New Orleans

**New Orleans** is a real-life American city in Louisiana.

#### New Orleans Square

New Orleans Square is a neighbourhood in the French Quarters overlooking the Mississippi River which was built around the intersections of *Royal Street*, *Esplanade Street*, *Orleans Street*, and *Front Street*. It held many stately shops, restaurants and estates along with a station for the Disneyland Railroad.

* **Blue Bayou Restaurant**: The Blue Bayou Restaurant was a stately restaurant with a plaza located along the sereneBlue Bayou outside of New Orleans Square.
* **Café Orléans**:
* **Cemetery**: This was a burial-ground located behind the Haunted Mansion and which hosted countless of its spirits, effectively serving as an extension of the house itself. It has several names in spin-off materials including the Whispering Glade Cemetery and Eternal Grace Cemetery.
* **Club 33**: This is a highly exclusive club for the elite located within New Orleans Square.
* **Cristal d'Orléans**:
* **Disneyland Railroad Station**: This was a station for the Disneyland Railroad, a transit system which also notably passed through Rainbow Ridge, made stops in Thunder Mesa, and Tomorrowland to name a few.
* **French Market**:
* **Haunted Mansion**: The Haunted Mansion (also known by names such as Gracey Manor) is a haunted antebellum estate overlooking the Mississippi River. It has a long and bloody past while also playing host to 999 spirits from all over the world.
* **La Bat en Rouge**: La Bat en Rouge (French: The bat in red) was a clothing/apparel store which had a name playing on the Louisiana city, "Baton Rouge".
* **La Mascarade d'Orléans**:
* **Mlle. Antoinette's Parfumerie**:
* **Pieces of Eight**: This was a shop seemingly specializing in the sales of items pertaining to piracy. Amongst it's paraphernalia was a voodoo-doll of Jack Sparrow, a piratical fortune-teller named Fortune Red, several portraits of golden-age pirates, and a chandelier resembling the pet monkey, "Jack" of Captain Hector Barbossa.
* **Port Royal Curios & Curiosities**: This was a shop which apparently specialized in selling objects aligned with the occult and arcane. Several of its artifacts held connections to the Haunted Mansion, denizens of Halloween Town, and famous villains.
* **Royal Street Gallery**: The Royal Street Gallery was an estate that served as an art-gallery. On the first level it displayed artwork of famous pirates of the Caribbean and an ornate fountain with moulds of mermaids and the skull of the undead Captain X. It's second floor held a more multi-purpose art-gallery referred to as the Disney Gallery.
* **Royal Street Veranda**:

#### Water-bodies

* **Blue Bayou**: The Blue Bayou is a wetland in the Louisiana parish named for its serenity. It was home to many people who lived in shacks and house-boats. It was home to many alligators, water-fowl and fireflies.
	+ **Blue Bayou Restaurant**: The Blue Bayou Restaurant was a stately restaurant of New Orleans Square with a plaza located along the bayou.
	+ **Canal**: The brick canal within the Blue Bayou held the skeletal remains of the undead pirate, "Captain X". In addition to this was a passage-way which with blended with Captain X's supernatural powers, created a waterfall portal to Dead Man's Cove on the cursed Caribbean island of Isla Tesoro.
	+ **Joe's shack**: This shack was a shack along the bayou which was home to river-marker and bait-seller Beacon Joe and another unidentified individual.
	+ **Laffite's Landing**: Laffite's landing is a riverboat landing located along the Blue Bayou and behind the Royal Street Gallery of New Orleans Square. It held and launched riverboats for regular passage along the Blue Bayou's waters. The landing was named for early 19th century pirate *Jean Lafitte* who along with having defended New Orleans in the Battle of 1815, was known to use bayou landings for his smuggling operation to bring contraband from the Caribbean into the city from the pirate-haven of Baratia Bay.
* **The Bayou of New Orleans**:
	+ **Mama Odie's Tree**:
* **Mississippi River**: The Mississippi River passes through New Orleans and along New Orleans Square. It is frequented by the *Sailing Ship Columbia* and the *Mark Twain Riverboat* while also being believed to hide catacombs which were used by the smuggler Jean Lafitte. Lafitte himself had a base on the Mississippi upriver of New Orleans and out of Louisiana on Jackson Island, Missouri.

## History

The city of New Orleans was founded under the name of **La** **Nouvelle-Orléans** in by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville in 1718 and was built on a delta land of the Mississippi River known to Chocktaw Indigenous as **Balbancha**. The city was part of the French Empire's establishments in North America though later in 1718, Nouvelle Orléans was sold to the Spanish empire to keep it from the hands of their mutual enemies, the British Empire. In 1723, the city became Louisiana's capital though still part of the Spanish empire with spaniard governance making connections between Louisiana and Cuba for trade.

From 1755 to 1764, New Orleans and Louisiana saw a high number of Canadian immigrations. This being due to the Acadian expulsion where the British began forcefully expelling citizens of Acadia, Quebec due to them refusing to submit to British rule and oppression. These acadians would become very concentrated in New Orleans and frequently join families with the Indigenous peoples of the region, eventually becoming known as, "Cajuns". In 1788, the city was devastated by a massive fire which lead to much of the city needing to be rebuilt in what are now known as the French quarters.

In 1803, the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte sold the entirety of Louisiana to the American government as a means of obtaining war-funds for his attempted conquest of Europe; the city's name was subsequently anglicized to New Orleans though it is more commonly known to residents as **N'Orléans** or **N'Orleans**. This in turn lead to a decrease in economic strength and civil rights as the American government (here run by infamous president Andrew Jackson) prohibited the city from trading with Caribbean islands and also stripped people of colour of some of the few civil rights which the Spanish/French ruling awarded them. These factors lead to two things: the rise of upper-class plantation New Orleans and the rise of piracy within the city.

## Appearances and allusions

New Orleans is the setting of New Orleans Square in Disneyland.

### Haunted Mansion

The Haunted Mansion is located in New Orleans' French Quarters on Esplanade Street, overlooking the Mississippi.

#### Camp Discovery

A newspaper mentions the New Orleans mansion in Adventure Isle's Camp Discovery.

### Main Street Cinema

One posting from the Disneyland Casting Agency is from Café Orleans trying to find New Orleans Dixieland-style musicians.

### Mark Twain Riverboat

In Disneyland, the Mark Twain Riverboat passes through New Orleans on the Mississippi River.

### Pirates of the Caribbean

Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland is entered through the Royal Street Gallery of New Orleans Square. The ride starts with guests riding a dinghy through the Blue Bayou outside the city, passing through the shack of Beacon Joe and into a canal with the undead pirate skull Captain X.

New Orleans Square also holds the shop Pieces of Eight which in and of itself holds many Pirates artifacts such as a, "voodoo" doll of Jack Sparrow owned by Blackbeard then later his daughter Angelica, several pirate portraits, and the piratical fortune-teller Fortune Red. The lady pirate, "Redd" of the Wicked Wench also appears as a walk-around character in New Orleans Square.

### Skipper Canteen

A book in the *Jungle Navigation Co. Ltd. Skipper Canteen* has the title, "Ghosts of New Orleans" by the author, "Scholtz" as an apparent tribute to the Haunted Mansion.

### Thunder Mesa Daily Messenger

An advertisement in the Thunder Mesa Daily Messenger promotes a tailor company called *Davis Coats* which originates from the city of New Orleans. The company is identified as having been founded in 1869 and has a promotion reading "*The finest overcoats, cloaks and capes for all happy and somber occasions*". This here being a tribute to Disneyland's Haunted Mansion which opened in 1969, is set in New Orleans, and which features recognizable characters in cloaks.

### In other media

#### Films

##### The Apple Dumpling Gang

In this film, New Orleans was the final destination being travelled to by gambler Russell Donovan in 1879 when he stopped in Quake City, California.

#### Printed-materials

##### Disney Kingdoms

New Orleans is the setting for both the Haunted Mansion and Museum of the Weird in the Disney Kingdoms comic-book continuity.

## Connections

### Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

A removed feature of La Bat en Rouge was a cage containing a hag resembling the Evil Queen's disguise from this film. She would attempt to persuade guests into freeing her by claiming that she would teach them to transform water into gasoline.

### Tom Sawyer Island

Pirates of the Caribbean, Tom Sawyer Island and the Haunted Mansion are all interconnected by historic New Orleans pirate, privateer and smuggler Jean Lafitte (c.1780-c.1823). References in New Orleans Square including a memorialized anchor supposedly taken from Lafitte's ship from the 1815 battle of New Orleans. There also used to be a shop named for Lafitte called Laffite's Silver Shop.

In Pirates of the Caribbean, Lafitte is the namesake of Laffite's Landing between the Royal Street Gallery and the Blue Bayou. In Disneyland Paris, a portrait of the smuggler was in the possession of the citizens of Puerto Dorado, Isla Tesoro during the island's ransacking at the hands of the Wicked Wench (odd considering that he wouldn't have been born yet). On the Pirate's Lair on Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyland there is a tavern called, "Lafitte's Tavern" and newspapers identifying Jackson Island (Tom Sawyer Island) as having been a base of Lafitte and later been used by Americans in the War of 1812.

In the Haunted Mansion he is more frequently referenced in non-canon materials such as the comics by SLG where he was an ally to the mansion's founder William Gracey, in the 2003 film continuity where he was an affiliate of Captain Ambrose Gracey who built the mansion, or the audio-book Nuptial Doom where the sea-captain who owned the mansion was a compatriot of Lafitte. These are based on how in an unused concept for the mansion, catacombs under the manor entered through Lafitte's tomb would lead to a pirate's lair on Tom Sawyer Island.

### Tower of Terror

George Hightower of the Hightower family was a resident of the Haunted Mansion in the 1870s until his death at the hands of Constance Hatchaway in 1877.

## References

1. ↑ http://www.mainstgazette.com/2016/07/now-casting.html
2. ↑ https://dapsmagic.com/2018/06/redd-the-pirate-sails-into-new-orleans-square-in-search-of-captain-jack-sparrow-at-disneyland/
3. ↑ https://jungleskipper.com/sea/attractions/skipper-canteen#&gid=1&pid=center-shelf-4th-shelf-c57
4. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDOjxGTVKF8