Artist's penthouse

This is the staircase leading to the flat in New Orleans we're staying in, in the Garden district near Magazine Street. The owners have a pretty eclectic taste, but the crazy ensemble of objects and images gives the place a very comfortable feel. 
It's 95 degrees outside today and the a/c is having to work hard.  This morning we went to the Whitney Plantation which is effectively a museum of slavery. We learned they worked 16-18 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, regardless of weather. The plantation makes excellent use of oral narratives gathered by the Federal Writers' Project in 1936 which recorded verbatim accounts of people who were alive in 1866. They'd all been children or teenagers at the time of emancipation and there are full-size sculptures by Woodrow Nash of these enslaved children throughout the site. These sculptures are eloquent, but even more so their words which are etched into the various memorials.