When I returned to my home town of New Orleans for a second try at making a full-time life there, it was winter, 2011, six years post-Water. I find it impossible now, in the retelling, to know exactly how I decided to move back. I had been living in New York City, running a global nonprofit with more than three hundred employees; a relationship that I had thought might become a marriage had imploded. Undoubtedly, my return had something to do with the intensity of that work and the dissolution of those personal dreams, the combination of which made me long to return to the place where my mother lived. Though I suspect there is an ancient reason for this, moving back to New Orleans and successfully living there had been a goal of mine ever since leaving.

“Paying attention to being alive” was how the poet Jack Gilbert described what I wanted to do for a year in New Orleans. Whereas before, I reasoned, I had lived my familial life by rote, beneath the carapace of clan, now I would be present, physically at least, more than I had since my first departure from the city, in 1997, fourteen years before, when I was not yet eighteen, riding to college in my brother Eddie’s pickup truck, sitting between two other brothers, Carl and Michael. But that was not all. I wanted to work full time at being what I had never wholly allowed myself to be: a writer. I would observe my family and my city, spend time in the city’s archives and with my mother’s old papers, collecting my family’s stories as a journalist might.

I leased an apartment on the busiest, most photographed, most written about, most used corner in all of New Orleans, where all of the city’s ideas about itself converge and sometimes clash. And where, from my narrow balcony three stories above it all, I could watch it happen. That balcony overhangs St. Peter Street, but the entrance to the apartment was around the corner, behind a massive metal green door, on Royal Street, which, in 1941—the year my mother was born—the city directory described as a street that “once seen, can never be forgotten, for there is no other street quite like it in America, replete, as it is, with picturesque characters, real and imaginary, and ancient buildings with an aura of romance still clinging to them.” In 1941, and in the many years following, black people—picturesque or not—were not welcomed on this street, or in any of its famed antique and curio shops, unless they were passing through on their way to work.

This is not the area of the city where I grew up. I grew up in New Orleans East, which had been vast cypress swamps until the nineteen-sixties, and which had been abandoned by developers after the oil bust in the nineteen-eighties. If the French Quarter is mythologized as New World sophistication, then New Orleans East is the encroaching wilderness. The East is less dressed up; it’s where the city’s dysfunctions are laid bare.

On the day I moved into my new apartment, I remembered a time long before, when I was a child on a field trip from Jefferson Davis Elementary School to the French Quarter, to visit “history.” The yellow bus bumped down Gentilly Boulevard, avoiding the High Rise bridge, and sped down Esplanade Avenue. We parked at the edge of the Quarter, on the rocks by the train tracks and old wharfs, entering the less than a square mile of history through the French Market and onto Royal Street. The French Quarter, we were told back then, was the place where our ancestors—African, German, French, Haitian, Canadian—had converged in this bowl-shaped, below-sea-level spot along the river. It was, our teacher said, the impossible and unfathomable point from which we had all spread—across Canal Street to the Garden District uptown, across Rampart to the back of town, farther away from the river and closer to Lake Pontchartrain. In the more recent past, we learned, we spread across the man-made bridges and the man-made Industrial Canal, down Chef Menteur Highway, which is how we came to be sitting at Jefferson Davis, at broken wooden desks, in a trailer for a classroom, hot and irritated.

This apartment of mine, in the LaBranche building, named for the sugar planter Jean Baptiste LaBranche, is famous not for the owner or the structure itself but for its “striking cast iron balcony railings,” as one seventies-era book describes them, with “beautifully symmetrical oak leaves and acorns,” likely hammered out by slaves. Built in 1835, this “brawny sentinel” of a building was flanked on all sides by historicized icons of the city, places that when taken together form what the historian J. Mark Souther calls “a collage of familiar images.” These images, he writes, lend to the visitor feelings of “exoticism and timelessness.” These symbols appear on advertisements and postcards and coffee mugs, along with such taglines as “It’s New Orleans. You’re different here.” Or, my favorite: “We’re a European city on a Po-Boy budget.”

At the end of my block, where St. Peter and Chartres Streets merge, stands the Cabildo, the construction of which began in 1795, directed by Andres Almonaster y Rojas. The Cabildo—City Hall during Spanish rule, and the site of the Louisiana Purchase ceremonies, in 1803—is a museum now. The St. Louis Cathedral, just next door, is the church that the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau attended and where more than a dozen bishops, church leaders, and other citizens are buried underneath the floor. Just outside its doors sits Jackson Square, with a statue of Andrew Jackson tipping his hat on a whinnying horse, which I looked out upon every day as a teen-age employee of CC’s Coffee House. Jackson Square was formerly the Place d’Armes, a site of military barracks under the Spanish and French. And the city’s first prison.

These streets—fifteen parallel, seven intersecting, seventy-eight square blocks, less than a mile walking from Canal Street to Esplanade Avenue, or three minutes of slow driving—contain the most powerful narrative of any story: the city’s origin tale. This, less than one square mile, is the city’s main economic driver; its greatest asset and investment; its highly funded attempt at presenting a mythology to the world that touts the city’s outsiderness, distinctiveness, diversity, progressiveness, and, ironically, its lackadaisical approach to hardship. When you come from a mythologized place, as I do, who are you in that story?

When I arrived, as was the family custom, Michael, Carl, and Eddie were summoned to help lug my suitcases and boxes up the three flights of stairs. This visit to St. Peter Street would be Carl and Eddie’s first and last. “Not everybody meant to be in them Quarters,” Carl would say, all the times I pleaded with him to visit.

I met my neighbor Joseph—the only immediate neighbor I would meet in the course of the year—the day he began spraying my thirsty plants from his balcony in the building next door to mine. Joseph’s was the apartment where LaBranche’s mistress once lived. I learned this from the New Orleans ghost tours that began nightly, at dusk, crowds gathered underneath my balcony, where guides dressed in gold told and retold the story of how the mistress, who was pissed about having been chained to a wall by LaBranche’s widow and starved to death, haunted the building. The guides said that her ghost made residents nervous and jumpy—not by throwing things but by turning you so crazy that you’d do it yourself.