Edmund White's New Orleans — cntraveller.com

The American confessional author and essayist, best known for his semi-autobiographical 'A Boy's Own Story', is entranced by Louisiana's most colourful city The formula for a beautiful town in the States is that it must have been rich when it was built, and then it must have fallen into poverty during the ugly years of so-called 'modernisation' (the 1950s and the 1960s), and finally it should have been rediscovered in the last 20 or 30 years by wealthy Americans and foreigners searching for authenticity and a period look. That formula explains the preserved beauty of Nantucket, Savannah, Charlestown and New Orleans, the most charming cities in America. They were built by rich whalers (Nantucket), slave-owning cotton merchants (Charleston), silk and indigo (Savannah), slave trade and Mississippi shipping (New Orleans), and once these industries declined the cities fell into benign neglect, only to be revived by a recent careful generation of preservationists.

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