New Orleans used to be one of the country's biggest cities with a great economy and booming culture. The culture is still there, but it seems like the city is in a lot worse state than other comparable cities. I've heard a few people throw around a bunch of parallels with Detroit. Can you build upon this, please?
Thank you.
I'm on my phone so I can't answer in much detail, and I'm also not an expert. I hope what I write here will be interesting but it can't possibly be complete. Like all history, the story of New Orleans is nuanced and complicated and includes many factors other than what I will discuss. but I'll say what comes to mind. First of all, I don't think it's very considerate of you to call it one of the "biggest embarrassments" of the country, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant no ill.
The city was once a wealthy seaport with a lot of rich, educated people running things. It had been at times both French and Spanish and French culture was especially prominent, with a lot of people speaking French in their daily lives. The city became wealthy through cotton and slave trades, and the combination of cotton+slaves. At the time it had a lot of things going for it: it was on the coast and the biggest port in the area, it had a diverse "transatlantic" history, and trade was booming for cotton and slaves.
The things I see as the most obvious contributors to the development into what you find today are: 1) geography and 2) the civil war. What made the city great--its coastal location with a major river--was also its downfall. For a long time the city was reaping the benefits of its location while suffering the costs, and although it might have seen floods and hurricanes from time to time at least it was making money through trade. But as time has passed, sea access has become increasingly less important for trade to flourish, and the location of the city became more of a liability than an asset.
And then there is the Civil War. Obviously, slave trade was not happening anymore after that, and cotton trade changed partly because there were no longer spaces, and the entire South changed a lot through all these and related events.
The history of Galveston, Texas is similar in some ways to the story of New Orleans. Once galveston was a wealthy port town, and although some of the original structures remain from those days, it is now a quite run down, generally poor area that is struck repeatedly by hurricanes.