Here is where New Orleans was founded nearly 300 years ago, in a canebrake at a bend in the Mississippi. Giving French sentries a view upriver and down, the spot was also the head of an Indian portage trail leading to Bayou St. John, a stream that afforded easier passage through the difficult thickets and bogs separating the colony from Lake Pontchartrain.

At the foot of Jackson Square, the Mississippi elbows north, for 2.5 miles turning its east bank into its westernmost shore. Consequently, the square faces southeast, disorienting newcomers by seeming in conflict with a river known for flowing south. Thus New Orleanians give direction relative to the river’s flow, creating places like Uptown and the Lower French Quarter.

The square retains a nineteenth century European formality. Its ambience, however, is casual. You will see lunchtime readers, mothers and children, musicians, jugglers, artists, fortune-tellers, and the never ending traffic of camera-toting tourists.