And the people living here are just as interesting as the buildings. New Orleanians are always ready to tell you their life story, and it's intimately tied into the buildings. It's both real history and made up history. You get it from these carriage drivers who make up their own stories about the city. Everybody feels compelled to make up history because the ruling reality here is amnesia.
Nobody remembers anything really.
It's the magical realist metropolis par excellence. There are a few writers who've touched on it. Quite a few use New Orleans as the background for their crime stories. Very few use the city as a character. That doesn't give the city so much.