New Orleans has been a "different place" for a long time...

My great-great-uncle told me about driving there with a buddy during college--in the 1920s.

I think one of the early Harriet Potter books included the reference to a man who spent a year there in his youth and had the indiscretion to have experimented with alcohol.

Just a very different place from the rest of the US South, and AFAICT, different from any other place in the US