Gardens, Ghosts and Crazy Landladies

The apartment we live in is just inside the Garden District at Jackson and Magazine Street. You would think that this would be a prime location - I mean, it's called the GARDEN District and some of the mansions in the neighborhood are priced in the
millions - but whenever we tell people we live in the Garden District, we invariably get a weird look and a knowing, "Oohh." When pressed for the meaning of this cryptic "Oohh", they immediately clam up and say, "Oh, nothing. It's just that the neighborhood has a, ...well, ...a reputation."
"Well, what kind or reputation?" we ask.
"Oh, um, just be careful."
"Well, we're from Chicago. You can't scare us. We're tough. We can chew it up for breakfast, spit it out and ask for seconds...
...so, what exactly are we being careful of?"
But that's all we can get out of anyone, "just be careful."
Of what, we haven't figured out yet. It's very cryptic. Ghosts of Civil War generals? Deceased plantation owners? It's a mystery because the only people we have seen walking around in the neighborhood are tourists, hoards of them. Maybe they get roudy in summer and try barging in people's apartments for tours?

We are one block away from Magazine Street, a cool, 6 mile promenade full of boutiques, record shops, cafes and restaurants. On warm, sunny days, it's full of people strolling around, shopping or sitting at cafes.

The apartment we live in is a 100+ year old mansion that has been divided up into 6 apartments. It's very beautiful from the front...but since we live in the back, we rarely see the front of the building, so the effect is kind of lost on us. Our apartment is a little, one-bedroom affair with a kitchen, a bit of a garden view, some steps outside our front door to sit on and air conditioning which should be coming in handy in about a month. The landlord is an old Italian lady who grew up in the Bronx. She's losing her hearing and her mobility is limited due to an injury she received a couple of years ago, so she spends a lot of her time hanging out by the door to her apartment watching our comings and goings and asking us regularly about our job situation, what we are having for dinner, where we are going, etc.

In addition to her snoopyness, she has terrible taste in music. The reason I know this is because she plays her music so damn loud, we can hear it in our apartment. Occasionally Marvyn Gaye makes an appearance to soothe our ears, but in general, the day passes with German drinking songs including, but not limited to, such perennial favorites as the Chicken Dance and It's A Small World After All. (if you've ever been trapped on the "It's a Small World" ride at Disneyland and forced to listen to this song repeated over and over at high volume for almost an hour, this particular number can bring back especially traumatic memories)

"Do you like my music? You know, it's over one hundred years old, my music." she says proudly as we stare at the ground, shuffling our feet and thinking of a polite way to tell her that the constant thudding bass of Um-Pah-Pah not only prevents us from concentrating on our projects while in the apartment but also has the unsettling effect of causing us to imagine creative ways of strangling old ladies.

We're beginning to wonder if perhaps this is what people have been warning us about.
"Oh, you live in the Garden District?" "Just be careful"
What they're really saying is, "Be careful not to strangle any old ladies or you'll be thrown in jail for many more years than it might be worth just to silence that annoying Um-Pah-Pah music."