Bourbon Street: A History

8. How Bourbon Street Flourished: Late 1920s–Mid-1940s

105 8 How Bourbon Street Flourished Late 1920s–Mid-1940s In some ways, the “nightclub” represented the next in lineage after the concert saloons of the late 1800s. Both venues brought together entertainment and alcohol (legal or otherwise) in dark, stylized spaces scented with the possibility of sex. Unlike in concert saloons, however, an air of exclusivity circulated among nightclub patrons, constructed via fine attire, high prices, membership, a cover charge, a hat-and-coat check, and a velvet-curtain barrier. Restaurant service made nightclubs more of a total-evening experience rather than just a watering hole, and earned them the name “supper clubs” or “dinner clubs.” Thematic décor, usually imaginative and sometimes garish, aimed to evoke swankiness or exoticism. Entertainment bookings were eclectic, including comedians, dance acts, contests, and novelty performances, but eschewing anything so vulgar as vaudeville. The cancans and all-girl revues of a few decades ago had given way to a single stylish dancer engaged suggestively but tastefully in “a pas de deux between her body and a spectator’s gaze.”1 Music generally entailed bands with identities and soloists with personalities trying to “make it” in show business, rather than nameless house pianists churning out atmospheric melodies with their backs to the audience. Patrons danced, as most arrived as couples, quite different from the male-dominated scene of concert saloons. Nightclubs benefited from, indeed catered to, the liberated lifestyles to which women in the 1920s were laying claim. Whereas women were usually servants, performers, or prostitutes in concert saloons, in nightclubs they were patrons as well, participants in the emerging social trend of “dating,” in which young men courted flappers with bobbed hair and cloche hats by treating them for a night on the town. The more dazzling the evening, the better the chance to score another new social dare: premarital sex, fame and infamy 106 or something close to it. Nightclubs created classy and safe private-domain public spaces in which these newly permitted social interactions could take place. The nocturnal appearance of “decent” middle-class women on Bourbon Street and the upper Quarter in the 1920s helped regender an urban space that for decades had been, at least at night, decidedly male and decidedly sketchy. Making such areas “commodious to women,” as historian J. Mark Souther has pointed out, formed a key step in their conversion to safe modern mass commercial tourism; their presence took the dangerous edge off male-dominated spaces and replaced it with decorum.2 These were also spaces where see-and-be-seen social networks could be woven, where social status could be upgraded through conspicuous consumption, and where new technologies such as electricity, ampli fied or recorded music, and air-conditioning made for a luxurious and novel escape from daytime drudgery. Upwardly mobile husbands and wives loved them as much as courting couples, and for the single man-about-town, nightclubs could also provide scintillating female entertainment akin to the cancan dancers of old—only with less petticoat and more sass. The model for nightclubs emerged from France during the Belle Époque, and is best exemplified by the famous Maxim’s on Rue Royale in Paris (1893), which would set European social trends into the twenty-first century. Similar venues appeared subsequently in other European and American cities, either diffusing as an innovation inspired by the Parisian original or independently arising from similar urban cultural milieus. While the Grunewald Hotel’s “Cave” (1908) was probably the first modern nightclub in New Orleans, Bourbon Street offered the perfect environment for this new concept to take root, and it would soon cluster here more than in any other street in the city. Nightclubs got an unintended helping hand from a Louisiana state law passed in 1908 known as Gay-Shattuck. This social reform measure is best known as the law that segregated whites and blacks to separate bars, prevented women from patronizing venues that served alcohol, and banned musical instruments and performances from alcohol-serving places. But the Gay-Shattuck Law did not prohibit women, alcohol, musicians, and performances from coexisting in establishments that also served meals, such as restaurants or hotels. Mixed company , cuisine, libations, musical entertainment: these were all the key ingredients to a “club.” And because few people drink and dance during the daytime, the enterprise became a “night” club.3 What first brought nightclubs to Bourbon Street was the creative mind of Arnaud Cazenave, a colorful French-born wine and champagne merchant who...