A working-class city with a population of just under 500,000, this steamy, decaying, raffish old Mississippi River port has been in a deep recession for a decade and has one of the highest unemployment rates and lowest income levels in the nation. Its crime rate compares with New York`s and Detroit`s and its climate with Devil`s Island`s.
Yet this city in a swamp, with a downtown skyline as unimpressive as Louisville`s and a local accent that most resembles Brooklyn`s, is now the third most popular tourist destination in the country-ranking behind only New York and San Francisco and ahead of the nation`s capital. Some 6 million people crowd into it every year-most coming just to visit an ethnic neighborhood.
Officially called the Vieux Carre (French for ”old square”), the neighborhood is more commonly known as the French Quarter. There isn`t anything like it in America. There can`t be a more enjoyable square mile of city anywhere in the world.
It`s most famous, of course, for Mardi Gras, the 11-day bacchanal and continuous parade immodestly but not inaccurately described as ”the biggest party in the world” by Stephen Hand, director of the Vieux Carre Commission, which, in the easy, relaxed way of New Orleans, more or less runs things in the Quarter.
Of those 6 million visitors, fully 1 million are invariably on hand for the great, exuberant cavort with which New Orleans has celebrated the coming of Lent for nearly three centuries. The revelry subsides a little after Ash Wednesday, but les bons temps roulent on and on as a condition of life in the Quarter. Walk St. Peter Street toward Jackson Square in the wee hours of even the hottest summer night, and if you don`t encounter a band of merrymakers, a pair of strolling lovers and one or more truly strange-looking people, then, well, you must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.
The Quarter has been like that virtually since the city was founded in 1718, when the 10-by-13-block riverfront rectangle was all there was to the town.
How did New Orleans luck out? Why is it in possession of such a unique and colorful urban treasure when the bigger, richer and more powerful cities of the country have made such messes of themselves?
According to Hand, a Westchester County, N.Y., native who did a long stint as a U.S. Senate staff member before studying landscape architecture at Louisiana State University and hanging around New Orleans long enough to get the Vieux Carre Commission job, the French Quarter lives on because of a serendipity involving poverty (for decades the Quarter was one of the city`s poorest neighborhoods) and the New Orleans tradition of laissez faire, or
”let be.”
But mostly it`s because of the people-French, Spanish, German, black slaves and freemen, Italians, bohemian artists and writers, Caribbeans and decadence-loving yuppies-who came in successive waves and delighted in the way the architecture, ambiance and attitudes of the Quarter allowed them to live. ”You feel wonderful in the Quarter because shop doors and windows open right onto the street,” said Hand, whose commission is charged with the preservation of the district. ”There are all those wonderful things in them. You don`t go along a half-block of granite facing and then come to a closed door. Everything you go by has feeling and life to it. It`s the antithesis of, say, Houston and most major cities. And there`s so much life, and so many things going on, that your senses get excited. And you`re less afraid, too, because you feel the presence of people constantly.
”Intimacy and familiarity is very New Orleans. Tourists don`t want to leave the streets. They don`t get to wander in streets like this at home. At almost any time of day, the Quarter is the same way. You go by one-story houses-wood and masonry with doors and stoops leading right into them. You feel the people inside. They`re out sitting on their stoops. They`re up on their balconies and their galleries. You sense their eyes and their presence, and it never leaves you. I can`t preserve this. You can preserve the buildings and make sure they`re all open and felt on the street. But you have to have the people here.”
Inhabited history
Unlike Colonial Williamsburg, Va., and the historic district of Philadelphia, about 5,000 people live in the French Quarter, a few truly strange but most of them ordinary folk, except for their peculiarly casual dress and such habits as keeping on their tables jugs of Tabasco sauce the size of beer bottles.
American cities have belatedly turned to preservation as a municipal concern, but most have so thoroughly obliterated their past with urban renewal and rampant real estate development that there`s little left to cherish.
New York has run so roughshod over its history that it had to re-create its South Street Seaport virtually from scratch as a tourist attraction, and, as Hand noted, no one lives there. Chicago`s Prohibition gangster era produced a folklore still famous around the world. But the first Mayor Richard Daley, obsessed with respectability, saw to the bulldozing of the St. Valentine`s Day Massacre garage and other bootlegger shrines.
Respectability, to be sure, has never been New Orleans` forte. An early French colonial governor of Louisiana, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, once described the local settlers as ”the very scum and refuse of Canada, ruffians who have thus far cheated the gibbet of its due, vagabonds who are without subordination to the laws, without any respect for religion or for the government, graceless profligates, who are so steeped in vice that they prefer the Indian females to the French women.”
As to the women, when implored by missionaries to expel ”loose women”
from the colony, Cadillac replied: ”There would be no women left, and this would not suit the views of the government.”
In the 19th Century, the French Quarter and adjoining Basin section were home to such notorious not-so-grand dames as Gallus Lu, Kidney-Foot Jenny, Fightin` Mary and Sister Sal, a companion for hire who, according to local historian Al Rose, became known as One-Eye Sal after a dispute with Fightin`
Mary. One-Legged Ryan was a sporting lady who perished when an irate gentleman friend yanked off her wooden leg and struck her over the head with it.
The adjacent Storyville, officially sanctioned as a red-light district in 1897 by city council member Sidney Story in a not totally successful scheme to get prostitutes out of the Quarter, was shut down during World War I-not by the city but by the Navy.
The savory and the unsavory
Sin is only one of the Quarter`s cherished traditions. Its most famous and popular is food. As an Irish diplomat once said of the French, ”they know that eating is something you`re going to have to do all your life, so they try to make something special of it.”
The succeeding waves of immigrants took up the habit, combining a Mediterranean flair for sauces and spices with local eatments on the order of shrimp, catfish, redfish, crawfish, sausage, beans and rice to create the spicy soup known as gumbo; the epicurean jumble called jambalaya; a mountainous sausage, mustard and whathaveyou sandwich called the muffaletta;
and etouffee, a stew of crawfish, shrimp, rice and other good things. The fast-food joint is a disdained anomaly in the Quarter, where people will line up for hours to get into K-Paul`s Louisiana Kitchen, or make a long night of dinner at Brennan`s, Mr. B`s or Antoine`s.
And there`s the unrarefied culture. Ragtime and jazz were largely the inventions of New Orleans` black community. Whites became exposed to it in the whorehouses and on the streets blacks used for their remarkably joyous funeral possessions.
Although New Orleans is a town where you can get a drink or a bottle 24 hours a day (48 hours a day during Mardi Gras), modern-day jazz clubs that depend on liquor sales to survive have had a hard time of it. Still, joints like Pat O`Brien`s, Mahogany Hall and Preservation Hall jump and thrive, the latter without selling a drop of liquor. For $3, you get to stand or sit on the floor and drink in as many sets of the purest New Orleans style jazz you`re likely to hear anywhere (if you request ”When the Saints Go Marching In,” it`ll cost you an extra $5; on some nights, $10). Street musicians perform at all hours almost anywhere, for whatever you want to drop in the hat.
New Orleans has a stuffy, socially connected, rather prissy art museum, but the Quarter is and always has been as much a loving home to painters, sculptors and photographers as Montmartre and New York`s SoHo-as the proliferation of galleries along Royal and Chartres Streets attests. In the archives of the Historic New Orleans Collection, you can examine the original prints of the famous photographer Ernest Bellocq, immortalized in the Louis Malle film ”Pretty Baby,” whose subjects are not celebrities or society ladies but the prostitutes of Storyville.
French Quarter laissez faire has included a tolerance for almost every legal form of human behavior, no matter how bizarre, and a tendency to wink at some of the not-so-legal ones, as long as no one is getting hurt and the disturbance isn`t so great. Street performers and a rich variety of just plain weirdos cavort as uninhibitedly on Sunday mornings in the Quarter`s Jackson Square as they do during Mardi Gras. The palmists, psychics and fortune tellers are so numerous, they have their own business association.
The Vieux Carre police station, commanded by Chief George Bougeois, a renowned local photographer, has little in common with the stations in Chicago, or any other city. Outside the front entrance is a sidewalk cafe. Horses are tied to trees on the lawn. The walls of the cavernous room where the desk sergeants sit are covered from ceiling to floor with sketches of famous 19th Century Americans.
”The cops are sort of the ringmasters of Jackson Square,” Hand said.
”With their friendliness and understanding, they set the tone here. Ask them for directions, and they`ll gladly walk you to where you want to go.”
In the same friendly manner, the Quarter has survived by absorbing its invaders rather than resisting them. The French embraced the Spanish, rather warmly, to produce the Creoles. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and Andrew Jackson`s 1815 victory over the British brought in ”the Americans,” though most passed through and settled in ”uptown” New Orleans. The social acceptability of mulattoes, even in slavery days, brought them into the mix as well. Black people, as slaves or freemen, have always coexisted with whites in the Quarter.
Near the turn of the century, because of immigration, the Quarter became a largely Italian neighborhood, though its Mediterranean character remained the same (only two street names have been changed in the Quarter`s entire history). The artists and writers (Sherwood Anderson, Tennessee Williams, etc.) who followed were preservationists by nature, as were the early yuppies who joined them.
`We are different`
A sprawling city in area with a largely stagnant population, New Orleans has never experienced the developmental pressure of other big cities. The Depression brought all growth to a halt, but with a wary eye to the future, the city in 1936 created the Vieux Carre Commission to keep the Quarter unspoiled.
A city ordinance now prohibits structures higher than 50 feet in a wide swath around the Quarter. The commission, assisted by the police, who view gaudy business signs far more sternly than they do gaudy humans, enforce strict zoning and use codes designed to keep all the Quarter`s 2,140 buildings as they have been.
”It`s not a matter of taste,” Hand said. ”It`s a matter of what is authentic. Our concern is not just over someone`s business sign, but what changes might do to le tout ensemble-the entire place.”
Homeless people drift into the Quarter every night to sleep-largely for reasons of safety-but drift away again during the day. There is a large gay population, but, according to Hand, ”it`s not confrontational.” Both male and female prostitution exists, ”but you have to go looking for it,” he said. Many now think the street performers in Jackson Square have gotten out of hand, but they`re being encouraged to control themselves before the city has to.
The section of the Quarter nearer the river tends to consider itself superior to that over by Rampart Street and what was Storyville, but first-rate one-bedroom apartments can be had in very nice locations for as little as $400 a month.
The Quarter`s biggest preservation worry has to do with the latest and biggest invading force: those 6 million tourists, and the people who profit from them. Were it not for the commission, the Quarter could quickly fill up with T-shirt shops, tourist hotels and bars.
The most major preservationist controversy, having to do with the Quarter`s waterfront, was lost by the hard-core conservationists. With the approval in referendum of 67 percent of the Quarter`s residents and 71 percent citywide, the highly contemporary Aquarium of the Americas was erected next to the Mississippi at the foot of Canal Street (named for a canal that was never built), opening last year, and a linear riverfront park was established next to it. Purists fear this could lead to large-scale, tourist-oriented development similar to New York`s rather ersatz South Street Seaport and Baltimore`s glitzy Harborplace.
Hand doesn`t think so.
”We`ve got an 18th Century layout, 19th Century buildings, and 20th Century use. We`re nine years from the 21st Century and there`s no reason to believe we can`t accommodate whatever comes our way.
”New Orleans doesn`t have to put on a show for tourists to try to be different. We are different. We really are. I think when we may get ourselves into trouble is when we try to be what we think people want us to be, instead of just ourselves. It shows through.”
