There’s no more relaxing way to end a day than to watch the clouds float over Bayou St. John.  It’s at the end of Esplanade Avenue, a peaceful retreat where people gather to make good memories.  This is New Orleans.  The landscape is the community.

Bayou St. John is a natural body of water, though it’s been straightened over the centuries.  This whole neighborhood surrounding Esplanade Avenue used to be home to three bayous: Bayou St. John, Bayou Gentilly, and Bayou Metairie.  

Those names don’t mean anything to regular readers, but to Orleanians, Gentilly is a neighborhood to the east of the city center.  Metairie is the suburbs.  All of the land around Esplanade Avenue in this part of town used to be swampland, the way most of the city was.  Be careful where you build.  It may last 300 years.

How much longer will New Orleans last?

Bayou St. John used to be a busy commercial shipping channel.  It was mostly. lumber and oyster boats by the time the city shut the trade down.  

The Lafitte Greenway, parallel to Esplanade Avenue, used to be a canal.  That’s why the buildings on the Uptown side of the bike path are industrial-looking.  There used to be much more water in New Orleans, and there used to be a lot more jobs connected to the water.  Bayou St. John used to be a part of that.  Now, it’s a place for kayakers and dog walkers.  Times change.

Bayou St. John runs from Lafitte Street (where the former Carondolet Canal started) all the way to Lake Pontchartrain.  You can walk the length, or ride a bicycle.  It’s landscaped all the way.

There used to be party boats on the bayou, but the city put an end to that with WWII.  Less people lived along the bayou until the 1920s, when the bayou’s mouth was closed to the lake.  Shipping stopped, so nobody knew what to do with it.  This being New Orleans, and there being no law against it, people set up party boats on the bayou.

They were like the party buses that drive around town, blaring music and annoying the neighbors.  Some things never change.

When you are looking for somewhere to stay in New Orleans, you have found the right place.  La Belle Esplanade.  You belong here.