Jackson Square has survived two fires, a hurricane named Katrina, and roughly four hundred years of tourists asking the mule drivers if the mules have names. It had not, until this trip, survived someone doing a headspin next to its fountain at ten in the morning.
I fixed that.
The square behind me
That is St. Louis Cathedral in the background, the oldest continuously active Catholic cathedral in the United States. The current building took its present three spire form during an 1849 to 1851 rebuild, after an earlier version burned in the Good Friday fire of 1788, but a church has held that exact spot since the French founded New Orleans in the 1720s. The square itself was originally a military parade ground, then a public execution site, then finally the landscaped park it is today, renamed in 1851 for Andrew Jackson, whose statue sits dead center on a horse that has been rearing in bronze for over 170 years.
Why this spot, specifically
The French Quarter is full of good backdrops, but Jackson Square has the one thing a lot of them lack: flat, open stone with room to move. Street performers have worked that plaza for a century for the same reason. Good acoustics off the cathedral facade, steady foot traffic, and enough space around the fountain to actually build a routine instead of apologizing your way through one.
It is the same instinct that pulled me into a freeze at the base of Christ the Redeemer in Rio a few years later. Give me a landmark with open ground around it and I will find a reason to drop into a six step.
If you go
Morning is the move. The square fills in fast once the day trip crowds arrive from the cruise terminal, and the light on the cathedral’s three spires is better before nine anyway. Grab a coffee and a beignet two blocks over, walk it off in the square, and if you happen to see a stranger break into a freeze by the fountain, that is just how it works down there now.
