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chapter 7 a City on Parade . . . we are so desperate for money that the gradual sacrifice of a heritage will not strike many as too high a price to pay. —james gill (1986) What we’ve known and loved has been turned into a theme park to amuse visitors. —henri schindler (1998) In 1986 Sidney J. Barthelemy, an Afro-Creole and soon to be New Orleans’s second black mayor, began corresponding with the development division of Walt Disney . “As I sit here virtually on the eve of my inauguration as this great city’s next Mayor,” he wrote, “I cannot help but think of what awesome responsibilities I face in turning things around for our most deserving citizens and how much a Disney project here would accomplish precisely that.” The mayor-elect hinted at the severity of the conditions that befell New Orleans in the mid-1980s. For Barthelemy, snaring a Disney theme park for the city’s downtown riverfront seemed the perfect way to shore up New Orleans’s sinking economic foundation. “We simply have to have you,” he told a Disney representative.1 Although his overtures to Disney failed, Barthelemy further strengthened city hall’s close relationship with a cadre of tourism-oriented developers and promoters who had begun to reshape New Orleans. If Mayor Moon Landrieu had seen tourism as an industry his administration could stimulate to ease the burden of the shipping and oil industries in steering economic development, Barthelemy was the first New Orleans mayor to view tourism as the city’s only hope of fighting urban decay. In the 1970s and early 1980s, ballooning oil and natural gas prices had yielded a bonanza in tax revenues for the state treasury in Louisiana. Coupled with generous federal grants to cities, oil money enabled the city government and the private developers with whom it partnered to portray New Orleans as a veritable boom town. In the early 1980s, Times-Picayune articles carried headlines such as “Boom isn’t coming to N.O.—it’s here” and “Are we overtaking Atlanta?”2 But beneath the veneer of prosperity lay intractable problems, including a poorly educated, low-skilled workforce, decaying neighborhoods and schools, rising pov- 186 new orleans on parade erty and unemployment rates, white flight to the suburbs, and a shrinking tax base worsened by a state-approved homestead exemption that freed nearly all New Orleanians from paying property taxes. In addition, assurances of economic expansion ignored the reality of a modernizing port that required fewer workers, an oil industry that despite billions of dollars’ investment employed few New Orleanians , and a burgeoning tourism industry that generally replaced losses in the transportation and manufacturing sectors with low-paying service jobs. Then, in the span of a few months in 1984 and 1985, the Louisiana World Exposition went bankrupt, leaving thousands of new hotel rooms empty. The price of oil plummeted, casting a pall over the city’s seemingly bright future. In the next few years, the city lost about sixty thousand jobs and as many residents. Dutch Morial , already seeing federal support for cities drying up, had warned of the dangers of counting on oil, shipping, and tourism as substitutes for manufacturing jobs, but his successor Sidney Barthelemy felt compelled to embrace tourism. So did many newer business leaders, who by the 1980s had relegated the Carnival elite to little more than coordinators of parades and debutante balls. In the midst of the oil bust and the tourism-led recovery that followed, the impact of tourism on the city’s public policies, its landscape, and its culture only grew. In the 1940s New Orleans’s leading newspapers rarely referred to tourism. A half-century later it seldom lay far from the center of any discussion of New Orleans in the local and national media. The increasingly impoverished city staked its hopes on the tourist trade, forgoing tackling the difficult problems that could not be resolved in the short span of one or two mayoral administrations, and its landscape and culture revealed the extent to which tourism reshaped local priorities to match outsiders’ expectations. The French Quarter became commercialized to the point that the preservation-minded residents who had played such an important role in resurrecting the village often found themselves unable to endure what they could no longer control. While the Quarter and adjacent downtown area became more intertwined as a single tourist district, blurring the longimportant Canal Street boundary that had historically separated them, the...

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