New Orleans part 11.

 Tuesday Oct 3. Tomorrow we fly home. How did the week go so fast? 

We had no plans for the entire day, until the jazz cruise this evening, so we decided to utilize the last of the Hop-On Hop-Off pass and go to the French Market and Jackson Square. We walked over to our cafe where our server was standing outside smoking some weed with a friend and hollered “Two orders of toast, with a side of peanut butter!” (As that’s what we had every single day) It will be sad to go home and have to make my own toast. 

Anyhow, we ate our toast and headed over to Canal St to hop on the Hop-On and head over to the market. 

Same of the interesting things that you see on the tour are a few famous people’s homes, including Sandra Bullock’s, Beyoncé’s, Anne Rice’s, and one of the Manning’s…Eli? Peyton? Parent? I’m not sure, and a lot of other football player’s places, but I don’t follow the game, so the names meant nothing. Neither did seeing the Superdome excite me, other than remembering how so many people had to stay there during Katrina.

I felt obliged to snap a picture. 

This place had a sort of interesting story behind it:

It’s called The Plaza Tower and was started to be built in 1964, but the owner quickly ran out of money. It was eventually finished in 1969 for a cost of $18 million, and was opened for office and residential use. However, it had to be abandoned in 2002 due to asbestos and toxic black mold as well as elevators that wouldn’t function properly and constant leaks.

It was purchased in 2011 for $250,000 and the new owner planned to renovate/fix it up, until a panel blew out of an upper floor and hit a passing cyclist (which of course then involved a massive lawsuit) and the roads around it had to be closed (for fear of further falling debris)

In 2021 the owner put a massive net around the top (I think 5 floors), which is the weird black shape that you can see. It’s become an expensive albatross that no one knows what to do with.

Another interesting thing we noticed were the huge amounts of beads in trees. During Mardi Gras when beads and other goodies are thrown from parade floats by the hundreds of thousands, many get caught up in tree branches, and end up being left behind. I guess it could be considered eco-unfriendly, but I personally think they look festive and very suitable to the atmosphere of New Orleans! The city and homeowners just leave them, so I guess they think the same as I do.

By now the bus is almost at the WW2 museum stop, and it’s still early in the day, so I made the quick decision for us to hop off the Hop-On and check it out. 

Let me tell you. Everyone who told me to go was 100% correct. It was just incredible. I’ll likely go on a bit long here, it was that amazing. (Not that I ever am at a loss for writing words anyhow.)

After you purchase your tickets you get a dog tag (not a real one, more like a hotel room key) but it has “your” soldier’s information on it, and you can scan it in various places throughout the museum and follow your soldier’s journey through war. The soldiers are genuine men and women whose lives you can follow. 

My fellow was Roy Rickerson, and he did some amazing things during the war. He was born in 1918 in Louisiana and died at the age of 82, in the same parish he was born in. His team, named “Louise” (maybe for Louisiana?) was  responsible for rescuing 21 downed Allied airmen, killing 461 enemy soldiers, wounding 467 and capturing more than 4,000. His whole story was fascinating and made the experience much more personal and emotional. 

Anyhow. After you get your dog tag, you go to the depot and get on a train, which was an original troop car, and while it didn’t really go anywhere, you felt like it did as it bounced and shook, and a film strip outside the windows showed the countryside passing by. Very cool.

When you arrive, there are retired servicemen and women who help you decide where to go, I think a lot of your choice is time-dependant, I mean this place is HUGE, multiple levels, a movie theatre, 5 pavilions; the entire complex takes up 6 acres in downtown New Orleans. 

There are arrows on the floor that you follow, that in turn follow the course of the war. There are nooks and crannies everywhere with short videos, artifacts and a lot of immersive exhibits as well. I can’t even explain how absolutely fantastic it was. And other than the faint sounds of the videos, it was completely silent. There are signs asking for silence throughout. 

Most of the small rooms with videos were empty, but there were occasionally older men in uniform just sitting there, staring at the screen, and some younger men with service dogs as well.  It sort of broke me.

The various battles each had an area that was designed to give a sense of what it was like.

The above picture shows the amount of soldiers each country had at one point. Each of those little men is equivalent to 3,000 servicemen! I had no idea that the Germans and Japanese had so many, compared to the USA.

One area had an average American home of that time, you could walk through the house and almost feel like you lived there. 

Above and below pictures are in the entrance hall.

Above is the hall for Guadalcanal and below is a bombed bunker.

Below, all the videos were only 4 or 5 minutes long, and all were extremely informative and interesting.

Each room had the short film, then an immersive area, then displays.

The only room that was different and that we didn’t linger in was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was just one large, dark hall, with a screen showing the horrible events of those days. Just black and white clips of children burned and crying, people in shock, the empty cities, the devastation. It was really emotional. I’m not sure what music was playing ever so faintly in the background, but it tugged the heartstrings for sure. 

Anyhow. There was so much more to see, areas of the Japanese internment, Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and other atrocities. Of course the ending areas showed the celebrations and joy at the end of the war, but the earlier areas were quite a hard thing to see, in many ways, but I do think everyone should go, if possible. I’m so glad we went. 

We were a little bit quiet as we got back on our Hop-On bus and continued on to The French Market and Jackson Square.