Four days in New Orleans: the least American city in America

The Quarter is about a dozen blocks by six, small enough that you will cross it by accident several times a day, and it is the whole of the first afternoon. Almost nothing standing in it is French. Two fires in the 1780s and 1790s took the town down to the ground, and what went up afterwards went up under Spanish building rules, which is why the balconies are wrought iron on brick rather than the wooden galleries the French had built.

Start at Jackson Square, because everything else on this day is within two hundred metres of it. It began as the parade ground of a garrison town, and it carries the name of the general who won the battle fought just downriver in 1815; he is in the middle of it on a rearing horse. On three sides there are painters, tarot readers and usually a brass band. On the fourth is the cathedral.

St Louis is the oldest Roman Catholic cathedral in the United States, plain inside by European standards and free to walk into between services. It takes twenty minutes. The two matching buildings flanking it were the Spanish colonial city hall and the priests' residence, and both are museums now.

Cross Decatur Street to Cafe du Monde, which has been selling coffee and beignets on that corner since the nineteenth century and has never sold much else. Then eat properly in the early evening, because the last thing tonight starts at a fixed time and standing in line for it is part of it.

Cross Rampart Street and you are out of the Quarter and into Tremé, which is where this day happens. It is one block from where you were standing yesterday and a different city.

St Louis Cemetery No 1 opened in 1789 and is the oldest surviving one in the city. The tombs stand above ground because the water table is barely a metre down, so the dead are laid in stone ovens that sit in the sun and are reused by the same family for generations. Marie Laveau, the voodoo practitioner whose reputation still runs the tourist trade, is entombed here. Access is now by licensed guide only, and tours almost all go in the morning, which is worth knowing before you turn up at the gate at two.

Then walk five minutes further into Tremé. Congo Square, inside what is now Armstrong Park, is the single most important patch of ground in American music: under French and Spanish rule, enslaved people were permitted to gather here on Sunday afternoons to trade, drum and dance, and the rhythms that survived that became jazz a century later. There is nothing much to look at. Stand there anyway.

In the evening go the other way, down to Frenchmen Street in the Marigny, which is what Bourbon Street was before it became a stag do. Four or five clubs in three blocks, cover charges of a few dollars or none, and a brass band on the corner outside.

Fifteen minutes upriver from the Quarter, the old cotton warehouses have become the museum district, and one of them is the reason a lot of people extend a New Orleans trip by a day.

The National WWII Museum started as a museum about D-Day, which was located here because Higgins Industries built the landing craft in this city, and it has since grown across several buildings into the best treatment of the war anywhere in the country. It is not a hall of tanks. The narrative campaigns in the Pacific and European pavilions are done as walk-through sequences with personal accounts attached, and people routinely spend five hours in it. Give it at least three, and buy the ticket ahead.

Come out and cross the road to the Ogden, which is the counterweight: Southern art across two centuries, in a building with a wooden staircase running up the middle, and quiet in a way the war museum is not.

Then walk two blocks to St Charles Avenue and get on the streetcar going away from town. This is the oldest street railway still working anywhere, the cars date from 1923, the windows go up because there is no air conditioning, and the route runs out past the mansions the Americans built after the Louisiana Purchase, at a polite distance from the Creole city, with live oaks meeting overhead the whole way. Ride it for twenty minutes or so and get off for a drink on a porch.

The last morning goes out along Esplanade or up the Canal streetcar to City Park, which is larger than Central Park and has stands of live oak in it that were mature trees when the city was founded.

The art museum sits at the head of the main avenue, its collection is strong on French and Latin American painting, and the sculpture garden behind it is free and spread through the trees along a lagoon. An hour in each is a good last morning, and the garden alone is worth the trip if the museum is shut.

Then get a coffee and something fried in sugar, which is the correct way to leave this city, and go to the airport. Allow forty minutes, and an hour if it is raining, which it will be.