Recently I became re-acquainted with these fellows. Cement puti, I guess.

These figures as well.

They all can be found in the pleasant but hardly opulent courtyard of the Hotel Chateau in the French Quarter. The figures were there when I first visited New Orleans in 1981 and stayed at the hotel. They stood in the courtyard when I went back in 1989. They may only be ordinary stone, but they abide.

The hotel abides. Its history? The hotel web site page called History is remarkably free of any actual information on the subject. Enough to know that it’s an old place. This is the Vieux Carré, after all.

A little context. The first group of figures is one of a set that stand between a tall brick wall and a small swimming pool that’s the centerpiece of the courtyard.
The other figures decorate a small fountain near the courtyard entrance.

As far as I can tell, or remember, the hotel and its courtyard haven’t changed much in the nearly four decades since I first saw it. The walls looked old then, as they do now. The rooms seemed equally old, yet comfortable enough, then as now.

But memory across decades is always dodgy, and since my previous visits involved taking no pictures of the place, I can’t really say what it used to be like, except that the figures and pool were there.

It might astonish later generations, but none of the four of us took a camera on our three-day trip to New Orleans in 1981. For her part, Lilly did what people now do on such as trip: a running commentary to friends elsewhere, especially highlighting the food by transmitting images of it. Well, why not? If we’d had the same electronic gizmos, we would have done the same.

The view from the entrance of the courtyard.

The view from the second-story balcony. Our room was up there.

We could have stayed any number of places in New Orleans, or in the French Quarter, for that matter. I didn’t consider the Hotel Chateau overpriced, so that was a factor in deciding the stay there again. Its location at the corner of St. Phillip St. and Chartres St. is excellent, and that was a factor as well.
But the main reason we stayed there, beginning on May 12, was nostalgia. My own nostalgia for the place. Nostalgia might be derided as a kind of weepy foolishness, but I believe a dose of it now and then is a balm for the stress of the present, whatever that might be. A dose of personal nostalgia, that is, not the kind sold in stores.

Back in the 1980s, the property was called the Chateau Motor Hotel. I have a room service menu, dating from 1989, to prove it. I used it for note-taking on that trip. I might not have taken many pictures then (I had a camera the second time), but I filled four pages with notes about what we did.

This is only speculation, but at some point someone, maybe a new owner, decided that “motor” was déclassé, and the word was dumped. It’s entirely likely that in some earlier decade, say the 1950s, “motor” was added to the name because it sounded modern.

I don’t know why we stayed there the first time. One of my other companions had arranged the stay, maybe because another friend or relative had stayed there even earlier. It was a pre-Google, pre-Trip Advisor time. So our stay in 2019 originated in word-of-mouth very likely over 40 years old.

During that first visit, we spent at least one evening splashing around the pool — at its size, swimming wasn’t much of an option — and talking the banter and nonsense you find in a small group of friends. With one exception, I don’t remember any of it. I do remember a fairly involved discussion of the precise lyrics and larger meaning of “Across the Universe.”

When Lilly and I were sitting in the courtyard reading late one afternoon during this stay, two young men and a woman came to splash around in the pool. They were probably a little older than we were in the early ’80s, but not much. Their own banter and nonsense soon started.