Scenes from The Big Easy

Your DC reporter visited New Orleans this weekend, where he snapped a sea of folks in red on famed Bourbon Street. On Saturday, thousands—including many men—donned colorful dresses as part of the annual Red Dress Run, a 5k that raises money for a variety of charities. But while the excess of Bourbon Street might be the attraction to the Crescent City, there's much more to see.

You might expect to see something like the National World War II Museum in DC, but New Orleans scored a major coup by landing the property in 2000. New Orleans has a bigger connection to WWII than you might think—the boats that stormed Normandy on D-Day were actually designed and manufactured there.

Here's something DCers can definitely relate to: a long line for pastries. But instead of Georgetown Cupcake, the destination here is Cafe Du Monde in the French Quarter, which opened in 1862 and serves up its signature beignets to thousands of tourists and locals.

Amazingly, it's been nine years since Hurricane Katrina, and while the city is still recovering, incredible progress has been made. We visited the Lower Ninth Ward, which was hit hardest but is becoming the beneficiary of international philanthropy. We snapped this mod-looking new home built with funds from Brad Pitt's Make It Right foundation, which aims to build sustainable new housing in the Lower Ninth. Just down the street, there's a brand-new duplex house designed by none other than Frank Gehry.

While tourism is the major driver there (as evidenced by the two huge hotels, on the left, we snapped from Canal Street), the energy and financial services industries are also a big part of the economy. And it's why there's enough demand to fill up the city's massive skyscrapers—on the right is Place St. Charles, an over 1M SF mixed-use complex anchored by CapitalOne and JPMorgan Chase. Down the street, Shell Oil anchors the city's tallest building, the 1.7M SF One Shell Square.