Historic Hotel (No, Really)

As you might expect, a big part of running such an old, historic hotel is speaking to people about the multitude of fascinating things that have happened within these walls. "If walls could talk" is an expression that's found new meaning since I discovered this intriguing place. 

Many know the basics. Hotel Maison de Ville includes buildings that are some of the few of French architecture that survived the Fires of New Orleans in 1788; that's true. New Orleans is old, but most of the city was rebuilt in the late 18th century after a series of fires - and our cottages and carriage houses hold the honor of being some of the few (and when I say few, I mean less than half a dozen) buildings that were not rebuilt. Maison de Ville is, at it's heart, a phoenix that has risen from the ashes multiple times (like our beautiful city itself). 

And some know of our building's early inhabitant, Antoine Peychaud, who invented the now widely used Peychaud's Bitters and, later, the Sazerac, the world's first cocktail and now Louisiana's state cocktail. 

And of course, everyone knows about Tennessee Williams - but not everyone knows that he stayed with us before he bought his first home in the French Quarter (which was right across the street - he didn't go far!). In fact, we named a Suite after him - the very rooms in which Williams wrote the manuscript that became A Streetcar Named Desire. 

To come to the Maison de Ville - and by extension, New Orleans herself - has and will always be to take a walk through history, but it's not always in the most obvious sense. Sure, there are the greats, the stories told over and over again, but I prefer the smaller ways that Maison de Ville has so deeply entrenched itself in the psyche of America and the world. Every day, we find our hotel cropping up in places we didn't possibly know about - books set partly in our famous courtyard; old paintings of our fountain. The other day, I picked up a book about New Orleans' fine dining, and on the inside cover was a picture of our well-loved Bistro. I can't help but find it fascinating, that our name - and our charm - is woven so deeply into the history of New Orleans and of the United States that we are constantly finding mentions of it when we least expect it.

Today I ran across a book originally in French called American Hotel Stories. And how could I resist when the inside cover was a charming, hand-drawn map of the Unites States, with a wonderful little red building inked over where New Orleans would be, our name scrawled next to it? I flipped through, and lo and behold, there was a now very familiar image of our courtyard in the evening, with - of course - "Tennessee Williams" beneath. 

I can't help but be tickled when I open these huge, heavy books to find gigantic glossy images of the place where I spend  my days. I forget, sometimes, all the things this hotel has seen. It's high time I remembered. 

Click through for the article text.

I don't know of any city that is more bewitching than New Orleans, which is hardly surprising since voodoo practice is inextricably linked with its history. The streets are still filled with the rhythm of the blues sung by slaves on the plantations. The churches and chapels swell with full-throated gospel singing. With its matchless heritage - Creole and Cajun, Satchmo and swing, Jean Lafitte the buccaneer and Tennessee Williams and his streetcar - this is a city that is able to endure the worst, live through the darkest hours, and still remain as captivating and irresistible as it ever was. 

So Tennessee Williams must have though, too, as he downed one Sazerac - the cocktail of choice here - after another in his room at the Hotel Maison de Ville. It was 1939, and he had just turned his back on his puritanical family in order to live a nomadic life in the heart of the French Quarter. Moving from hotel to apartment and back to hotel, as doors opened and closed again, he changed hotel rooms as often as he changed partners. His hotel rooms spanned the globe, a heteroclite collection that formed the central thread to a life that would reach its dramatic end in a hotel room (where else?) in New York. In New Orleans, the French Quarter - and Toulouse Street in particular - was to offer him a rich and inexhaustible source of observation and inspiration. His memories of people he met in New Orleans would inspire the characters in his plays, and many years later he made a pilgrimage back here. He kept his apartment close to the hotel to the end of his life. 

His room at the Hotel Maison de Ville, Room 9, opens onto a private patio surrounded by tropical plants and flowers. This is where he wrote, downing Sazeracs all the while, preferably in the quiet atmosphere of the patio - sheltering, tranquil, bohemian. It was in this room, which now bears his name, that he finished writing A Streetcar Named Desire. Did he rise at dawn to write here, as he did when he lived in another hotel room in Tangiers? Did he go and read the newspapers on nearby Bourbon Street, or did he follow his old habits and go to the corner café? Did he spend his afternoons strolling the French Quarter and drinking with friends and acquaintances? More than likely he did, since he was a regular at the Hotel Monteleone's Carousel Bar - along with other distinguished barflies, including Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. 

A true Southern establishment, imbued with poetry and Creole charm, the Hotel Maison de Ville has extended hospitality to travelers for generations, and is reputed to be haunted by the spirits of some of those who have passed through during its two-hundred-plus years of history, including the slaves who used to have quarters here. Discreet and private, it is burnished and worn with a patina of age that makes it even more moving. 

Many of the rooms are arranged around the cool courtyard with its fountain. Then there are separate cottages, an unexpected pool - the oldest in the French Quarter - and a bistro serving frogs' legs, just like in Paris. As always in New Orleans, there is a legend for every room. One inspired the naturalist John James Audubon, who painted many of his Birds of America here. Another received Elizabeth Taylor. Another is haunted, so they say. And the hotel boasts several ghosts who are "regulars," eternal guests forever in residence. 

Affecting and with more than a touch of mystery about it, this is a hotel that breathes authenticity and character. As you walk out onto Toulouse Street after spending a little time here, you feel that you are already part of the city - in a way. I can see it all now: the narrow streets, the magnificent courtyards glimpsed through half-open carriage entrances. I can still smell the aromas of Creole cooking, of the vegetation in the heavy, humid hothouse atmosphere, of Café Brûlot with its spices flamed in rum. And in the midst of it all, barely discernible, just a hint of the wicked absinthe notes of a perfectly chilled glass of Sazerac.