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Preface to the Paperback edition New Orleans on Parade was in press when Hurricane Katrina struck the Crescent City. About a thousand miles away, along the south shore of Lake Erie, I struggled in a hastily composed postscript to make sense of the epic devastation on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Lacking a crystal ball and hampered by two years’ separation from New Orleans, my conclusions were necessarily circumspect. New Orleans, I felt, would struggle to repopulate, restart its crippled economy, and reconstitute its distinctive culture, but it seemed that tourism would surely figure prominently in the city’s future. Now that the FEMA trailers and telltale blue roofing tarps have vanished, it is worth revisiting the story of tourism in New Orleans.1 New Orleans is still a city “on parade”: Bourbon Street remains as bawdy as ever, Preservation Hall still enshrines traditional jazz, Mardi Gras’s influence spans far beyond the Carnival season, and hundreds of restaurants continue to prepare Creole cuisine to sate tourist appetites. Before Katrina, international celebrities graced the floats of Carnival superkrewes, and some bought second or third homes in New Orleans.2 Since the storm, many have moved beyond reveling in the city’s aura. New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees sparked a celebration rivaling Mardi Gras when he guided the city’s perennially underachieving football franchise to its first Super Bowl victory in 2010, but he also used his Brees Dream Foundation to draw national attention to the Big Easy’s post-Katrina needs. Likewise , actor Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation used Pitt’s “star power” to keep the plight of the Lower Ninth Ward before the nation’s eyes in an expression of Hollywood ’s altruistic streak.3 HBO’s popular television series Treme, which provides a more nuanced glimpse into post-Katrina New Orleans than short-lived 1990s shows like The Big Easy and Orleans, sells the latest iteration of the city’s brand. The city’s high-profile plight exerted a magnetic pull not unlike Ground Zero in post-9/11 New York. Large bus-tour operators like Gray Line and a host of smaller competitors paraded thousands of visitors through the devastated Lower Ninth Ward and other flooded sections of the city. While such tours had the potential to bridge the chasm between the “tourist bubble” and previously invisible sections of the city where mostly black tourism workers made their homes, Anna Hartnell and other scholars have observed that such tours tended to turn “the tourist gaze x preface to the paperback edition away from the controversies surrounding the storm” and focus it on discussions of the “natural environment.”4 Whether inquisitive, voyeuristic, or impelled to help, millions of visitors have descended on the Crescent City since the floodwaters receded, and their presence, like that of visitors before them, retains its power to shape the city’s future. Katrina is without question the critical watershed in New Orleans since the fall of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Yet, despite the storm’s floodwaters renewing civic leaders’ efforts to address problems of crime, education, housing, poverty, and especially environmental vulnerability—not to mention catalyzing a new spirit that attracted legions of volunteers and newcomers—they washed away neither New Orleans’s overreliance on the low-hanging fruit of the tourist trade nor the ways in which the industry obscured the city’s social inequality. In the face of profound changes wrought by Katrina, tourism continues to loom large in the place once marketed as “America’s Most Interesting City” and recently rated by Travel + Leisure as the “best American city to visit.”5 If Katrina revived dreams of a “new” New Orleans not unlike those of Mayor “Chep” Morrison sixty years before, municipal and state officials and heavily invested hospitality leaders unsurprisingly recognized the enduring centrality of tourism after the storm. Louisiana’s lieutenant governor, Mitch Landrieu, son of former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu, appointed the New Orleans Hospitality Task Force (NOHTF) in 2009 to bolster the city’s tourism industry. The following January, the eighteen-member task force unveiled “Celebrate Our History, Invest in Our Future: Reinvigorating Tourism in New Orleans,” a tourism blueprint drafted by the Boston Consulting Group. The ambitious plan resolved to increase the number of annual visitors from the 2008 figure of 7.6 million (about onequarter less than four years earlier) to a record 13.7 million by 2018, New Orleans’s tercentennial year. It identified the need to...

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