In 2011, I came to New Orleans from New York City to take a teaching job at the University of New Orleans.
I’d
never been to New Orleans. I didn’t know
the city at all. Where to live? A friend, who had once lived in New Orleans,
advised me:
“Don’t
live in the French Quarter.”
“Why
not?” I asked. After all, Tennessee
Williams had lived there, and he hadn’t done too badly, had he?
Because,
he said, it’s too expensive. And you’ll
never find a place to park.
I
didn’t heed that advice. I reasoned since
I didn’t know a soul in New Orleans, at least I’d be living in a neighborhood
where there was always something going on.
I wouldn’t be lonely. As for the
parking, well, I’d lived in New York for thirty years. Parking, in the French Quarter, compared to
the ferocious, gladiator-like struggle in New York City to find a space for
your car, couldn’t be nearly as daunting.
When
I came to New Orleans to search for an apartment, I enlisted the services of a
real estate broker who specialized in the French Quarter. He lived in the Quarter, and his family had
been selling and renting houses there for years.
“What
do you do?” he asked me.
“Well,
I’m a writer. I’ve come to New Orleans
to take a job teaching.”
“A
writer? Oh, well, you must live
in the Quarter.”
(You can read the rest of the piece here.)
