Riding the Coast Road

Editor's note: Published in 2002, before the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Lili LeGardeur's trip down the Coast Road is thankfully still one you can take today.

As I make my way out of New Orleans, I can look through my passenger window and see the gunmetal flats of the open Gulf stretching out under lightning-veined skies. If I strain to listen, I can hear the dull roar of rush hour on Interstate 10, a half-mile inland. But here on U.S. Highway 90, my eyes take in a different world, one of rude camps facing the open water on rickety stilts and tufts of impossibly green grass, of cornball signs declaring camp names like “Plum Nilly,” “All Nashed Together” and “Cajun Estate.” Some of New Orleans’ most powerful politicos are rumored to have camps along this stretch of the old Chef Menteur Highway just east of the city, but the rough paint jobs and humble buildings belie the fancy boats parked here and there and seem to insist that everyone here at the edge of Orleans Parish is “just folks.” 

My destination this stormy Monday is Mobile, Alabama, where a pair of world-class art exhibitions (Picturing French Style: Three Hundred Years of Art and Fashion at the Mobile Museum of Art and American Accents: Masterworks from the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco Featuring the Rockefeller Collection at the Gulf Coast Exploreum) are being staged to celebrate that port city’s three hundredth anniversary. My route will take me from French Louisiana’s last capital to its first outpost, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi; its third capital, in Biloxi, Mississippi; and its second, in Mobile, itself. That seems appropriate, since Picturing French Style will open the new Mobile Museum of Art with a view of the cultural vision that infuses both French art and fashion.

My route will take me from French Louisiana’s last capital to its first outpost, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi; its third capital, in Biloxi, Mississippi; and its second, in Mobile, itself.

But the frumpiness and nostalgia of this route are what has immediate appeal. This is the road my parents used to take to the coast for weekend house parties long before I was born, and it will thread the carny atmosphere of the vestigial “Redneck Riviera” of the 1940s and 1950s. With such a trip before me, the road itself is my destination.

Vintage steel truss bridges lead over quiet still rivers, one of which, Pearl River, is a peaceful scene of moored houseboats. I’m anxious for the beach, though, which I find after turning onto a necessary ten-mile stint of modern U.S. 90 before turning off again at Mississippi 603 toward Waveland. The road T’s into a two-lane blacktop that meanders beside the beach. Waveland is scattered and residential; the old town center is sort of sad, dominated as it is by a plaque memorializing the hurricane that virtually destroyed the town in 1915. This stretch of beach is a nice entree to the shore, though. I park the car and walk through the damp sand, savoring the way it sticks to my toes in the aftermath of the storm.

Turning left on this coast road will take you into Bay St. Louis, which is rightfully favored as a day-trip destination. It’s worth taking a few moments to explore the village, whose frame cottages are done up in jigsaw-work ranging from modest to florid. The bandstand outside town hall, which floats halfway up the enormous live oak tree that it’s wrapped around, is a particularly pleasant place to sit and eavesdrop on the locals. A good brisk walkabout will reward you with vintage shops and galleries and at least one decent coffee shop. Several galleries along Main Street will give you a glimpse of the talent in fabric, photography, jewelry and ceramics that’s hiding out along the coast.

Crossing the bay bridge from Bay St. Louis to Pass Christian, I come quickly into view of the grand old mansions that face the beach. They remind me that New Orleanians fleeing heat and disease began establishing summer homes here as soon as steamboats and railroads made it practical to do so. It doesn’t take long to notice the modern houses interspersed with the old—a painful reminder of Hurricane Camille, which crushed this area thirty-three years ago. This is where the Gulf really opens to me in all its glory, though. I have to concentrate to keep my eyes on the road instead of on the silhouettes of shrimp boats that fleck the horizon.

This is where the Gulf really opens to me in all its glory, though. I have to concentrate to keep my eyes on the road instead of on the silhouettes of shrimp boats that fleck the horizon.

The coast road gives a patchwork rendition of this region’s economic history. Long Beach, once one of the most successful truck farming communities in the South, gives way to Gulfport, which pulled itself up by the bootstraps of produce shipping to become a minor boom town in the 1930s. The passage is now stippled with chain restaurants and convenience stores, though a detour through Gulfport’s downtown will bring you to a Works Progress Administration-era post office, a refurbished turn-of-the-century train station and several avenues of two- and three-story brick buildings peppered lightly with modern shops and restaurants.

One of Gulfport’s best-reviewed new restaurants, 27th Avenue Bistro, is nestled here in the heart of the old mercantile center, but I head for the Blowfly Inn, a local haunt equally well-known for steaks, ribs and seafood. A casual, window-rimmed building perched on the edge of Bayou Bernard, The Blowfly makes the busy-ness and chain restaurants and stores of modern Gulfport seem like a distant bad dream. Over stuffed flounder (tenderest behind the broad, flat spine) and hot tea—I am suffering from a cold—I learn that Miss Betty, my waitress, has worked here for seventeen years, as has her sister. Betty doesn’t say so, but cashier Chuck Slaget points out that Betty also makes most of the desserts, which include devastating-looking cheesecakes, banana pudding, and both lemon and key lime pie. I leave with a souvenir plastic Blowfly (it came atop my fish) and a satisfied appetite.

There are things I do not do when I drive the coast road, that other travelers nonetheless should know about. I do not eat at every good restaurant, though there are several: Trapani’s and Bay City Grill in Bay St. Louis, Annie’s in Pass Christian, 27th Avenue Bistro in Gulfport, Mary Mahoney’s and the simpler Mary’s Drive In in Biloxi, Justine’s and Germaine’s in Ocean Springs. I do not stop at Marine Life to see the dolphins and seals perform gymnastics for visitors, though I dimly recall loving the show there when I was a child. I do not take the day cruise to Ship Island with its Civil War fort, which departs from just behind Marine Life.  I do not do the casinos. All of these attractions, though, are visible from U.S. 90, and visitors may very well want to sample them for themselves.

I do, however, go to Beauvoir, the last home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, just because I’m attracted to shrines and because Davis is such a political flashpoint. The twenty-minute film that introduces the house and grounds is full of surprising information—I didn’t know, for instance, that Davis was U.S. secretary of war under President Pierce—and the exhibit of personal artifacts is an interesting slice of nineteenth-century military and domestic life. The Confederate cemetery behind the Greek Revival home serves as a reminder that hundreds of veterans of the Civil War lived here in modest cabins until they passed away and were buried on site. What strikes me most, however, is the simplicity of the outbuilding that Davis used as his writing studio. Reportedly he would bivouac here for weeks at a time, scribbling the long tome that is still for sale at the Beauvoir gift shop.

Returning to the beach road, I take in the display of the flags that have flown over Biloxi: France, Spain, England, the Republic of West Florida, the Confederate States of America, the United States, and the nineteenth-century and contemporary flags of the state of Mississippi. Then I’m deep into the palimpsest of time periods that is Biloxi. The main Art Deco Broadwater Beach Resort building remains, as does the elegant 1930s-flavored Broadwater sign across the road; but it’s the President Broadwater now, and the large waterfront casino is clearly a recent addition. Gift shops along the highway try to outshout each other visually with sculptural displays. A mermaid riding a waterfall cascades from the front of one; a huge pink shark opens his jaws above the door of another; a third wears an oversize crawfish like a novelty hat; all of them offer shells, T-shirts and surf wear at bottom dollar.

A mermaid riding a waterfall cascades from the front of one; a huge pink shark opens his jaws above the door of another; a third wears an oversize crawfish like a novelty hat; all of them offer shells, T-shirts and surf wear at bottom dollar.

The Biloxi Visitors Center, just past Beau Rivage casino on the right-hand side of the road, offers a free walking tour of downtown Biloxi. If you’ve never encountered George Ohr, the “Mad Potter” of Biloxi, you owe it to yourself to visit the O’Keefe-Ohr Cultural Center on G.E. Ohr Street, where skillful reproductions and a few precious originals demonstrate the unbelievable skill and humor of this chaotic ceramic artist. Long after his death, Ohr was embraced by Jasper Johns and other New York painters, who saw in his work a precursor to abstract expressionism. Ohr’s work will soon be housed in a dynamic sculpture of its own: a new museum designed by Frank Gehry, the architect behind the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. The new museum is projected to open in 2004.

Slipping over the bridge to Ocean Springs is like leaving a shouting match and entering a quiet conversation. U.S. 90 takes the name of Bienville Avenue here, and the absence of casinos is palpable. Turn right onto Porter Avenue and you’re instantly in the small-town South again.

Slipping over the bridge to Ocean Springs is like leaving a shouting match and entering a quiet conversation. U.S. 90 takes the name of Bienville Avenue here, and the absence of casinos is palpable. Turn right onto Porter Avenue and you’re instantly in the small-town South again.

Ocean Springs is an artists’ town, by which I mean that many of its residents are creative people who were drawn here to work and live in private. One artist family that is prominently on display is the Anderson family, whose its most famous member, Walter Anderson, is the focus of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in the center of town. If you’ve never encountered Anderson, whose vibrant paintings and drawings on ceramics, linoleum and paper depict everything from pre-Columbian civilization to the teeming nature of nearby Horn Island, you’re in for a treat. The walls of both the tiny studio at the end of gallery and the community center next door are completely covered with continuous Anderson murals. Just down the road, the Anderson family compound known as Shearwater is home to Shearwater Pottery. Here you can view the work of all three Anderson brothers, Peter, MacConnell and Walter (whom the family called “Bob”) as well as the pottery of several younger family members. Peter Anderson’s original glazes give a fine rendition of the limpid Gulf light.

Next door to Shearwater with its rustic collection of studio buildings is Shadowlawn, a wide-porched bed and breakfast whose lawn slopes right to the water’s edge. It’s amusing to sit under the shade of ancient trees here and look across the bay to the neon of Biloxi’s casinos. But it’s late in the evening to call innkeeper Nancy Wilson, whose childhood home this is. Instead, I try the Wilson House (no relation), a slightly larger bed and breakfast closer to the east end of town. To my relief, innkeeper Brian Britt has a room and doesn’t seem at all put out by an unannounced guest.

I’ve seen the Wilson House signs along Interstate 10 on previous trips through the region. As I leave the lights of Ocean Springs behind me and turn from U.S. 90 onto 57 North, I wonder what kind of charming bed and breakfast can be located so close to the interstate. The Wilson House is amazingly charming, so much so that I just didn’t mind the fact that you can actually see the highway from the porch. The spacious log-and-plaster building was built during the Depression, then sold to Joel Pinson Wilson, who developed nurseries and citrus groves around the home. The house stood in another location then, in an area of Gulfport that took its name from the Wilson nurseries: “Orange Grove.” Ironically, that same spot, near the intersection of Interstate 10 and Highway 49, has barely an orange tree or any other kind of tree today. Instead, it’s a jumble of shopping malls and outlet stores. In 1994, Wilson, who grew up in the house, arranged with his brother-in-law Brian Britt to move it to its present location and open it as a bed and breakfast.

The bedroom Britt shows me to is snug as a camp cabin, with two twin beds (one trundle) made up with old-fashioned quilts and a private bath. Other rooms are more luxurious, with cleverly worked cabinets (notched supports, moveable shelves) and handcrafted mantels. Three of the bedrooms have fireplaces, and the enormous fireplace in the living room is a welcoming focal point. Throughout, the paintings of Marjorie Welch Wilson, the artist and garden columnist who lived here with her husband, Clarke, for 50 years, brighten the space.

I’m out like a light, the muffled shoosh of traffic lulling me to sleep. Breakfast is fluffy pancakes served with cane ribbon syrup made by a neighbor, fresh melon and grapes, grilled andouille sausage and eggs. Britt joins me for coffee and explains that his wife, Delissa, who is widely known for her biscuits, is usually the breakfast cook, but is away taking the couple’s daughter to college. We talk about Orange Grove and how the car dealership that stands where the homestead once stood has bulldozed all of Clarke Wilson’s trees, including a sycamore grown from seeds that orbited the earth aboard one of the Apollo spacecraft. He sends me on my way with a copy of Clarke and Marjorie Wilson’s slim 1940 volume In Southern Gardens, a bottle of cane syrup, another bottle of soft peppermint candy and a new route for the last leg of the journey.

It turns out that The Wilson House is popular with bicyclists who pedal across the country. I decide to take the inland route favored by cyclists, which Britt describes over breakfast, from Ocean Springs to Mobile. U.S. 90 will certainly get me there, but it’s just not a pretty drive. I turn off of Allen Road and go north on Highway 57 to Wade-Vancleave Road, about six miles farther on. A right-hand turn takes me through groves of oaks and over the Pascagoula River. Forty-five minutes later, I’m on Airport Boulevard in Mobile.

Mobile, for the purposes of this visit, is actually two cities: downtown Mobile, which radiates out from the bay, and Spring Hill, home of the University of South Alabama. The new Mobile Museum of Art building sits atop a hill in the second part of town, part of a park that includes the Mobile Botanical Garden (undergoing expansion) and an outdoor history trail assembled by the downtown Museum of Mobile.

It’s always fun to get a look at a new museum or theater when it’s finished but not yet dressed up for its first exhibit or play The new MMA building, designed by The Architects Group of Mobile, triples the previous exhibition space for fine art and adds an interactive educational wing and an auditorium. It’s a clean, contemporary space with lots of gorgeous natural light.

Special Exhibitions Curator Jill Alene Jimenez walks me through the airy two-story lobby and up to the suite of galleries where Picturing French Style will be mounted in the next few days. Jimenez is author of the exhibition, which will gather 135 paintings, sculptures, costumes and installations from major museums in an original vision that takes in both art and fashion across three hundred years of French history.

 “We wanted to look at three hundred years, and we were founded by the French, but French art lends itself to a lot of different approaches,” explained Jimenez. “What distinguishes the French from other cultures is that they really take fashion as an art form.”

The show, in effect, lets us see both the artists and the rooms they walked through in the same broad mirror. In the Court of Versailles, details like the metallic sheen on a metal magnate’s waistcoat or the shuttle in an aristocratic Frenchwoman’s hand (to indicate that “a good woman’s hands are never idle”) are faithfully recorded in portraits. The intricate embroidered bee that image-maker Jean-Baptiste Isabey created as the emblem of the Court of Napoleon will appear beside portraits from the studio of Napoleonic court painter Jacques-Louis David, with whom Isabey collaborated. Paintings by Renoir and Degas record the nineteenth-century image of the “dandy” popularized in the writings of Charles Baudelaire. Later periods reflect the intense overlap between fashion and couture. Thus, we see a Dali drawing for a hat that was realized by Elsa Schiaparelli and a “surreal” dress with false pockets that Dali designed for Dior. In the last rooms, contemporary French designers like Christian Lacroix and Jean-Paul Gauthier quote from traditions of both art and fashion. The whole show ends on a spectacular note with the installation Solo Gotscho/Ungaro by artist Gotscho.

After listening to Jimenez’s descriptions, I can’t imagine viewing the show in less than three hours. Respite can be found right in Spring Hill at the Brick Pit Barbecue, renowned as best barbecue joint in town. I find that I can only take in one huge art event per day, so I’d probably make my way into town and set up for the evening at this point if the show were actually in place. Mobile has three historic bed and breakfasts (The Towle House and one funky historic hotel (Malaga Inn). On the higher end of the scale, both the Adam’s Mark and the Radisson Admiral Semmes are beautiful hotels. All six properties are close to the Oakleigh and Old Dauphin Way Historic districts, which I find lovely for walking around, and downtown, which gets a bit deserted at dusk but which has a lively music scene on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

I haven’t seen the show, though, so I’ve got stamina for the Rockefeller Show at the Gulf Coast Exploreum. You, gentle reader, probably do not, however. Suffice it to say that this show of three hundred works, including one of only thirty-five surviving American portraits that predate 1700, is full of delightful surprises that indicate the breadth of American art. I spent almost three hours in galleries noting the limpid eyes of portraits by Benjamin Copley, the suffused light of Frederick Edwin Church’s twilight scene, the obscuring shadows of a rare George Inness landscape, the sharp lines of a Charles DeMuth factory view and the gleeful color of a Marsden Hartley’s loving record of Blue Mountain, Maine. The show casts an interesting light on the fact that, for much of Mobile’s three-hundred-year history, “American” art was defined far away from here, in the Northeast. Few of the painters represented in the show are southern, and many of the scenes, like the snowy Winter in the Country by George Henry Durrie, are foreign to this balmy clime.

The Exploreum offers a double advantage to visitors with children, who might want to spend time in the hands-on science exhibit downstairs or view the 3D Lewis and Clark film in the attached IMAX theater. Tickets to the Exploreum are $11, $10 for seniors and students, and $7.50 for children; tack on an extra $5 ($3.50 for kids) for the IMAX theater. There are refreshments on site, so you could plan to spend the day.

It’s early for dinner, which I’ve planned to have at Quatorze, a tiny jewel of a French bistro tucked away on South Conception Street downtown. Turning on a whim on Conti Street, however,  brings me to Wintzell’s Oyster House, which I immediately recognize as a one of those local institutions a good writer just can’t pass by. Inside I’m stunned by thousands, yes, thousands of original quips and sayings written by founder J. Oliver Wintzell, who made a going business of a seafood hut opened during the Depression. The local color in this place goes on for days and the oysters are good enough to slurp down with nothing but lemon.

Quatorze is my reward for a long two-day meander, and it’s everything I’ve heard it would be from friends. Chef/proprietor Yannick Marchand, formerly of Peristyle in New Orleans, makes the most of local produce and fresh seafood in a menu he creates daily. I’m stymied by the choice between chilled peach soup with mint and rum, a salad of baby greens, pears and Danish bleu cheese or shrimp cake with a sweet and sour glaze and caramelized onions—and that’s just for appetizers. I settle on shrimp cake (too good to describe) and seared scamp with citrus beurre blanc as an entree. In between courses, a boyish Marchand bounces out to ask about some of his colleagues in New Orleans. The restaurant is elegant and minimal, with only thirteen tables, and a nice balance between cool mirrored walls and rich burgundy-colored banquettes of leatherette. I pass on Marchand’s famous vanilla bean creme caramel, but accept a double shot of good espresso as fuel for the road.

It’s a three-hour shot to New Orleans, taking the interstate. This time the destination is all, and the trip seems longer for it. Passing over Orange Grove, I toy for a moment with taking the exit to see if the single row of Clarke Wilson’s camellia bushes that developers spared is still thriving in front of the First Church of Christ, as Brian Britt told me it is. But it’s late, and I’ve got a deadline to meet.