Books: New Orleans Grab-Bag

THE FRENCH QUARTER—Herbert Asbury—Knopf ($3.50).

In 1721 the French Administrator Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, laid out the site of New Orleans "in the form of a parallelogram, 4,000 feet long by 1,800 feet deep" and set a crew of convicts to work building the city. The area he marked off now constitutes the Vieux Carré, the old French Quarter of New Orleans, some 165 acres of picturesque wickedness, romantic associations, narrow streets and old Spanish dwellings, bounded by the Mississippi River, and Canal, Esplanade and Rampart Streets. It has been...

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