The view is great. From the 25th-floor window you look down Canal Street to the bend, or "crescent", on the Mississippi on which New Orleans grew up. The French began it in 1718; the Spanish got a present of it 44 years later; Napoleon took it back in 1803 and 20 days later France sold it to the United States as part of the $15 million "Louisiana Purchase".
So that is why there is a French Quarter on one side of Canal Street but with beautiful Spanish buildings. The Creoles who lived there have now mostly died out to be replaced by Italians. But the Cajun descendants of French Canadian settlers still flourish outside the city.
On the other side of Canal Street, the street cars clang along St Charles Avenue past the elegant Garden District where the American arrivals in the 19th century settled. But the streetcar named Desire which Tennessee Williams used when he lived in New Orleans does not run any more. His commuting paid off in a play and then a film with Marlon Brando in a sweatshirt grunting at Vivien Leigh.
If the puritanical British had won the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 they probably would have cleaned up the quarter or burned it down. Fortunately there was a stout Ulster Protestant to thwart them.
Andrew Jackson's parents came from Carrickfergus and later settled in Tennessee (that name again) where he was born. At 14 he fought the British in the American Revolution. No better man to come down the Mississippi with his militia when the British reappeared in the forgotten war against the US of 1812 and got within nine miles of New Orleans.
Jackson was facing another Irishman, Maj Gen Sir Edward Pakenham from Castlepollard, and inflicted the biggest rout in the history of the British army. The 5,000 Americans, many of them untrained militia, in two hours defeated 10,000 Redcoats fresh from triumphs under Wellington in Spain.
British casualties numbered more than 2,000; American casualties 13. Poor Pakenham was shipped back to his mother pickled in rum as was the custom of the day, having been killed in the battle. Jackson became the greatest American hero and 13 years later was elected the seventh president of the US.
That's enough history. What about Voodoo, Cities of the Dead, jazz, jambalaya and Cajun spices?
Voodoo is not the hit it was when the Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau, presided over "hellish orgies" and visiting Englishmen were appalled by the frenzied dancing of the black slaves in Congo Square on their day off. Yes, slaves did get a day off from the more laid back Louisiana plantation owners and Creole merchants.
Marie used to dance on Midsummer's Eve with her 20-foot snake Zombi, behead live roosters, drink their blood and all that.
She died in 1891 and I visited her tomb in St Louis Number One cemetery. You have to be buried in a tomb in below sea level New Orleans or you float quickly to the surface. Those who saw the film, Easy Rider, might remember Peter Fonda cavorting around Marie's tomb on an acid trip.
I also called on Priestess Miriam Chamani in her Voodoo Spiritual Temple opposite Louis Armstrong Park. She was conducting a Voodoo wedding ceremony but was willing to allow an Irish visitor squat on the floor. On Hallowe'en she had commemorated the Royal Marriage of the Dead between Baron Samedi and Manman Brigitte.
The wedding I attended had a lot of paperwork and affixing of Voodoo seals. The bride had problems with her contact lens. In the end we all got Italian sparkling wine and Miriam giggled as she explained her kind of Voodoo which has Catholic elements. The altar devoted to her "invisible snake" Dombo - there is a picture of her with the snake around her neck when it was visible - has a Christian counterpart in the form of St Patrick because he had no time for snakes.
This Voodoo is far from the orgiastic rites of Congo Square and is primly described as "the infusion of traditional African beliefs with Catholicism". The Voodoo Realist Newsletter welcomes advertisements and Miriam is also on the World Wide Web - http://gnofn.org/voodoo.
It's not the same as the old days when, on St John's Eve 1806, a local newspaper reported that a white man found "his daughter in a thin nightgown, dancing with a hundred halfnaked blacks . . . in a room crawling with serpents and frogs she wanted to get her lover back."
Coming out of the Voodoo wedding I was in time to see an estimated 6,000 "mostly gay men" pouring into Circus Eroticus, the Hallowe'en fundraiser for Project Lazarus, a hospice for AIDS patients. The local Times-Picayune predicted that the gays would be "dressed in costumes ranging from outrageously extravagant to shockingly skimpy".
I can report that that was an extravagant understatement. New Orleans is cashing in on a lucrative gay tourist market between Circus Eroticus and the Southern Decadence weekend which attracted 50,000 visitors on Labour Day last September.
But it was no circus for the Irish who arrived in large numbers in New Orleans in the last century. They dug the New Basin Canal linking the city with Lake Pontchartrain, perished in their thousands from yellow fever and malaria and were buried along its banks. Slaves were regarded as too valuable to do such dangerous work.
The fate of the Irish is preserved in a ballad which ended:
Ten thousand Micks, they swing their picks to dig the New Canal.
But the choleray was stronger 'n they,
An' twice it killed them awl.
It took eight years to finish the canal and 100 years later the city voted to fill it in. The luck of the Irish.