louisiana Purchase and who were born here before the Louisiana Purchase, their ancestors, can rightfully call themselves Creoles, regardless of race.

-After the Louisiana Purchase, New Orleans was growing, and residents were quickly learning they had to make room for newcomers.

This causes occasional friction.

The upriver borderline of the original settlement was a median that would be named Canal Street, but residents considered it a neutral ground, separating the original, mostly French, settlement from the Americans, who were developing property upriver.

That boundary didn't stick.

Coming to New Orleans in search of a new life were the same ethnic groups populating other cities in the United States: the Irish, French, German; and, later, the Italians, mostly from Sicily.

Additionally, there was an unexpected influx from the Caribbean.

-The Saint-Dominguan rebellion had a tremendous impact upon immigration of free Blacks, as well as slaves to Louisiana during the first decade after the Louisiana Purchase.

There were literally thousands of slaves who came in with their masters.

What was significant about it was that it increased tremendously the number of free Black people that you had here, which caused a problem because, the first governor, Claiborne, who, of course, had come from Virginia, was not used to self-assertive Blacks, educated Blacks, Blacks who were well off financially, who, at first, demanded the same rights that whites had in the society.

-Nevertheless, Claiborne welcomed the refugees.

With them came the French culture which temporarily staved off the gradual transformation of the city becoming more American.

[ Suspenseful music plays ] Being part of America meant facing Britain's attempt to regain its former land holdings.

-The Battle of New Orleans took place during the War of 1812 and, of course, the United States didn't fare too well in the early, early years of the war and the overall strategy of the British was to encircle the former colonies in, now, the United States.

The strategic position was capturing the Mississippi River and capturing New Orleans.

In December of 1814, they sent the fleet to capture New Orleans by water, rather than an overland route.

-At the helm, defending New Orleans, was Major General Andrew Jackson.

-They thought Jackson would be just such another kind of a loud, boisterous, ruffian fellow, and they were very surprised when he turned out to be anything but.

He turned out to be a very courtly gentleman, very well-spoken and genteel.

-In appreciation for Jackson's victory, the parade grounds, or Place d'Armes, where the local military drilled, was renamed in his honor.

♪♪ -After the war of 1812 and the victory of the Battle of New Orleans, people felt a little bit more appropriate that it was more appropriate to come here 'cause it was theirs now, you know?

And so a lot of people moved here from the Eastern Seaboard.

[ Poignant tune plays ] ♪♪ -Slaves were very much a part of the population of early New Orleans.

-Most of the slaves who came to Louisiana came from the area of West Africa called the Senegambia, between Senegal and the Gambia Rivers, and they were brought here primarily because they were agrarians who knew how to farm with metal hoes, who knew how to cultivate rice and tobacco.

These were the two most important crops that early Louisiana sought to cultivate.

-And then, in the 1790s, once you have Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin; Etienne de Boré, granulated sugar; cotton and sugar cultivation take off and they need an ever-larger workforce to make that plantation economy work.

New Orleans was the largest slave market in the country from, you know, after 1808 up through the Antebellum period, and the slave trade continued, basically right up to the Federal occupation of the city in 1862, I believe.

-Slaves, immigrants of various nationalities, Native Americans, everyone, went to the market to sell or buy food and supplies.

-But, generally, you went every day to the farmers' market.

It was an essential part of everyone's life, of households' life, to have someone go to the market to get their groceries.

Making groceries, New Orleans-style.

Actually, "making groceries" [clap] is a literal translation of the French faire marché, to "make market," and that's where we get the term.

"Making groceries" is that translation from the French.

-The slaves were more or less told, you know, "You should fend for yourself," you know, "Feed yourself.

Feed the town."

They were allowed to hunt.

[laughing] They had guns, their own horses.

Fish, you know, do everything, gather firewood.

Then they would come to town and New Orleans, early New Orleans, as I saw it, is almost an African market town and they are controlling that culinary economy, if you will.

-Another early area where commerce took place was Congo Square.

Here, it was almost exclusively the slaves doing the selling.

-And, usually, the dancing that's associated with Congo Square occurred during the lull, when they were not selling.

They were there primarily to sell.

-And they would have musicians in the circle and dancers around the circle would clap their hands, sing or chant, shuffle their feet, and then, they would all take turns, individuals or couples, in the circle, creating their own dances, and that became very exciting.

There were second line parades, which are considered as a moving version of that type of celebration.

[ Playing jazz ] ♪♪ [ Melancholy tune plays ] ♪♪ -While fear of flooding for the river was an ongoing concern, this vulnerable young city also had another potential threat.

-What happened was this: It was Easter Friday, Good Friday, March 21, 1788, and there was a strong south wind blowing across the city.

Around 1:30 in the afternoon, some curtains in the home of the treasurer, the Spanish colony treasurer, in his home on Chartres Street, the fire broke out, presumably from these lace curtains blowing across the candles.

And, immediately, the fire spread very rapidly.

Now, you have to picture the city then.

It was mostly wooden buildings, so it was a virtual fire trap.

In the course of four or five hours, 856 houses were said to have been destroyed.

The governor said it was four-fifths of the city.

The women and children, particularly, gathered on the riverfront along the levee and they were crying and sobbing and tearing their hair out, according to the accounts, because they had nothing left.

-A second fire broke out in 1794, in the commercial section, but also destroying 400 houses that were considered to be in a more prosperous part of the city.

♪♪ In addition to fire, another constant fear was disease, especially yellow fever.

♪♪ -Yellow fever killed over 40,000 New Orleanians and over 100,000 Louisianians over the course of the long 19th century.

The first epidemic is around 1795 and the last one is 1905, which, by the way, is also the last one in the nation.

-For a long time, the cause of the illness remained a mystery.

-What they could not quite piece together was that there was this vector, this invasive mosquito called Aedes aegypti, which communicated this virus.

What we also didn't quite realize is that, while, indeed, stagnant water did breed mosquitoes, a more problematic source of those breeding areas were the cisterns that people had attached to every one of their houses.

-Mark Twain wrote in his book that he was so grateful every time it rained.

It was like flushing the toilet in New Orleans.

All of the stench and manure went to the back of the city, in the swamps, and remained back up in there.

-This was a dancing town.

In the 1830s, in many of these ballrooms, for example, because of the cholera and yellow fever epidemics, they used them, the space, as makeshift hospitals.

The problem is they couldn't get the dancers to leave.

♪♪ -During the city's early days, preparations for the deceased were primitive, to say the least: They buried them on the levees.

As the community developed, these efforts became more formalized.

-The first cemetery of the city of New Orleans was actually in the French Quarter.

They then moved the cemeteries out of the city proper there, where St. Louis Number 1 and St. Louis Number 2 is there, and that was outside of the city proper.

-They had doors here in town, mostly in the French Quarter, that sold all kinds of mourning goods.

Now, this would be anything from veils to hats to dresses, coats and shoes, dressings for the horses.

-One mourning custom seems especially surprising today.

-And the idea was that, maybe you didn't have enough family or friends, or maybe you wanted to make a very big show.

In either case, you could hire mourners, in other words, strangers who were available, for a pittance, to dress in black, which the funeral people would provide, and walk alongside the casket as it was carried through the streets on wagons or by hand.

[ Melancholy tune fades ] ♪♪ -Creating a city out of untamed land on the banks of a river that could easily overflow was not an easy feat.

-The oldest existing building in the Quarter is, hands down, the old Ursuline convent on Chartres Street.

It replaces an earlier convent, which was brick between posts, which began to fail because they left the bricks exposed.

They learned early that they had to cover the bricks with stucco or wood.

And the nuns moved in about 1750, '51.

It's not quite clear the exact move-in date because there was no big ceremony, like they had when they moved into the first convent.

That's our first recorded parade in the city of New Orleans.

When the nuns moved up Chartres Street from the upriver end to the lower end of the city is a recorded ceremony or parade going through what is the French Quarter today.

-There's another dwelling that gives us a glimpse of the early city.

Its name comes from a character in a short story.

-If we want to see what early residences looked like in New Orleans, we have to look to Madame John's there because it has all these precedents which will go on in the city of New Orleans for a century.

-The house also demonstrates the evolution from French Canadian architecture to architecture which developed along the Mississippi River Valley system, as well as in the Caribbean.

-If there's one structure that figures most prominently in the history of New Orleans, it's the Cabildo.

-But, because it was the site of the French corps de garde going back to 1750, when I did the restoration after the '88 fire, we discovered all the foundations for the early French colonial buildings in the back courtyard there.

Because the Louisiana Purchase transfer took place in the building there, because it was the state Supreme Court in the building there, because it served all these different functions throughout history.

General Lafayette came to visit in the building there.

Andrew Jackson went into the building there.

All these historic events took place in the building and it's great architecture, on top of all of that.

♪♪ -In the 1790s, Creole businessmen financed the digging of the Carondelet Canal, linking the original settlement, the French Quarter, to Lake Pontchartrain.

A little over 30 years later, American businessmen had constructed what became known as the New Basin Canal, connecting the lake with their newly developed section of the city.

-It's well known that the digging of the New Basin Canal, the Irish and German all were used because slaves were considered too valuable.

You did have a lot of free people of color doing work.

You have a lot of whites doing work for Blacks and Blacks doing work for whites during this period of time, under contract.

-Yeah, I mean, this is a city in which you really couldn't escape one another and, when you had an Irish Channel, it was really not purely Irish.

It was [laughs] as many Germans there as there were Irish.

I mean, you really did have to -- you know, the -- You really lived next door to one another and it was not segregated by race.

There was a lot of salt- and-pepper pattern to it.

And nor was there segregation by ethnicity.

I mean, you had Little Saxony, but, that's a little area of one esplanade, but, you know, that wasn't much of a ethnic ghetto.

You really couldn't escape one another.

♪♪ -With a robust port and rapid increase in cotton and sugar export, the city was booming.

With the activity came newcomers seeking their fortune.

Famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted likened New Orleans to no other place on Earth.

"I doubt there is a city in the world," he noted in his 1856 landmark book, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, "where the resident population has been so divided in its origin or where there is such variety in tastes, habits, manners, and moral codes of citizens."

The Creole-born Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville recognized the growing need for housing and transforms his family's plantations into neighborhoods.

-And, from a sleepy little town, in the 18th century, of about 9,000 people, suddenly, another 9,000 more arrived in 1809 from the islands, refugees of the French Revolution in what is now Haiti, and they doubled the population and that created a market for housing.

-Many of these refugees came to the city with needed skills.

The city's large population of free people of color, almost 19% of the city's population in 1840, were active in all endeavors of commercial life, but most notably in literature and in the building trades.

-So that you can meet plasterers today whose fathers and grandfathers were in the business of plastering and, of course, this went all the way back.

-Marigny, who considered himself a man steeped in French culture, named the streets in his new Faubourg Marigny Champs Elysées, Elysian Fields, Frenchman, and Desire.

-He was about 20 years [chuckling] old in 1805 and he sold and sold and sold and sold and sold, and his Faubourg developed into a thriving suburb with Creole cottages on the small streets and townhouses on the larger streets and a beautiful central square.

-The astute businessman also developed land on the other side of nearby Lake Pontchartrain, naming it after his family: Mandeville.

-New Orleans, before the Civil War, was a authentically global city and, by the 1840s or '50s, something like three-quarters of the British imports came through New Orleans.

We had an enormous impact on the most important industry in Europe, at the time: the textile industry.

♪♪ [ Strings play jaunty tune ] -Epitomizing the Americans who came here to find their fortune was James Robb.

Originally from Pennsylvania and a man of humble beginnings, Robb moved to New Orleans in 1847.

-In a remarkably short amount of time, he becomes a global capitalist 150 years before his time.

He has investments in everything from railroads to gas companies, in Europe, in Havana, in New Orleans.

-He was one of many wealthy men who built homes in today's Garden District.

His house filled an entire block and even included a substantial art gallery.

-And so he selected probably the most prominent spot in the most opulent district in the 1850s, which people were already describing as the Garden District.

[ Outro plays ] [ Piano plays melancholy tune ] -In 1857, in the midst of a countrywide financial crisis, he was forced to sell off his mansion and art collection.

As for the house, there were numerous owners through the years, but it was demolished in the 1950s.

♪♪ -The land becomes more valuable than the buildings.

♪♪ But if you look closely, you could still see the old granite steps of the old Robb Mansion.

-During his New Orleans years, Robb had served as a ward representative for the second municipality, which comprised much of today's uptown.

By the late 1850s, the three municipalities came together as one city.

Headquarters was Gallier Hall.

In later years, the city annexed the adjacent communities of Lafayette; today's Garden District; Jefferson City; much of uptown New Orleans; and, later, Carrollton.

[ March plays, drumroll ] ♪♪ By the early 1860s, America was divided by civil war and, for the North, New Orleans was a prize.

♪♪ [ Laconic tune plays ] -Most of the people in New Orleans did not want to secede, to begin with.

We did not want to secede over slavery and New Orleans people lost a lot of men in the Civil War.

Families were broken up because of death.

Then, it was broken up because of finances.

Hundreds and hundreds of laypeople from the North came to New Orleans and started businesses in competition with the establishment here, so it was a very difficult period.

-In 1862, leading the capture of New Orleans was Flag Officer David G. Farragut.

A mostly peaceful surrender prevented destruction of the city.

Major General Benjamin Butler was appointed military governor of occupied Louisiana and New Orleans.

There are problems from the beginning.

-It involves women turning their backs on Union soldiers or crossing the streets because they don't want to confront them or getting off of streetcars and, in some pretty extreme cases, mothers encouraged their children to sort of spit on Union officers.

-Things get worse.

-He issues General Order Number 28 on May 15, 1862, and so there's this implicit threat in that that women who behave in this way in the streets will be treated as public women.

-The effect of Butler's order meant that any woman who treated a Union soldier with disrespect would be treated like a prostitute.

-And, in his memoirs, he recalls, what he says is, Farragut and another officer walking down the street and he says a woman from above on a balcony drops a container of what he calls "not very clean water" on Farragut's head and so many people have interpreted this to mean that she dumped a chamber pot on Farragut's head.

-An even darker moment during Butler's tenure is the treatment of New Orleans resident William B. Mumford, who tore down a United States flag that had been placed by Farragut.

He was hanged, from the same flagpole where the American flag once stood.

During Butler's administration of the city, locals who refused to take a loyalty oath had their possessions confiscated and sold at auction.

The major general and a brother often bid on the items, buying them at a fraction of their value.

Butler did improve the city during his administration, by insisting on a vigilant sanitizing.

His tenure was brief.

Within two years, he was reassigned, but the resentment of political occupation was boiling over.

By far, the biggest skirmish took place on Canal Street, [ Gunfire ] the city's main thoroughfare.

A group of local businessmen, many having fought on the Confederate side, attacked members of the occupying militia and police force.

They were known as the White League.

The incident became known as the Battle of Liberty Place.

The opposition was led by Confederate General Frederick Nash Ogden.

-So, in September 1874, under General Ogden, in New Orleans, they actually formed a quasi-military force and attacked the Republican government and defeated them and that really was the beginning of the end of Reconstruction in New Orleans and Louisiana.

And, when the presidential election of 1876 came along, the great compromise was made, where the South would support the Republican candidate for president and federal troops would be withdrawn from New Orleans, so, federal troops left in 1877.

-Eleven members of the Metropolitan Police force and 21 members of the White League were killed.

-The White League, they wanted to regain what they had lost because of the Civil War.

It was to return power, political, social, economic power, to themselves, which had been lost during the war.

♪♪ -Among the many losses after the war were civil-rights laws that had been enacted during Reconstruction.

-And, after Reconstruction ended in 1877, local Louisianans spent a great deal of time getting rid of a lot of the civil-right law and equal-protection laws that existed, that were created during the Reconstruction Era, and one of them was that Blacks and whites could not mingle in public places and on public transportation.

-The Citizens' Committee, a group of local writers and civic activists, both Black and white, decided to challenge the law.

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth African descent, volunteered to board a train from New Orleans to Covington, north of Lake Pontchartrain.

He bought a first-class ticket and sat in the car designated for white riders only.

The Committee had hired a private detective with arrest power to take Plessy off the train, to ensure that he was charged with violating the state's separate-car law, and not some other misdemeanor.

-The case went from the district court here to the state Supreme Court, to the United States Supreme Court, where the court ruled that it was okay.

It didn't say it was required.

It was okay to segregate passengers in public places, as long as facilities for the two races were substantially equal, so it began separation, but not equality.

-In 1954, the Supreme Court's landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education declared that separate public education systems for Black and white students was unconstitutional.

In New Orleans, on November 14, 1960, first-grader Ruby Bridges was one of four African American children to desegregate a local school.

She was accompanied by US Marshals as she entered the William France Elementary School.

♪♪ -In 1964, the Civil Rights Bill was passed and, a few years later, the Voting Rights Bill was passed, and so the bill had a big impact nationally, so, first of all, there's just the social justice of the bill, which is the most important part of it and to be appreciated, okay, but beyond that, the economic impact that the bill would have in New Orleans, I don't think anybody realized, but it was really enormous because what was happening is that Southern cities really couldn't be in the mainstream of American life.

Big corporations weren't going there and so, like the NFL, for example, or like hotel developers.

So what happens is, after the passage of this, suddenly, you see, for one thing, you see national chain hotels move in.

Then, after '64, you'll see, over the next few years, the Sheraton, the Hilton, the Marriott.

-With those hotels came the emergence of a modern tourism industry, funded by a hotel-users tax that was directed towards funding a convention center, originally, the Rivergate, and, ultimately, the building of the Superdome.

The NFL had avoided the South.

-The NFL had some franchises to give.

They went to Atlanta, first, and then they came to New Orleans because the NFL had to be where things were, by law, integrated, and so they were there.

And so, once New Orleans had the potential of getting an NFL team, part of the sales pitch that the city made was, "Look, come to New Orleans and we're gonna build a big dome stadium."

And then, once they got the creation of the Superdome, then you got sort of like the rebuilding of that section of the city and then, ultimately, comes the arena.

The Superdome had been paid for by the time they built the arena.

We got a NBA franchise.

And so New Orleans became a really major-league city, during that period after 1964, that it couldn't have been before and it had building and it had development and the whole tourism industry all comes from that era.

♪♪ [ Band plays "When the Saints Go Marching In" ] ♪♪ -Tulane University, through the use of its football stadium, made possible the evolution of two New Orleans institutions.

One was the Sugar Bowl, the second-oldest of all football bowl games, which gave the tourist economy a New Year's boost.

The other was the Saints NFL franchise which, starting in 1967, played in the stadium for eight seasons, until the Louisiana Superdome was completed in 1975.

Through the initiative of businessman Dave Dixon and with the support of governor John McKeithen, by the 1960s, efforts were underway to get a dome stadium constructed.

The architectural firm of Curtis and Davis was hired to design the 70,000-plus-seat domed structure in downtown New Orleans.

The Saints called the dome home.

In 2010, right before Mardi Gras, the Saint beat the Indianapolis Colts 31-17 to gain their first Super Bowl victory.

A parade was held to celebrate the win.

-The Saints, at that time, I think they were like in their 45th year or something as a franchise, so, we go downtown to that parade and one thing we didn't count on is that there were so many people, but I remember being at this spot along St. Charles Avenue, right before Gallier Hall, waiting for the parade to come, and this woman comes up to me with a little boy and said, "Would you mind if he stands in front of you?

He's been waiting three hours for this."

And I felt like saying, "I've been waiting 45 years for this," okay?

I didn't say that, but I wish I had.

♪♪ [ Piano plays jaunty tune ] -First music in New Orleans would've been military music of marching bands and also people were singing church hymns, probably very badly, heh, and they also started to have popular music for dancing, so, dance music.

-French folk songs were also in the air, but the repertoire expanded rapidly.

-By the end of the 18th century, we've got ballet and opera in New Orleans and this puts New Orleans ahead of New York and Boston and Philadelphia, in terms of this kind of high culture, although, at the time, opera wasn't really considered to be high culture.

It was popular culture.

-The city's unique location contributed to the development of its music.

-Transatlantic tributaries, European and African, coexist in New Orleans, and then, over the course of the 19th century, because New Orleans is close to the terminus of the Mississippi River, work songs, blues, ragtime, spirituals, morphing into gospel, all of that is coming down the river to New Orleans.

-Add to that the city's proximity to the Gulf, the Caribbean, and Central America.

♪♪ [ Portentous music plays ] If ever there was a symbol of cultural pride, it was the French Opera House.

Opening in 1859, it had an Italianate facade and four balconies.

For over half a century, it was the center of social life in New Orleans.

The audience consisted of music lovers from all walks of life.

-So, really, from the late 1830s on, it's Italian opera, which resonates with the New Orleans population, and this ultimately affects young jazz musicians, who used to study at the conservatory of the French Opera House.

-The stunning arrangement of these tiers of seats that went up almost vertically with the box seats flanking them was a great way for the ladies to show off their jewels and their gowns and to flirt and see and be seen, and so it was a very exciting thing, to go to the French Opera.

-[Singing opera in Italian] [ Jazz plays ] -Small bands performed at picnics out by Lake Pontchartrain and such favorite destinations as West End, Old Spanish Fort, and Milneburg.

Brass bands played in parades all over town.

One little boy was listening closely.

-Louis Armstrong was an incredible musician that many people would label -- and I would, too -- a genius because he was able to take all of the sounds he heard around him as a kid: jazz, the feeling of everything from street vendors singing to brass bands, to religious music, people singing on street corners.

He was able to take all of those things and put them into his musical consciousness.

♪♪ -Armstrong grew up in a rough neighborhood near the legalized red-light district called Storyville.

During the heyday of Storyville, musicians were often hired to play in the downstairs parlors of the brothels or in nearby saloons.

-The saloons and cabarets are employing about 75 musicians a night.

Total pool?

About 200 musicians over the course of Storyville.

That is a lot of work.

-One of the most successful madams was Josie Arlington.

Arlington's place was lavish.

-It has all these very fancy themed parlors.

It's very haute Victorian, lots of dark wood and gewgaws and material.

They also make a lot of money because they are essentially running bars downstairs and so some people certainly come to visit prostitutes, but they also come to sort of see the spectacle of these very fancy brothels.

-In 1917, the Secretary of the Navy wants to close down Storyville.

♪♪ -And both the Departments of the Army and the Navy set up regulations that say there can be no regulated prostitution district within five miles of any Army encampment or Navy base.

-New Orleans Mayor Martin Behrman is none too pleased.

-And he is reputed to have said, "You can't make prostitution in illegal in Louisiana, but you can't make it unpopular."

But, ultimately, it is the Department of the Navy, under Josephus Daniels, who argues that Storyville be closed and, ultimately, the city will concede to that, and they concede to that because they understand the importance of having Army encampments and naval bases in the city of New Orleans.

It is an important part of debarkation for troops going to Europe.

♪♪ -In addition to Armstrong, among the numerous musicians who left the city for greater opportunities were Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton.

Nick LaRocca and his Original Dixieland Jass Band was one of many musicians of Italian ancestry who contributed to its development.

In his case, he spread the music with his records.

-So "Livery Stable Blues" and "Dixie Jass Band One-Step" sold over a million copies, like in a matter of months.

It was the largest record sales, up to that point, in the history of the phonograph.

-In 1961, Preservation Hall opened as a venue for veteran musicians to play for both locals and a budding tourist market.

Trumpeter Louis Prima would find success beyond New Orleans, as did trumpeter Al Hirt and clarinetist Pete Fountain.

Fountain and Hirt would ultimately settle in their hometown and perform in their own clubs on Bourbon Street.

♪♪ In the 1950s and into the '60s, numerous national hits came out of the city, as the local rhythm & blues scene exploded.

By 1955, Fats Domino had five gold records and made his mark with "Blueberry Hill" and "Walking to New Orleans."

♪♪ At the beginning of her career, this Grammy Award-winning singer was waiting tables at a local music club.

-I was getting paid $4 a night, plus whatever tips I could make, but I spent more time singing with Tommy Ridgley's band than I spent serving tables and my white boss at the time did not appreciate that because he said he didn't hire me to sing; he hired me to wait tables, and he fired me.

So Tommy Ridgley hired me.

[laughs] -At the helm, composing and producing many of these New Orleans hit songs was Allen Toussaint.

-We all rehearsed right there in Allen's living [laughing] room, so.

And we, you know, we weren't star-stars.

We were entertainers.

We enjoyed each other's company.

We would trade off tidbits about various clubs.

It was like family discussion week when we weren't rehearsing.

It was just good to be there.

[chuckle] -With an over-60-year career, New Orleans guitarist and band leader Deacon John Moore performed on many of the records recorded by Toussaint and Thomas.

Vivid are memories of the night they all recorded the 1962 hit "It's Raining."

-One thing I do remember: it was raining the night of the recording session.

[ Laughing ] I said, "Oh, how apropos."

But you couldn't hear it outside because the studio was soundproofed, but, anyway, we got kind of wet coming into the studio.

-♪ It's raining ♪ So hard ♪ It's really coming down ♪♪ ♪ Sitting by my window ♪ Watching the rain ♪ Fall to the ground ♪♪ ♪ This is the time -It is one of my favorites, also, you know.

I do sing it, you know, and some people say, "Oh, you sound just like Irma Thomas."

[ Laughing ] -In 1971, Newport Jazz Festival organizer George Wein hired Quint Davis and Allison Miner, who worked at Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive, to help him start a music and heritage festival.

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival is one of the world's largest music festivals.

-New Orleans becomes a medieval village during Jazz Festival.

Over those two weeks, that's all we talk about.

"Are you going to the festival?

I'm going to the festival.

Where and when are you going to the festival?

Who's playing at the festival?"

Have you seen this at the festival?"

This is it, okay?

There's no other topic of conversation.

There could be a nuclear strike somewhere.

"So who are you gonna see on Friday and who are you gonna see for Saturday, for the festival?

", you know?

We love it and I have to say, this kind of myopia is extraordinarily attractive to me because, you know, it's the local people who are excited, as well as the visitors who come from so far away.

-It gives back to the community.

It's connected to the community.

It understands heritage.

It understands the connections of New Orleans to the rest of the world.

-Deacon John Moore is someone who has stayed put in New Orleans and has made many local music memories.

-I could play a debutante ball.

The night after that, I could be playing at a casino.

The night after that, I could be playing a birthday party, so I made -- That's the reasons of my success, was that I was able to reinvent myself with the marketplace.

I just didn't stay the same all the years.

[ Piano plays poignant tune ] ♪♪ -Three churches have stood on the site of what is today's St. Louis Cathedral.

While New Orleans became home to other faiths, including early-on Judaism, the culture has long been influenced by the Catholic religion.

-We're all culturally Catholic in New Orleans.

Even the Episcopalians suck the heads of the crawfish, you know, so we're all culturally Catholic.

-Religious orders of nuns have long contributed to the welfare and education of Orleanians.

The Daughters of Charity, distinctive with their wing-like headpiece, founded Charity Hospital, providing centuries of care.

Sister Henriette DeLille tended to the needs of slaves and free people of color.

Mother Frances Cabrini aided the Italian immigrants in the early 1900s, with her order of nuns ultimately founding a girls' high school.

And Mother Katharine Drexel founded Xavier, the only Black Catholic university in America.

Deacon John grew up Catholic in a family of 13 brothers and sisters.

-My mother was a very devout Catholic and she raised us to the letter of the religion.

You can't eat meat on Friday.

You gotta go to mass and communion every week.

You go to confession.

She sent us to Catholic schools with the nuns and the priests, to reinforce everything that was taught, you know.

My mother had a statue of the Blessed Mother and she would make us all kneel down and say the recitation of the Rosary because it was broadcast on the radio, WSMB, at 6:00 every day.

When we're outside, playing, you knew, at 6:00, you had to come home and say the Rosary.

[chuckling] ♪♪ [ Cheering and applause ] -Some saints' feast days are especially embraced by New Orleanians, with Mardi Gras-style parades for St. Patrick.

-Come on, baby!

-Descendants of Sicilian immigrants continue to honor St. Joseph with altars of food that is shared by the community, all in thanks for favors granted.

The enslaved population brought with them their own beliefs.

Many of those rituals became entwined with other religions, including Catholicism.

The most famous practitioner was Marie Laveau.

♪♪ [ Piano plays jaunty tune ] ♪♪ Since the earliest days of New Orleans, what to eat has been a topic.

-I think people in New Orleans have always enjoyed what's close at hand and, very fortunate for them, that's a lot.

The waterways, the marshes, extremely productive.

Of course, that'll be augmented by what the ships are bringing into the port, you know, as a trading port; and what people kind of developed here based on what they missed from home or the traditions that they had.

-It was inevitable that the early residents would bring to the table dishes reflecting their own cultures, but what if the British had won the Battle of New Orleans?

-Well, what if the British had won?

The food would be terrible.

[laughing] Right?

And we'd have a different accent.

[chuckle] -The story of New Orleans food always starts with the French and the Spanish and the African and maybe the Italian and the German, if you're really paying attention to what's going into the pot here.

-By the early 1800s, travelers to New Orleans would initially dine at hotels.

In 1840, Antoine Alciatore opened his door to lodgers, but soon realized a restaurant could be more lucrative.

Still family-owned, Antoine's is one of the oldest restaurants in America.

Begue's; and, later, Tujague's; offered bountiful breakfasts, originally created to feed the hungry butchers once they were finished for the day at the French market.

Along Lake Pontchartrain, Bruning's served up seafood dishes, always popular, but especially so with the mostly Catholic population that observed Lent, refraining from meat for 40 days.

Cooking styles soon emerged in both the city and the outlying areas.

-Creole cuisine can be a little more refined.

Brings in more influences from around the globe.

Cajun cooking is country cooking, usually done for big gatherings and family events and just it's a heartiness; it's a coming-together kind of food, but, when you all get down to it, they share the same DNA of being Louisiana food.

♪♪ [ Mellow jazz plays ] -Gumbo, with its African roots, and po' boys are among local favorites.

Throughout the years, immigrants from Sicily and Croatia have also contributed to the New Orleans food ethnic identity.

There's now a more recent influx of ethnic groups.

-So you've got Vietnamese, of course, which is huge now and extremely popular in the food world, not just within its own community, but really across the city.

We even have Vietnamese po' boys now.

-Each new wave of people that comes to the city adds something to the food and something to the music.

That doesn't happen, except for in a wonderful port city, like New Orleans, that, even with all the frictions, knows that it lives and breathes because of the mix of people that get to come here and live.

-Post-Katrina, what you've seen is an opening of the cuisine.

I mean, before that, it's pretty still strictly Creole, you know?

It's like even chefs like Emeril and Frank Brigtsen, who were the first kind of "star" chefs from New Orleans, you know, Paul Prudhomme, they were still working in a sort of Creole vernacular, you know?

They were -- It was more sophisticated; it was more experimental, but it was still, you know, it was their take on Creole cuisine.

[ Sultry jazz plays ] -And, while Latin American food has long been a part of the city's cuisine, in the more recent past, it has certainly expanded in scope.

-[laughing] Now it's not just Mexican food, but Central American food, South American food.

We're seeing a much richer display of different ethnic identities in New Orleans food because people are more curious about it.

They still want that red beans.

They want their gumbo.

They want their traditional home cooking, but, when they want to dine out, they have a lot more options now, and that's been exciting.

[ Upbeat jazz plays ] ♪♪ -Mardi Gras.

Yet another link to the early Catholic culture of the city.

While there are other cities around the world that also celebrate the day of feasting before the fasting of Lent, it's not a brag, but a fact, that New Orleans stages the world's largest spectacle.

In early New Orleans, balls were popular, and there was costuming.

A few attempts were made to organize a parade, but nothing lasted, until 1857.

-1857 is when an organization started, called the Mistick Krewe of Comus, and it was with Comus that we saw the template for all else that was gonna follow.

It was Comus that introduced the idea of, first of all, the word krewe was a Comus invention; the idea of having maskers and the ideas of having floats, so Comus was really, you know, the godfather of it all.

-Mardi Gras historian Perry Young described the first parade: "The glare of torchlights shattered the darkness... bands burst into symphony, and the Mistick Krewe stood revealed, a company of demons, rich and realistic; moving in a procession that seemed to blaze from some secret chamber of the earth."

Fifteen years later, during Reconstruction, a group of businessmen decided to stage the first day parade, with the hope that it would attract visitors.

It was called Rex.

Instead of drawing its name from mythology, as other krewes would do, the group's monarch was referred to with the Latin word for "king."

Over the next 150 years, more parades would follow.

Over the last half-century, some krewes have increased the amount, and size, of their floats.

Floats can also be tiny, elaborate, and full of satire.

Bacchus, which first rolled in 1969, introduced the concept of a celebrity monarch.

-Carnival, more than anything else, created the image of New Orleans being a good-time town, and, to this day, that's its image, that New Orleans is a place that you want to visit, and it's an image established by Carnival.

-Most folks who grew up in New Orleans have Carnival-connected memories.

-Well, the reason I got into music was, when I was a kid, we used to go to Mardi Gras parades all the time and I remembered seeing the St. Augustine High School Marching 100 in the Zulu parade on Jackson Avenue in the early '60s, and they played so powerfully and, when I saw them, they had these knight helmets on and these beautiful purple-and-gold uniforms, and people had to open up for them to come, and they seemed like a legion of soldiers.

♪♪ -While most krewes have all-male membership, the Krewe of Iris is the oldest existing female organization.

-Iris certainly endured and has certainly has created, to this day, it's created a big parade with lots of bands and it's a very visual parade.

The big change came in the [indistinct] parades, with the establishment of the Krewe of Muses.

The Muses changed it all.

-Muses, a nighttime woman's parade, first took to the streets in 2001.

-One of the Muses's great innovations is that it allowed more marching organizations within the parade, these walking organizations, and a lot of those are female-oriented, too, and so it created a parade that was not only big and visual, in terms of the floats, but to me it was a lot of fun.

-I was an honorary Muse one year and I got to ride in the big glitter shoe.

-Reed decided to embellish the costume she wore that night.

-So I went to Walmart and I found a leopard-print bra and made a tiara out of it.

It's very beautiful.

I still wear it.

[laughing] It's one of my favorite things.

If I'm in a bad mood, I put on my leopard-print-bra hat, and there you go.

You can't take yourself very seriously or be sad anymore after that.

-The Zulu organization, founded by a group of African American Orleanians, started parading on Mardi Gras morning in 1909.

The tradition of float riders throwing something to parade-goers is a long one.

Today, beads have become larger and much more elaborate, and ever-present, outside of the Mardi Gras season, on the main parade route, elegant St. Charles Avenue.

-They kind of remind you that Bacchanalia [laughing] is never far, never very far away in time.

I mean, I guess I've lived here so long, I've taken it for granted, you know?

It doesn't even -- I don't even raise an eyebrow or say, "What's this?"

-The 1984 World's Fair was a celebration that lasted six months and helped transform a once-industrial area into a new neighborhood.

-I would say that New Orleans was founded along the river in 1718, but New Orleanians discovered the river in 1984.

But in 1984, when the World's Fair opened and people could walk along that building that's now Riverwalk and look out and say, "Oh, look at that.

There's a river there," and see the beauty of the river.

[ Piano plays melancholy tune ] ♪♪ -New Orleans has long served as a muse for writers.

By the 1800s, there were numerous travelers' accounts of this exotic city.

The place also inspired poetry.

In 1845, Armand Lanusse edited Les Cenelles, a collection of 85 poems written in French by 17 Creoles of color.

It is considered the first African American poetry anthology published in the United States.

-I mean, the word got out pretty early for writers, certainly early in the 19th century, that New Orleans was the place where you could be yourself, express yourself.

-Greek-born Lafcadio Hearn arrived in 1877.

During his decade in New Orleans, he worked for local newspapers and also contributed to national publications.

-Lafcadio Hearn was a sort of ambassador to the rest of the world, preaching the virtues of New Orleans, the values of New Orleans, the wonderful history of New Orleans.

He's the first one who really realized how distinct the food was and, of course, he wrote the first cookbook from New Orleans.

-The novels of George Washington Cable spread beyond New Orleans the perception of the city as mysterious and romantic.

His best friend, Mark Twain, spent time in the city, mostly focusing on his own experiences as a young riverboat pilot on the Mississippi.

By the 1920s, the French Quarter was rundown, but the rent was cheap, and the neighborhood picturesque.

-Sherwood Anderson was the first of the writers in the '20s who recognized the uniqueness of the city and wrote a broadside in which he urged writers to come to the city.

He said, "This is the place to live."

He created a sort of mystique of his own about the city, but he urged other writers to come to the city, notably William Faulkner.

[ Sultry jazz plays ] -One young writer was drawn to New Orleans in the late 1930s, hoping to find work.

Instead, he found inspiration.

His name?

Tom Williams.

Once he moved to New Orleans, he became known as Tennessee.

-When he came here, he found a freedom he had never had before and the shock of it against the puritanism of his nature gave him the material he continued to write about.

-Williams lived in various places in the French Quarter, from 1939 until his death in 1983.

-He moved into 632 St. Peter Street, and an upstairs apartment where he had a skylight and he said it looked as though he could reach up and touch the clouds and grab a handful and cool your fevered brow.

-In 1946, Williams was busy working on a play he called "The Poker Night."

-He said, "From that room, I could hear [ Bell clanging ] that rattletrap streetcar running up one way and the one named Cemeteries running down the other, and it seemed to me the ideal metaphor for the human condition."

-Williams decided to change the name of the play to "A Streetcar Named Desire."

-Blanche says, her first line in the play is, "They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, to transfer to one called Cemeteries and then get off at Elysian Fields," which, of course, is physically impossible.

Those lines don't run in that sequence, but, the metaphor, of course, is between life and death.

Elysian Fields represents eternity, the afterlife, and whatever, so, it's a wonderful -- actually, it's a wonderful key to interpreting the meaning of the entire play.

-"Streetcar" contains all of my major themes and I wrote about the most -- I did my best work on those themes in "Streetcar," I believe, but, those themes were of a considerable number, I think, and I've never repeated myself, uh, more than other writers do, I don't think.

Perhaps.

But one's own -- A writer's opinion of his own work is not too trustworthy, you know.

He's naturally inclined to think well of it.

[ Laughter ] -The Desire streetcar line was discontinued a year after Williams completed his play.

Novelist Walker Percy set his 1961 novel The Moviegoer in the city.

-And so the thing about Walker Percy was that he understood that sort of sensuous smell and feel and sound of New Orleans.

-John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces takes a comedic look at local life.

-It has all sorts of New Orleans characters in it; not just French Quarter characters, but other eccentric New Orleanians who would not seem eccentric in New Orleans, but would to the rest of the country.

-Novelist Anne Rice explores the supernatural through her family of vampires in her series of books, set mainly in New Orleans.

-But I was fascinated by her whole life view of the vampires as being outsiders, and, of course, Tennessee was always intrigued by the outsiders of society.

-Williams was crystal-clear concerning some of his favorite places.

"America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans.

Everywhere else is Cleveland."

[ March plays ] ♪♪ During World War II, New Orleans was a hub of activity, not only as an important port of embarkation for troops but also for equipment construction for the war effort.

Andrew Jackson Higgins had factories building Higgins boats landing craft, LCVPs, 24/7.

At one point, he had almost 20,000 employees.

The vessels were considered a contributor to the success of D-Day and the overall war effort.

♪♪ -I remember my father was sent back home from the Navy with a bad heart and very disappointed.

He was coaching then; he was not [indistinct] yet, and he and my mother began to take care of all of the aunts that had husbands that were going overseas.

But every man in my family, if they couldn't serve in the war, did something.

-Clarkson and her family had a nightly ritual.

-Every night, my father sat in front of the radio with my sister and I and listened to President Roosevelt.

Whenever he spoke, we sat in front of the radio and followed maps because we had family in the Atlantic and family in the Pacific and we knew where they were; not just family, but a lot of the boys my father coached.

And several lives were lost, of boys my daddy had coached at Warren Easton.

He ended up naming playgrounds, two, in particular, after two of his favorite young men who lost their lives, and one is Markey Park, in Bywater; and the other one is Delcazal, in Algiers.

[ Suspenseful music plays ] -Living on the west bank of the Mississippi below New Orleans allowed for a unique perspective of the war.

♪♪ -We noticed, early in the war, that we saw ambulances were coming up from the mouth of the river pretty often.

We didn't realize, 'til after the war, how many freighters the U-boats were sinking at the mouth of the river.

And so the survivors were being brought up to New Orleans from Belle Chasse because there were no helicopters, so the only way you can get someone in.

-Even students became involved on the home front.

George Hero went to Jesuit High School.

-We were mostly taught how to march, and so forth.

They were looking for recruits and also we had the scrap drives.

Now, you turn 500 active, young teenagers and say, "Go get scrap," and it's amazing how much they got.

[ Laughter ] There was a tremendous pile of aluminum and steel and it was piled behind Jesuit High School.

It was a real hill.

-New Orleans families did their part on the home front.

Gordon Wilson's father was an air-raid warden.

-And he wore World War I surplus helmets with "Air Raid Warden" written on it and he had a band around his arm that said, "Air Raid Warden," and so we would have air-raid drills, which were always a big thrill for the neighborhood.

Well, all the lights in the neighborhood would go off and you'd have to have -- you'd have black shades that you'd pull down, but, usually, everyone just turned off their lights.

And the grownups sat up on the porch and the kids ran around and, at that time, we had what -- we called them lightning bugs, or fireflies, and they were all over the place 'cause, with no lights, you could really see them, and you could see the stars.

♪♪ -And, pretty quickly after World War II, the economy recovered.

Part of what drove that, of course, was the baby boom, as people, 12 million, 14 million soldiers, came back from war, got married, started families.

All of the consumer products necessary for that and the demand for housing, all of that sort of sent the economy on an upward path.

It's true for New Orleans as well.

-Enter young, bright, and handsome New Orleans attorney deLesseps Morrison.

-Morrison had been the young state representative before the war.

He came back.

He'd been the colonel in the war and some of the people from uptown New Orleans prevailed on him, "Please, let's get some new ideas, a fresh face," so he ran for mayor.

It was a major upset that he was elected, became very popular.

And this was happening around the country.

Like people were returning from the war and they were being worshipped and so they'd run for office and they win.

-He tried, in the mid-1950s, to sort of restore our history with Latin America.

I think the city had a short time where it adopted the motto "Gateway to the Americas."

-Confronting a key issue was on the horizon.

-The big picture is simple: From 1960s to the present, the story of New Orleans politics is the story of coming to terms with our racial past and with the population of New Orleans.

-Moon Landrieu served as mayor from 1970 to '78.

-Mayor Landrieu was very important in the transition from a white-dominated political-social- economic structure to one that was more diverse, more inclusive.

He came into office at a very important time, right after the Voting Rights Act of '65 had come into effect.

He was elected four years later and he was elected, in part, on a pledge to bring African Americans into city government, and he didn't hedge that.

The pledge was not if and maybe and a few.

It was, "I will do this," and he did.

♪♪ -Ernest Morial, known as "Dutch," became the city's first African American mayor in 1978.

♪♪ Sons of both Morial and Landrieu would eventually serve two terms as mayor.

Between were terms held by former Councilman at Large Sidney Barthelemy and Cox Cable executive Ray Nagin.

Mitch Landrieu, the son of Moon, became mayor in 2010, with his term ending in 2018.

♪♪ In 2017, the city elected its first female mayor, city council member LaToya Cantrell.

[ Piano plays mid-tempo tune ] ♪♪ -On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

Breaches in the Lake Pontchartrain levee system caused most of the flooding.

Almost 80% of the city was underwater.

-Water came from more than one source.

I mean, it came from the lake; it came the canals, you know, and so it was just an extraordinary soup, you know?

That was my neighborhood.

And so, when I go to the door and I'm trying to get it open and then I look and I see something on the window of the house and I couldn't believe it.

I walk up more closely to it and I realize that there's a fish that's stuck to the side of my house, that's stuck to my window, you know, which can only tell me that, literally, there was a whole ecosystem [laughs] that had moved away from the lake and, you know what I mean?, from other water sources, you know what I mean?, around the city and that it collected in my neighborhood.

For a while, we were literally a fish tank.

-Katrina Christmas was a surreal time, but a very hopeful time.

Instead of decorating houses, sometimes people were decorating their FEMA trailers.

-It was kind of interesting to see how that event made everybody sort of hunker down and say, "This is now my town."

-After Katrina, those of us who were on the Louisiana Recovery Authority kept getting pushed by the federal government to do a centralized plan of the city, one big, unified New Orleans plan, as you may remember.

And I always thought that was a bad idea, that New Orleans was a city of neighborhoods and the way my neighborhood of Broadmoor was gonna come back might be different from the way Tremé or Marigny or, for that matter, uptown, you know, different neighborhoods.

That ended up being the way it happened, you know?

In my neighborhood of Broadmoor, we were almost lucky because the unified plan put a green dot there, that it was going to be made into parkland, and that rallied all of our neighbors, Black and white, to say, "No.

We're gonna bring Broadmoor back."

-And of course it was during that first Mardi Gras after Katrina that I heard a line that stayed with me forever.

It was one of these lines overheard in the street.

It was a lady.

I think she was talking on her cellphone, but I could hear her clear as day, and she said, "Darlin', I'm so happy to be back home.

I'm even glad to see people I hate."

♪♪ [ Mellow jazz plays ] -And how is New Orleans, post-Katrina?

Billions of dollars have been spent on hurricane protection by the federal government.

Much attention has been paid to improving the public school system, with more emphasis on charter schools.

There's been an influx of newcomers, many of them engaged in startup businesses.

-And everything we've been through, and it's our job to make sure that New Orleans can continue to sort of absorb and co-opt newcomers so that they will buy in to being a New Orleanian, too, and not just live a sort of a party culture, which I think is detrimental to the real thing, and figure out that the beauty and the traditions and the shared value of loving old things can get you through a lot of community problems, if you just open up to them.

-But I think, most of all, people consider themselves New Orleanians because they see that this is a different place, that we came very close to losing it and that they have recommitted to being a New Orleanian, and they're redefining what that is.

-We're here by choice.

And, certainly, after the storm, it was a choice, but -- And we get mad at our town and we get very frustrated when the waters rise and we get scared when hurricanes come and other catastrophes and calamities seem to be at our doorstep, but, I don't really think that anybody wants to trade it, and I certainly wouldn't want to.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -The book "New Orleans: The First 300 Years," is available for $34.99 plus $6 shipping and handling.

You can also order the 90-minute DVD of the program, for $29.95 plus $4 shipping and handling.

To order these items, call 1-866-999-9081 or order online at wyes.org.

♪♪ "New Orleans: The First 300 Years" is a part of WYES's New Orleans Tricentennial Salute, which is made possible by the Arlene and Joseph Meraux Charitable Foundation, dedicated to improving the quality of life in St. Bernard Parish and implementing innovative strategies to creating lasting, positive change for the entire community.

And by The Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum, research center, and publisher dedicated to preserving our area's distinctive history and culture.

Details on current exhibitions, books, and programs available at hnoc.org.

Additional funding provided by the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation.

Visitors, and locals, too, can start their story with "One time in New Orleans..." Learn more at neworleans.com.

And...the Feil Family, the City of New Orleans, and the Edward Wisner Donation.

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