Buddy Bolden: The Father of Jazz from New Orleans
The Loudest Man in New Orleans (You Never Heard) There is a small, weathered shotgun house on First Street in Central City that holds one of the biggest stories in American music. No plaque screams...
Louis Prima: The Wildest Entertainer New Orleans Ever Made
There is a certain kind of New Orleans energy that cannot be taught, bottled, or faked. It is the energy of a city that treats every Tuesday like a reason to celebrate and every funeral like a reas...
Allen Toussaint: The Songwriter Behind New Orleans
If you have ever tapped your foot to a New Orleans song, there is a very good chance Allen Toussaint had something to do with it. As a songwriter, producer, arranger, and pianist, Toussaint shaped ...
Mahalia Jackson: New Orleans' Queen of Gospel
A Voice Born in Black Pearl If you walk the quiet blocks between St. Charles Avenue and Leake Avenue in Uptown New Orleans, you are standing in the neighborhood called Black Pearl. It is a small, p...
James Booker: The Bayou Maharajah of New Orleans
If you have ever sat at a piano bar in New Orleans and watched someone play something so good it made the whole room go quiet, you have felt the ghost of James Booker. They called him the Bayou Mah...
WWOZ: New Orleans' Heartbeat on the Dial
There is a moment, usually around dusk, when you are driving through New Orleans and you land on 90.7 FM. Maybe you were scanning stations. Maybe someone told you about it. But suddenly there is a ...
Louisiana Coastal Land Loss: What We're Losing
If you've ever driven south out of New Orleans, past the last gas station and the last grocery store, down into Terrebonne or Plaquemines Parish, you know the feeling. The road gets narrower. The l...
New Orleans Oysters: A Local's Guide to the Half Shell
There is a sound you hear in New Orleans that you will not hear anywhere else in the world. It is the pop and scrape of an oyster knife hitting a shell, followed by the slide of a half dozen across...
Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans: A History of Masking
If you've ever stood on a New Orleans sidewalk on Mardi Gras morning and heard drums rolling down a back street, followed by a flash of feathers so bright it made you forget where you were, then yo...
The New Orleans Crawfish Boil: A Backyard Tradition
Nobody teaches you how to throw a New Orleans crawfish boil. There is no class, no certification, no YouTube tutorial that really captures it. You just show up to enough of them, and one spring Sat...
The Sazerac: New Orleans' Original Cocktail and How to Make It Right
Every city has a signature drink. Most of them are marketing. The Sazerac is not. It's the oldest known cocktail in America, it was born in New Orleans, and in 2008 the Louisiana legislature made i...
Make Wetlands Not War: The Disappearing Coast Louisiana Can't Afford to Lose
Louisiana is losing land. Not in some abstract, geological-timescale way. Right now. A football field of coastal wetlands disappears roughly every 100 minutes. That's not a metaphor - it's a measur...
A Local's Guide to Mid-City: The Neighborhood in the Middle of Everything
Ask most visitors where to go in New Orleans and they'll say the French Quarter, the Garden District, maybe Magazine Street. Ask a local where they actually live their life and there's a good chanc...
The Shotgun House: Why New Orleans' Most Iconic Home Looks the Way It Does
If you’ve walked through any neighborhood in New Orleans - and we mean any of them, from the Garden District to the Bywater, from Mid-City to the Irish Channel - you’ve seen a shotgun house. You’ve...
Savory Simon was a real person - Simon Hubig, born in 1860 to German immigrant parents in the U.S. After his father's early death, Simon and his brothers helped their mother run a baking business...
By Adam Karlin In a nation divided between individual liberty, puritan morality, and the good of the public, the portable drink is a nod to freedom in a daiquiri-friendly carrying case. It’s liquid...
We had a chance to sit down and talk to Maurice about his new book, his research approach and what he would do if he was mayor. Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a New Orleans native and is the autho...
Bill Banzai White Tennessee, 2025 It started well before the tshirts. There was an energy among those who started Dirty Coast to move the city of New Orleans towards being more equitable and progre...
Blake’s early partner in crime with the launch of Dirty Coast in the city after Katrina. From friends to partners, Patrick ran the day-to-day operations from 2006 to 2014. Here he and Blake remin...
Absinthe: Double the Vision, Double the Fun
Vintage spirits, bohemian New Orleans, and fine illustration. In 2009, Dirty Coast raised a glass to one of New Orleans’ most notorious muses - absinthe. A drink that blurs the line between sin and...
