A Trash Panic Postcard: 72 hours in New Orleans
Things I saw, learned, bought, tasted—and what sparked new search terms for vintage and secondhand gems
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I was often met with overly dramatic looks of shock and awe when friends and acquaintances found out that in all my thirty-something years, I’d never set foot in the whimsically-haunted-chaotically-wonderful-jazz-soaked-fever-dream that is New Orleans.
“But it’s such a ‘Glenn’ city!” they would say.
Whatever that means!
Turns out, they were very, very right.
It was perhaps a slight miracle that this trip came to fruition as swiftly as it did. One night, in a haze of dirty martinis and a discussion about how I had never been to the Big Easy, my best friend and I decided right then and there it was time to rectify the situation. No second thoughts, no excuses — flights booked on the spot.
I did end up changing my flight to get in the evening before her (and our other close friend) so I could meet up with my vintage dealing friends who own a shop in the French Quarter. (more on that in a moment)
Little did I know that bumping my flight to the afternoon before would earn me my official “You’re a Midwesterner” badge of honor - having a real life run-in with Bon Iver at the Minneapolis airport. I’d heard the legends and tales, now it was my turn.
The short story is that we ended up sitting across the aisle from one another on the plane and I spent about 149 minutes of the 150 minute flight furiously texting one of my bffs on if and what I should say to him — he had headphones in, which we determined was the universal sign for “leave me alone” but we settled on congratulating him on his album if the opportunity presented itself. But with the blink of an eye and trying to wrestle my bag out of the overhead bin, he was gone.
The long story is that a day or two later, we came back to our hotel for afternoon chill time before dinner and I decided to go on an adventure to the common area to refill my water bottle. There, sitting at a table with two friends, was Justin Vernon. Turns out he was not only staying at our hotel, but was in the room only three doors down from us. With the encouragement and suave of my two friends, I managed to choke out what I hope did not sound like a pre-rehearsed sentence, which led to a decently smooth and charming five minute conversation. Or so I hear; I mentally blacked out about three sentences in after he smiled and complimented my name — classic.
So if his next hit single is about a really cool girl with a really cool name wearing a really cool horse sweater *ahem* 💅
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Perhaps it’s just me, but I feel I am a little disenchanted with what has become of seemingly every travel guide and trip recap on the internet these days. The expectation that only the coolest, hippest hard-to-get-a-reservation places should be frequented and only the most effortless, nonchalant candid photos should be snapped in front of sweeping picturesque landscapes. mom, come pick me up — there’s a wallpapered-neon-sign-Instagram-photo-moment at the bar!
If that is what you are looking for, I fear this is not that. My crippling body dysmorphia (I’m working on it!) mixed with my love of touristy kitsch means this is filled with an abundance of sightseeing pictures and an obvious lack of chic selfies and twirly whirly outfit shots. Maybe one day I’ll get there!! This dispatch is more a reflection of the privilege it is to explore new places, examine the lives of the people that live within them, and discover what pieces of a place stick when you go back home and resume normal life.
We’re all craving maximalist, curated, overflowing shelves crowded with books and art and somehow expect that lifestyle to arrive in two Amazon Prime business days. But all those inspiration pictures you’re saving on Pinterest are from people who took the time to explore the place and collect the thing over years and years and years! They bought new things and old things and mixed them together in a slow, continuous ritual.
Hopefully this inspires you to do the same.
The French Quarter
For my first evening in town, my dear friends Megan and Chris agreed to pick me up from my hotel and play Hip Local Tour Guides for the evening. Though not technically natives, they have called the French Quarter home for over a decade and are deeply involved with contributing to the community as active residents, parents, and the shopkeepers who own the vintage stores Vice + Graft and Swamp Rags.
As we wandered up and down each street, I got an unfiltered glimpse of nighttime life in the Quarter and the wonderfully wacky characters who make up the vibrant, quirky tapestry of New Orleans’ culture. I was impressed by how often we stopped to say hello to people and how often people came up to say hello to them. It’s like participating in your local community is important, or something.
New Orleans is famous for a thousand reasons, and I think most people assume they already know them. The beads and booze-soaked streets of Mardi Gras. A haunted, hazy jazz melody floating from street to street. Iron-laced balconies filled with overflowing foliage. An abundance of rich flavors born out of colonization and resilience on every corner. But you don’t really get it until you’re walking it, tasting it, (and sweating through it) under the flickering shadowy light of a street side oil lamp.
Hours of good food, good drinks, good conversation and suddenly the clock had struck midnight and I hadn’t taken more than three photos to document the day. Here is one of them ^^^ (lol)
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I met up with my girlfriends the following morning and dove into the itinerary we had loosely planned the months leading up to this trip. There is obviously no shortage of things to do and this trip just scratched the teeny tiny surface of all the many activities and history New Orleans has to offer.
I will try my very hardest to be brief — here’s everything we got into!
Eat + Drink
The Will & The Way
My first pit stop with Megan and Chris that really set the tone for the evening — good snacks, solid cocktails, in a lively but not too overwhelming atmosphereManolito
Tiki-esque drinks and crispy chickpeas that I have thought about once a week since being back — a little spicy, a little citrusy and very, very delicious. The space was cozy and tucked away, the fragrant blooming jasmine illuminated by the courtyard twinkling lights really completed the dream sequence.Arnaud’s
The first stop after meeting up with my gal pals! We did the jazz brunch and while it felt a little like being in Disneyland, it was absolutely worth it. Delicious food, a live jazz trio, and incredible people watching (lots of fancy southern ladies in their finest of finery)The New Orleans Vampire Cafe
”It’s a tourist trap” well, babe, I’m a tourist!! We made a stop here to pick up some blood bags (sangria) to walk around the Quarter with and proceeded to have the wildest sugar high for the following few hours. Maybe that’s how vampires feel after a good feed…Sylvain
Vibes on vibes on vibes - A+ for the lit by tiny tea lights ambience, A for food. I got the bolognese and cried that I couldn’t finish it all because I really, really, really wanted to.Antoine’s Hermes Bar
We stopped here after a guided tour (more on that below) when we realized we were absolutely starving. I inhaled a burger and two Hemingway Daiquiris and for the first time ever, was okay with a dude (our server) calling me baby. It just sounds so tender in that sweet southern drawl…Jewel of the South
This meal has landed firmly in my Top 10 Meals of All Time. Everything we ate was interesting, impeccably crafted and made us all branch out beyond our usual taste preferences. Highlights included: hamachi tartare, crawfish raviolo, and a crazy meringue dessert that melted in our mouths. The cocktails here are award winning (rightfully so) and the service was friendly and welcoming. Go here!!Ayu Bakehouse
+10 points for having flavorful cold brew that did not make me want to immediately shit my pants +100 points for having the best oatmeal cookie I’ve ever had in my life! (I ordered it three days in a row, no regrets)The Séance Lounge at Muriel’s
We stopped here for a little cocktail break once our feet started to hurt. Sad to report I did not see Pierre Antoine Lepardi Jourdan’s ghost, though I did enjoy seeing the table they have set for him with offerings to keep him from smashing all their glassware at night.The Columns Bar
This was a fun hotel to roam through during our day in the Garden District. The rooms look insane (in a good way) and I would definitely consider staying here for a night or two on another adventure.Cafe Beignet
No Du Monde for me this time, but this did the trick!The Elysian Bar
We stayed at Peter and Paul and had a few meals here. It was hotel pricy but the food was great and vibes were truly 10/10.
Shop
Vice + Graft
Well, duh. Tell them I sent you!Century Girl Vintage
From beaded couture to rare 90s runway finds, they have a really solid collection of flouncy feminine finds and is definitely worth the journey over from the Quarter.Dark Matter Oddities Shop
They sell new reproductions of old 1940s Halloween decorations and I left with one of every single style they offer - I have a weakness for vintage Halloween kitsch, I can’t help it.Magazine Antique Mall
A very fun, very large space to roam around and dig for treasure. Some of the pricing is a little touristy, but there’s a decent selection of antiques to pick through.
I didn’t actually end up buying anything of note on this trip, which I am totally okay with. I collected lots of postcards, ephemera, and matchbooks, which satisfied my craving to leave with things I liked but didn’t love. It’s okay to just window shop!
Megan and Chris gifted me two really special books about Storyville, the short lived red light district in New Orleans and I plan on making some prints from the photos (like the one above) and hanging them in one of my bathrooms.
The Gallier House
There are about a million different tours you can take on various topics relating to New Orleans while you visit. Some of them are brilliant, eye-opening and genuinely informative and some of them, well, you probably could have just Googled it yourself.
Luckily, the Gallier House tour was not only the former of those options, but a personal highlight of the weekend.
As a lover of all things spooky, I was initially drawn to tour the residence because it serves as the fictional home of world-famous queer vampires Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac in the new TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire. In my opinion, it’s the best version of the story to come to life — especially when it comes to the costuming and set design. I was fascinated to learn that the production team built a soundstage replicating the exact layout and dimensions of the Gallier House interior, capturing its general essence right down to the tiniest details.
Located in the heart of the French Quarter, the Gallier House is a living, breathing time capsule of what daily life looked like for a wealthy family in 1857. Designed by James Gallier Jr. himself, a top architect in New Orleans at the time, the home is an eclectic mix of traditional European and Creole style and possesses surprisingly modern features like indoor plumbing (even the toilet bowl was tiled and very fancy) and gas lighting.
Fully restored in the 1970s, everything in the home is accurate to how it would have been when the Galliers resided there. Our tour guide was incredibly knowledgable about every element of every room and was so patient with me asking a million questions about everything. I had no idea how many traditions and rituals surrounded the changing of the seasons — wall to wall carpets removed every! summer! and replaced with woven mats! Upholstered furniture covered with canvas drop cloths! Paintings covered or fully removed and stored for summer so they didn’t mildew!
It made me think a lot about how a living space is just that — living! Life moves much faster than it did in the 1800s, but it was a nice reminder of what a privilege it is to keep and care for a home. I won’t be removing my carpet every summer but the sentiment leaves a lot to ponder.
The Gallier property has slave quarters and the last half of the tour was profoundly informative about the lives of the enslaved people who worked and ran most of the daily ongoings on the land. It was definitely the portion of the tour where the most questions were asked, a not-so-subtle reminder that our high school history books taught us very little about the truth of enslavement and the white supremacy our nation was built upon (and continues to benefit/thrive from.) It was a strong nudge to revisit some of the books I have sitting in a “to be read” pile that I’ve had the privilege to continue to push aside. (One of which I have listed below.)
If you find yourself looking for an activity to do in the Quarter, I can’t recommend this tour enough.
The Garden District
On our last full day we took a car over to the Garden District with no true destination in sight and wandered around aimlessly, oogling at every house. (I had originally hoped to do a tour of one of the cemeteries, Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, but it is currently closed for maintenance. This will definitely be a priority for my next trip because I love a spooky kind of history lesson and New Orleans has a lot to offer in this category.)
Every house has so much character and these tiny tiny tiny details that make them completely unique and special to the one beside it. I think I said the phrase “they just don’t make them like they used to” about a thousand times. I am also certain about 75% of the neighborhood has footage on their doorbell cameras of me apologizing while standing outside their front gate snapping a thousand photos of wrought iron fences and overflowing foliage and interesting paint combinations. I would highly recommend this approach to the Garden District, though I hear there are some good walking tours if you want to see all the homes featured in films or owned by famous people.
This day was particularly inspiring for me! It gave me the push I needed to come home and begin to tackle our overgrown, very neglected front yard that has been ignored for years by previous owners. This dispatch is already *way* too long (have I lost you?) but it did have me digging on eBay and Craigslist for old wrought iron planter boxes and stone vessels and old patio furniture and lots of twinkly lights. I needed to step outside of my bubble to find the motivation and clarity of vision, the ultimate privilege that comes with being able to travel and explore new places.
I was surprised and delighted to see that many of the homes have their porch ceilings painted in Haint Blue. A tradition rooted in Southern folklore and the spiritual beliefs of the Gullah Geechee, people often painted their porch ceilings, doors, and window frames a soft blue-green color that was believed to ward off “haints,” or restless spirits, by mimicking water, which they couldn’t cross.
If you’re curious, a deep dive in a few subreddits tells me that most people agree that Sherwin William’s “Atmospheric” is the closest paint color to a “true” Haint Blue.
Whether it’s aging or just living in the age of technology, I’ve noticed a decline in how actively I learn and retain new information (and yet, somehow, I still know all the words to Linkin Park’s “In the End”). These are some secondhand books I have in my shopping cart in hopes of having this knowledge stick and the inspiration continue to flow:
Hotel Peter and Paul
After drooling over photos on Instagram for years, I finally got to stay in an Ash hotel! Tucked away in the Marigny neighborhood, Hotel Peter and Paul is perfect walking distance to the Quarter and a quiet retreat from all the lively, festive chaos.
Once a 19th-century Catholic church complex, it’s now a beautifully, impeccably restored boutique hotel with 71 rooms, thanks to a painstakingly detailed four-year renovation. The property includes a church, schoolhouse, rectory, and convent, all brought back to life through a delicate mixture of antiques that make it feel a little french countryside, a little like church on Sunday (minus the guilt.)
Everything about this space was special, including all the staff. I would not hesitant to stay here again and look forward to finding my way to other Ash hotels in the future.
It left me wishing I had a summer country farmhouse that felt a little haunted, which eventually led me down a rabbit hole of various search terms and keywords on eBay for furnishing my fantasy vacation home. If you’ve made it this far, here’s your reward for sticking with me! Design your own haunted hideaway (and invite me for tea!)
Some keywords to play around with: antique pine wood, primitive wood, american folk art, tramp art, vintage cherub, gingham, vintage ralph lauren bedding, antique french textiles, vintage americana, french provincial, french toleware, wrought iron, cast iron, crocheted lace, vintage farmhouse
If you make a purchase through a link, I may earn a small commission, which I appreciate as it helps fund this space ✨
(working clockwise-ish, starting top left)
antique french embroidered valance with tassels ($299, purchase on eBay)
*so* many gorgeous and delectable antique french textiles floating around eBay — pricy but the real deal! I would highly recommend this sellerwrought iron candle chandelier ($325, purchase on eBay)
another option would be hanging this nice and low from a very tall tree branch in your garden, the dreamiest evening ambiancegreen toleware table lamp ($60, purchase on eBay)
convex frame religious virgin mary art ($99.95, purchase on eBay)
despite my deep, deep religious trauma, there’s something gothically chic about cool old church artornate gold wall mirror ($193)
french country walnut cane king bed frame ($749, purchase on eBay)
would it be considered a sin to paint this black? probably, but i still secretly would….floral lace curtain ($19.99, purchase on eBay)
ash hotels body wash and haircare ($39+)
i rarely use the products the hotel provides but anything at an ash hotel is an exception — the scent was so divineset of rattan mirrors ($1050, purchase on eBay)
we have no mirrors in our primary bath (long story lol) and i won’t lie, these are tempting…cast iron drawer pulls (set of 8, $24.99, purchase on eBay)
revamp an old dresser or cabinet with these!spanish style wood candle wall sconce ($47, purchase on eBay)
this is so so so coolset of round vintage needlepoint pillows ($49.99, purchase on eBay)
small gingham clip on lampshade ($14, purchase on eBay)
for a tiny little rescued thrifted lamp?wood cherub shelf ($100, purchase on eBay)
vintage ralph lauren gingham pillow case set ($44.99, purchase on eBay)
vintage ralph lauren home stuff is all over eBay and some of it is very, very good
Well, there you have it! You did it! You made it to the end!
Tell me your (kindly worded) thoughts on if you want to see more things like this in the future!
Thank you for being here! I’ll be back in your inbox this weekend with a Dump!
Until then,
xo,
G
You magnificent bastard, you did it. This was everything I wanted and more. So many good places, so many good photos, so much good history. Wow. The haint blue was one of my favorite parts of wandering the New Orleans streets - I love seeing the history stay alive. Also "A home fit for the most toxic vampire couple to ever immortally live." Yes, so much yes to this. Obsessed with everything you do thank you for this treat
I love a good travel despatch. Read every word and felt like I was there, and it feels like you didn't try and do too much either, which is my pitfall when I travel. I adore house tours and hope I'll see Gallier House for myself some day.