Jazz provided the soundtrack for our trip to New Orleans. We visited the New Orleans Jazz Museum, clubs on Frenchman Street, Preservation Hall, a piano bar in a building once owned by the pirate Jean Lafitte, a little outdoor stage at a club in the Bywater neighbourhood, a gospel concert at the cathedral. We saw the sights: mansions in the Garden District, shotgun houses across the river in Algiers, the above-ground mausoleums in the city’s cemeteries, Jackson Square, Audubon Park, and the Mississippi River.
New Orleans is a city of stories, many of them tragic – from the centuries of slavery, to deadly yellow fever outbreaks, to Hurricane Katrina. But one that occurred shortly before our visit was pretty funny. We went for a short hike along the bayou in Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and came to a point where a bridge over a creek was closed, so we had to turn back. A park ranger later explained that the bridge was closed because an alligator had a nest there (in fact, we saw the ‘gator lying still in the water). One night, he said, a couple of young guys with more sense of adventure than brains decided to climb over the barricade blocking the bridge and continue along the trail. They made it across without incident. But when they tried to re-cross the bridge, they found that the way was now blocked by a toothy barrier. Since the ‘gator showed no sign of retreating, they called 911. The park ranger was first on the scene and scared off the alligator so they young men could leave. But since they were trespassing, he took their names to give them tickets. While he was at it, he ran their names through the computer and found that one had an outstanding warrant, so he took him into custody. It was the first time the ranger had ever shared an arrest with a reptile.
New York
I call my first trip to New York my Broadway debut. Well, with an asterisk. A play of mine was accepted for a series of workshopped staged readings put on by New York University’s drama department, which happens to have an address on Broadway. There was no pay. It didn’t lead to a production. But it still felt pretty cool, especially when a few months later Rosemary and I were watching Sex in the City and I realized one of the actors on the screen had been in my play.
When I wasn’t workshopping that play, I used the trip as research for a new play I was working on based on Louis Riel’s time in the U.S. in the 1870s, when the Manitoba Metis leader spent time in St. Paul, Chicago, Washington D.C. and possibly visited New York to hear a pair of Irish revolutionaries speak. As part of the research, I wanted to learn more about the poor and crime-ridden Five Points district of Manhattan, part of which survives as Chinatown and part of which was long ago covered over by New York’s city hall and police headquarters. I tramped the streets of Chinatown, the Lower East Side and the Bowery, visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and tried to soak of the atmosphere of Herbert Asbury’s embellished non-fiction book The Gangs of New York and the grim photos of the photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis. The Louis Riel play never did get produced, but some of that research found its way into my novel Prodigies, which opens in the Five Points in the 1870s.
Fifteen years later, Rosemary and I went to New York for our anniversary and filled up on Big Apple experiences: a Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden, a trip to Coney Island to see a free oldies concert by ‘50s and ‘60s doo wop singers who were still somehow performing, an outdoor performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at Lincoln Center, a visit to a comedy club (where I did an open mic set), and a tour of the Chelsea Hotel, which the plaque out front informs you was once home to Leonard Cohen, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac. The Chelsea still has a few old bohemians living there as grandfathered-in long-term tenants, but otherwise it has been refurbished and turned into a high-end boutique hotel. We were two doors down at the not-yet-gentrified Chelsea Savoy Hotel.
I’m waiting for my plaque.
Nuremberg
We didn’t get to go to the courtroom where they held the Nazi war crimes trials because there was a genocide conference going on there. That sounds like the kind of thing some very entitled tourist would write in a one-star Trip Advisor review. But in fact that’s what happened. Rosemary and I visited the two Nuremberg sites associated with the rise and defeat of Nazism: the party rally grounds made famous by Leni Reiffenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will and the courthouse where many of the leading Nazis – those who survived the Berlin bunker – were put on trial. It makes for a sobering day.
Nuremberg has a beautiful, large old city and a distinguished history in art as the hometown of Albrecht Durer.
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But, in part because of its importance in the original German (i.e. Holy Roman) Empire and in part because it was the home town of Julius Streicher, a key Hitler supporter and publisher of the influential antisemitic newspaper Der Sturmer, it was also the symbolic home of Nazism. That history is why it was the site of party rallies, youth rallies, Nazi war games, and in the event Britain threw in the towel before the Americans got involved, the intended venue for victory celebrations. And that history and symbolic importance are why the Allies held the war crimes trials in Nuremberg.
You can visit the rally site, where the German government has an information centre about the role of the rally grounds and its use during the war as a POW camp and transfer camp for Jews and others shipped off to slave labour camps. There’s a big artificial lake right beside the remaining buildings and ducks paddle peacefully about on it. The lake is where the stadium for Hitler’s victory celebration was going to be built, but the war got in the way of construction.
On the other side of town is the courthouse where the trials were held. We spent hours reading the texts and listening to the audio guide as it walked us through trial preparations, legal arguments, and sentences. I learned that at the end of the war one school of thought suggested simply executing the Nazis without trial and it wasn’t just the Soviets (who knew a thing or two about summary executions) who wanted to do it this way. One of the key arguments for holding open trials was that the process of presenting all that evidence in court would show the world what had happened in the Holocaust so there’d be no denying it. To that end, prosecutors assembled eyewitness accounts of survivors, confessions of perpetrators, libraries’ worth of meeting minutes and bureaucratic records from all levels of the Third Reich — to prove the case against surviving high-level Nazis and to demonstrate to the world what the Nazis had done. Who could possibly doubt the mountains of evidence?
That genocide conference being held in the courtroom on the day of our visit, 78 years after the end of the Second World War, was specifically about genocide denial.
You guys sure get around and mange not to fall into the usual couple conflict about what to see and who is tired and who is not. :)