Batista-era Havana on the Bayou

These three books constitute an almost century-long timeline of economic development failures and missteps amid the sensory pleasures and political and street crime New Orleans is infamous for. Mark Souther points out that “New Orleans wears a mask, flaunting its beautiful architecture, delicious food, frenetic revelry, and fascinating folkways while hiding its face—decadent slums, deprivation and crime, and apathy and despair” (pp. 228–9). Both faces of New Orleans, masked and unmasked, the tourist landscapes along the Mississippi River and the working poor ghettos, are to be found in these enlightening and complementary studies.

Some of the earliest surviving film footage of New Orleans dates from just before the United States entered World War I when the Ford Motor Company produced city travelogues promoting automobile ownership as a portal to travel. These frames capture New Orleans just before the period Anthony Stanonis depicts so well in Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918–1945. Long shots panning the city’s smoke-filled skyline might remind one of a typically industrialized center. Most of New Orleans’ smoke, however, stemmed from its unchanging status as one of the world’s most significant transfer points. Rather than production, this air pollution represented ships and railcars passing through, carrying both freight and visitors.

The transitory sources of those wisps of smoke also represented the failure of New Orleans’ business leadership to adapt to changes in the economy first confronted before the Civil War. New Orleans leaders confident in the city’s status as the third largest city in 1840 continued to place their faith upon servicing the cotton and slave trade and chose not to diversify. Similarly, business leaders believed in the natural power of the Mississippi River and did not invest in railroads as Chicago and other cities had. Complacency and a lack of vision characterized the city’s economic elite then and throughout the twentieth century. What little manufacturing existed was tied to the agricultural products served by the port: cotton, sugar, coffee, and grain. The underdevelopment of its manufacturing industries and underinvestment in its human inhabitants combined early on to misshape the city’s economic future.

Tourism need not necessarily doom a city’s economic success in other areas, as San Francisco and other port cities demonstrate. Tourism out of balance, however, can damn a city when the public image is cast as somewhat more family-friendly than Batista-era Havana.

Stanonis’s monograph contributes substantially to the growing field of tourism studies by examining the formative period of New Orleans’ “modern, or mass tourism” industry, he argues. More than with perhaps any other United States city, to understand New Orleans’ precarious existence before and after Hurricane Katrina one must examine tourism’s role in misshaping its economic destiny as well as the perceptions of outsiders and potential investors.

Stanonis connects the origins of the city’s modern tourism industry to the appearance of the mass-produced automobile. The decentralization of transportation represented by roadways and cars following the Great War also meant that passenger railways lost their monopoly over visitors. Seeking to fill a hole in the economy, local business leaders assumed much more active roles in promoting tourism and courting conventions of white professionals. The Association of Commerce and new organizations attempted to reconfigure a city best known before the war for offering businessmen an open sex market as an archaic, romantic destination for middle-class families.

Stanonis maintains an...