Celebrating 300 years, New Orleans dreams of putting pigs on rollercoasters and its mayor in the Oval Office

If New Orleans has it going on suddenly, so too, it seems, does Mayor Landrieu. Just weeks from the end of his second and final term, he finds himself the centre of speculation about a run for the Democratic nomination in 2020

New Orleans celebrates its 300th birthday in 2018 (David Usborne)

There is a whole lot of shouting going on in New Orleans, some of it out of despair – but also pride. We are used to the former from the city that suffered Hurricane Katrina 13 years ago, and has had more than its share of struggles. The latter seems like a bit of a gear-change.

With barely 400,000 residents it feels apart from the rest of America. Everything is more vivid, including the poverty, particularly among black men, but also the joy.

Party buses ply the French Quarter, and I just saw my first rolling night club, an open trailer hooked to an SUV with a port-a-potty cabin at the back, pulsing with lights and music. Sway with the beat, sway with the traffic.

Even the despair isn’t what you think. They just held the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, the highlight of which is always the STELLA-A-A! shouting contest, involving men (and women) dropping to their knees in the street and reenacting Stanley Kowalski’s plea to Stella to forgive his alcohol-soaked boorishness in A Streetcar Named Desire.

This year’s winner for the best, most wrenching rendition was a certain Roger Bartlett, a Brit from St Albans, if you please.

Mardi Gras is over and we are a month from Jazz Fest, but New Orleans was close to a nervous breakdown last weekend, so much was going on. One event I didn’t make was this year’s Hogs for the Cause, a barbecue competition to raise money for paediatric brain cancer.

Next year, one of the organisers informed me in the lobby of the Pontchartrain Hotel on Saint Charles Avenue, the event will feature a roller coaster with little wagons careening along tracks through hot coals and fiery smokers each carrying a small pig (not live ones, he clarified).

I tagged along to happenings more sedate, but also directly concerned with boosting the city, its residents and heritage. First, a planning meeting for a gala fundraiser for the Beauregard-Keyes House in late April.

Not long ago rescued from impending collapse, the residence, one of the finest in all of the Quarter dating from 1826, now needs new wiring. Restoration of historic sites has for decades been a key preoccupation of the city and of private individuals with money to help.

Alas, there was never any rescuing the French Opera House, which sat in the heart of the Quarter until it burned down in 1919. But those New Orleanians pining for Puccini spent Sunday at a regional audition for young singers one day to sing with the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

A cocktail in a lavish private home in the Uptown district – where it’s hard not to notice that all the guests are white, and all the servers black – was followed by dinner in an equally fine restaurant, DTB, with the three judges who had presided enjoying ribs and smoked oysters. They’d been unable to choose between two sopranos and had declared the competition a tie.

Yet, we are still just scratching the surface. New Orleans is also in the midst of throwing a party for itself for its 300th birthday.

Overseeing a crazed calendar of exhibitions, lectures, festivals and other events, ranging just during April from a “state dinner” for mayors from across the world, a Navy week with tall ships and a French frigate docking near the Quarter, a food fair and fireworks, is Mark Romig – whose normal job is to run tourism marketing for the city, when he is not serving as the announcer for the Saints, its beloved American football franchise.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered an address at the 85th annual US Conference of Mayors (AP) (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

“There is still work to do,” Romig said of the aftermath of Katrina and the city’s other continuing challenges. “But if we keep dwelling on the misery we’ll never sense that there’s also huge opportunities.”

He paid tribute to Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who took the tenth anniversary of the storm in 2015 as the moment to turn the page and urge residents to “keep moving forward”.

If New Orleans has it going on suddenly, so too, it seems, does Landrieu. Just weeks from the end of his second and final term, he finds himself the centre of speculation about a run for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

The tricentennial is a help, and so too is the national noise he made last year tearing down a series of sculptures and monuments in the city associated with the Confederacy. Gone is Robert E Lee from the column near the Ponchartrain Hotel. Gone too is Beauregard who used to sit outside the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Not everyone is impressed. “He is despicable; I’d vote for Trump before Landrieu,” one leading surgeon told me over dinner, decrying the desecration of what he called civic art pieces – where they are being stored is a secret – as well as he what he considers the mayor’s failure to fix the city’s leaking sewage system and cracking roads.

But Landrieu is on a national tour to promote a new book inspired by the removal of the monuments, called In the Shadow of the Statues, and is a darling of the talk shows. He’s coy about running for president. But he would be, wouldn’t he?

“The country’s in a dark hour. My commitment has always been to do what I can to help,” he told one interviewer last week. “You never say never.“

That a mayor of New Orleans could even contemplate competing for the highest office in the land is almost jarring. This is the city of calamity in a state that consistently ranks at or near the bottom of everything from education to child mortality.

Yet, here we are, which means some kind of corner has been turned. Happy birthday, you all.