Good Bones, Hard Times, Small Delights

City of Yes, And... #8

Welcome to “City of Yes, And…,” a monthly newsletter for paid subscribers in which I go off-piste from my usual essay format. All subscribers receive my free weekly essays.

I’ve been on the road since August 1st, passing through much of the country from Austin to Cape Cod, so this edition will be a bit of a travelogue. A trip like this is a sensory overload: questions, notes, and future writing ideas pile up, but long hours in the car leave little time for reading or writing. Still, as the wheels turn, I notice familiar themes.

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New Orleans: Good Bones

New York might be America’s only real city, but our stopover in New Orleans had me wondering if the Big Easy is the closest version of the real thing in the South. I’d been to New Orleans twice before, but this was my first time in the Garden District, a streetcar suburb dating to the early 1800s. The streets were lined with stately mansions alongside shotgun houses and apartment buildings sitting on small lots and short blocks, all of it interspersed with corner stores and mixed-use stretches amidst lush greenery. The St. Charles streetcar line still trundles through the district, as it has done for nearly 200 years.

Most Southern cities were either built after the car or rebuilt around it. Their historic cores are small (Austin), museumified (Charleston), or overwhelmed by highways and sprawl (Atlanta, Dallas, everywhere else). New Orleans is the only one that really behaves like a city. It has a coherent urban fabric of tight street grids, walkable neighborhoods, and green public spaces interconnected by a network of streetcars and buses. There’s nothing resembling suburban sprawl within city limits.

And yet… while New Orleans may be the most walked-in Southern city, with 1 in 5 residents not owning a car, more than 60% of workers commuted alone by car—more than in Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, or Miami—and only 4.4% took transit, underperforming Atlanta (5.5%) and Miami (7.6%). Meanwhile, in America’s Only Real City, only 21.5% of New Yorkers drove, while 47.8% took transit and 9.5% walked to work.

The point is that even the South’s most “urban” city is still fundamentally car-dependent. New Orleans preserves the bones of a pre-car city, but its daily life runs on cars.

Streetcar City (Photo Credit: Author)

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