"New Orleans "The Crescent City"" a New Orleans Travel Page by spartan

New Orleans is an archipelago of ethnicity, an eccentric outpost just outside America's Bible Belt. As Shannon Hoon of the rock group Blind Melon once said, "New Orleans is a city where one's willpower is tested daily."

More of a Caribbean port than a garden-variety southern city, New Orleans sits astride a deep bend in the Mississippi River about 90 miles (145 kilometers) upriver from the Gulf of Mexico. Only half its 364 square miles (941 square kilometers) is dry land.

The population of New Orleans is slightly less than 500,000 but its list of famous citizens is long, and includes musicians Mahalia Jackson, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, and the Neville Brothers; author Anne Rice; performer RuPaul; chef Paul Prudhomme; weight–loss guru Richard Simmons; filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola; and actor Helen Mirren.

Every year about 10 million people visit New Orleans, which bestows its charms on those willing to accept her contradictions. Founded in 1718, it has never completely abandoned its affection for Old World style, and is deeply infused with cultural richness.

New Orleans is noted for its architectural styles, a tantalizing combination of Old World romanticism and industrial revolution functionality. It includes brick and masonry cottages; West Indian planters' houses; columned antebellum mansions; Italianate townhouses; Spanish-inspired stucco shops festooned with wrought iron, living quarters above and hidden courtyards within; and working-class shotgun houses with decorative scroll work.

Looming above the historic neighborhoods are 20 or so office and hotel towers (51-story One Shell Square is the tallest) and the gigantic aluminum soufflé of the Louisiana Superdome, with the longest roof span in the world at 680 feet or 207 meters (<font color=red>courtesy of MSN Expedia</font>).