The Arkansaw traveler., 1883-08-11
QUEER, QUAINT NEW ORLEANS


 The correspondent who remarks that New Orleans is a queer city is telling his readers nothing new. It is queer, bu, why no one can exactly make out. l. is a great metropolis, and yet 1t lacks the wickedness of a third-rate city. It is cos- mopolisan and yet all elements are har- monious and each class bears with the idioms and legends and customs of the other without complaint. II has the best street car service and the poores, pave ments. It has the poorest hotels and the best restaurants. It has the incest su- burban resorts and the dirtiesi back streets. l, is an American city in which the American can step aside to ind nl- self in Italy or France l. has the poor es; groceries and the best markets. !. has fair health and the poeres, drainage on earth. instead of being on the Missis- sippi the city is below it, The dives O. New York and Chicago are all down stairs. Those of New Orleans are all UP stairs. These are no, all the queer things about the queer city. IL is a metropolis without dark side. Its wickedness has no brutality, its poverty no misery, and its charity is an overfiowing heatt
 Broadway is grand thoroughfare be- cause there are no parallel streets to ac- commodate a part of the traffic passing up and down New York. Canal street. New Orleans, is grand stree, because laid out as wide again as Broadway. kep, iii far better shape, and accommodating three times the tide of tratfic and yet without crowding or confusion. The cen ue of the street Is raised above the sides. and down along this earthern platform, as 1t were. run all the street car tracks. There may be a long line or two in the city which does not send its cars up and down Canal, but every important line centres here. A, one point on Canal one can strike the cars of all lines. the same as at the postofrice in New York. He can do more. He can take the steam cars on the narow-guage road for two of the pretties, suburban resorts Tn the world. The street would not Ii. any other city. Such thoroughfare in Chicago or Gin cinnah, or Brooklyn would make stran- ger wonder whether he was among Moors or Americans. but Canal stree, IS New Orleans and New Orleans IS Canal street. They are part and parcel oi each other
 Speak oi New Orleans and one calls up the legend |" Louisiana State Lo.- ,ery-M. A. Dauphin. New Orleans and the lottery business are jolnei in wedlock. Buying and selling ,icke:s are par of the daily business. Tobacco stores are opened and maintained, ap- parently, less for the sale of tobacco and cigars than for the sale of lottery tickets. They hang on strings in the ~indows, are scattered on the showcases and pinned on the walls, and people walk in and purchase as openly as a Desroiter buys groceries
 There is a legend to the effect that speculating in lottery tickets brings man to the poor-house. Le, man show you three or four tickets and you begin to feel sorry for his pale-faced wife who must go withou, shoes, and his innocent children, who must walk through the snows of nex, winter without shoes or stockings If there is anything so very lamentable in such investments one ought to be able to secure evidences h New Orleans. but looked in vain. Everybody. from the senior member Of the great wholesale dry goods house to the Italian peanut peddler on the leyee, buys lottery tickets. In some families q portion of the husbands earnings are regularly set aside to purchase certain number of tickets, and the mendican, who uses dollar given him in charity to purchase ticket feels that if he makes a hit, charity will no longer have to sup port him. While l could not find any body who had made big hit, neither could hear Of anybody who had been reduced 10 poverty or driven to intern peranoe or crime through losing wha, he had invested.
 One of the handsomest buildings in America is the new cotton exchange. The ceiling of the assembly room is deco rated with paintings and fresooing costing Tn the aggregate over sIo,ooo, ard the finish of the entire building is al once rich and substantial.
 In years gone by much annoyance was caused by claims for damages on cotton Shfnnei fr0rs ezr Orleans TEN Snf-9-ey