New Orleans

THE FRENCH QUARTER 133
can sip a legal libation in the bar and feel at one with the famous
types who came before you, listed on a plaque outside: William
Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Walt Whitman.
Andrew Jackson and the Lafitte brothers plotted their desperate
defense of New Orleans here in 1815.
The house was a speak-easy during Prohibition, and when federal
officers closed it in 1924, the interior was mysteriously stripped of its
antique fixtures—including the long marble-topped bar and the old
water dripper that was used to infuse water into the absinthe. Just as
mysteriously, they all reappeared down the street at a corner establishment
called, oddly enough, the Old Absinthe House Bar (400
Bourbon St.). The latter has closed, and a neon-bedecked daiquiri
shack opened in its stead. The fixtures have since turned up in one
of the restaurants on this site! The bar is covered with business cards
(and drunks), so don’t come here looking to recapture old-timey and
classy atmosphere, but it’s still a genuinely fun hangout.
240 Bourbon St., between Iberville and Bienville sts. & 504/523-3181. www.old
absinthehouse.com. Free admission. Sun–Thurs 9:30am–2am; Fri–Sat 9:30am–4am.
Old Ursuline Convent Forget tales of America being
founded by brawny, brave, tough guys in buckskin and beards. The
real pioneers—at least, in Louisiana—were well-educated French
women clad in 40 pounds of black wool robes. That’s right; you
don’t know tough until you know the Ursuline nuns, and this city
would have been a very different place without them.
The Sisters of Ursula came to the mudhole that was New Orleans
in 1727 after a journey that several times nearly saw them lost at sea
or to pirates or disease. Once in town, they provided the first decent
medical care (saving countless lives) and later founded the first local
school and orphanage for girls. They also helped raise girls shipped
over from France as marriage material for local men, teaching the girls
everything from languages to homemaking of the most exacting sort.
The convent dates from 1752 (the sisters themselves moved
uptown in 1824, where they remain to this day), and it is the oldest
building in the Mississippi River valley and the only surviving
building from the French colonial period in the United States.
1110 Chartres St., at Ursulines St. & 504/529-3040. Admission prices and times
not determined at press time.
The Old U.S. Mint Kids The Old U.S. Mint, a Louisiana
State Museum complex, houses exhibits on New Orleans jazz and
on the city’s Carnival celebrations. The first exhibit contains a comprehensive
collection of pictures, musical instruments, and other