New Iberia, LA

Some might call it a river, or at least think of it that way. But spend an afternoon along the banks of the Teche in New Iberia, La., sit a while under its gnarled, moss-covered canopy of live oaks “uttering joyous leaves of dark green,” as Walt Whitman wrote, and you’ll know soon enough that it could only be a bayou, a serpentine oasis in the sun-drenched flatlands of Acadiana in southwest Louisiana.

About 150 years ago, Bayou Teche was New Iberia’s major conduit for sending its sugar cane to the world, and today it remains the city’s vital center. Locals and the tens of thousands who visit each year find respite from the heat at its edge. Barges navigate its curves, and all along its banks are the signs of the past that give New Iberia its frozen-in-time quality—the buildings, the landscape, the gardens and foliage—as though the city, founded by the Spanish in 1779, could never lose the historic character that shaped its identity and colors its present.

“You really feel the history,” says Jane Braud, a lifelong resident of New Iberia and its director of planning. Braud also is heading the city’s Main Street program, helping to restore many of its downtown buildings—which date from the late 19th to early 20th century—back to their original condition.

After a period of economic sluggishness, New Iberia (pop. 32,623) is again alive with the bustle that marked its heyday. Residents crowd its twice-weekly farmers’ market in downtown’s Bouligny Plaza. Scores deluge the city during its annual gumbo cook-off each October and amble through its streets in the cooler hours, dropping in on the shops and restaurants that have returned to its historic downtown buildings, now renovated as luxury condominiums and apartments on their upper floors. But much of the new, locals report, fits seamlessly into the frame of the old.

Passing from downtown’s historic commercial district, one enters the East Main Street historic residential district where the city is even more generous with its restored beauty. And marking the point of transition is the Shadows-on-the-Teche, a stately 1830s plantation home that for 125 years was home to the Weeks family, some of the city’s wealthiest sugar cane planters. The “Shadows,” as it’s known locally, is the oldest surviving estate of an era when plantations were laid out in the French plan of long, narrow strips of land leading away from the waterway. “You could have another plantation just a holler away,” says Pat Cahle, director of the Shadows.

William Weeks Hall, the family’s last surviving member, willed the house and its lavishly kept grounds to the National Trust for Historic Preservation upon his death in 1958, and it has operated as a kind of “living museum” ever since, appointed with antebellum furnishings and housing more than 17,000 family documents chronicling their lives in the house.

A well-connected artist, Hall was responsible for many creative luminaries passing through New Iberia, among them Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, and D.W. Griffith (both of whom made films here) as well as writers Sherwood Anderson, Henry Miller, and Anais Nin. Miller even devoted a chapter of his book, The Air Conditioned Nightmare, to his time in the city.

About 25,000 people visit the Shadows each year now, and many others enjoy parts of the city that have since been immortalized by one of its more famous current residents, mystery writer James Lee Burke. Among them, the Depression-era Iberia Parish Courthouse which, a stone’s throw from the Shadows, serves as the office for Burke’s famed Detective Dave Robicheaux (a local bookstore, Books Along the Teche, offers a walking tour of Robicheaux haunts). New Iberia also has benefited from nearby Avery Island, home to the McIlhenny family’s famed and fiery Tabasco sauce, and the Konriko Rice Mill, the nation’s oldest surviving rice mill, on the edge of town.

But surrounded by history as they are, locals in New Iberia continue to treasure one virtue above all else: the generous friendliness and hospitality of those who live here. “I think it’s true that the people in this community have the joie de vivre that you hear about with Cajuns,” says Will Chapman, publisher of the city paper, the Daily Iberian. “They’re very open and friendly people by their nature.”

Michael Depp is a frequent American Profile contributor.

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