Bourbon Street: A History

11. How Bourbon Street Stabilized: 1980s–Present

222 11 How Bourbon Street Stabilized 1980s–Present The 1970s crisis, which everyone agreed marked The Street’s nadir, did not go unnoticed by New Orleans’s new chief executive. A progressive reformer with a strong civil rights record and a knack for modern urban planning, Mayor Moon Landrieu realized that the past administrations’ complicity with or insouciance toward the strip could not continue. Bourbon Street’s chronic problems had become acute, and something had to be done. But he also recognized that Bourbon Street required special treatment. Investing too many scarce resources into that sin pit seemed to enrage one half of local society, while cutting it loose had the other half up in arms. So Mayor Landrieu did what most politicians would do: he formed a task force. To Landrieu’s credit, the Bourbon Street Task Force was not just another bunch of overtasked and underfinanced civil servants cobbled together to placate indignant voters. Chaired by former city chief administration officer Richard Kernion and funded at thirty thousand dollars, the task force united key agencies with local planning-design firm Marks Lewis Torre Associates to study Bourbon Street’s history, conditions, and communities; survey stakeholders; analyze results ; and propose improvements. Landrieu made it clear in the opening press conference that the stakes were high. Bourbon Street, he declared, was “an institution that makes New Orleans famous throughout the world.” This wasn’t about just any street, he explained; it was about a signature street, one that spoke on behalf of the whole city to the nation and world. If Bourbon Street went, so went the city.1 The six leaders of the Task Force got started with a tour of the adult-entertainment districts in Boston, New York, and Atlanta—a potentially scandalous junket if ever there was one. But the participants took their work seriously. They met 1980s–Present 223 with counterparts; toured Boston’s “Combat Zone,” New York’s Times Square and Little Italy, and Atlanta’s Peachtree Walk and the Underground; and came away with new understandings. They also discovered that Bourbon Street, “with its particular problems, was not typical of the usual adult entertainment districts throughout the country.”2 Next the task force met with Bourbonites on their home turf. Landrieu himself opened the initial meeting at Al Hirt’s nightclub on February 24, 1977. The good news was that, nationwide, Americans still felt there was no place quite like Bourbon Street, and no one wanted to sterilize the strip. Rather, the task force sought to identify problems and remedy them with the full backing of local government, so long as merchants were equally committed. The bad news was that Bourbon could no longer continue the status quo. Worse, it no longer held a monopoly. Competing spaces for the nighttime entertainment dollar were popping up locally and nationwide. After Councilman Mike Early, Chairman Richard Kernion, and Vieux Carré Commission Director Lynda C. Friedmann had their say, the Bourbon merchants and commercial property owners stepped to the microphone. They were mostly male and middle-aged, with a mix of Sicilian, Creole, Irish, Anglo, and Chinese surnames, and they did not see eye to eye on everything. Hoteliers, for example, were at odds with club owners about noise abatement. And feelings were mixed about the pedestrian mall: those who adapted to it via window hawking wanted to keep it, while traditional club owners smarted at the promenade’s impact on their nightly attendance. Nearly everyone wanted to “get rid of,” in their words, litter , congestion, prostitutes, loiterers, bums, panhandlers, pot smokers, kids, and Hare Krishnas—and not necessarily in that order. Some added flower peddlers, shoe-shine boys, barkers, false advertising, and obscene language. One attendee noted that the hosing down of sidewalks created stagnant pools of filthy water. Everyone wanted leniency on the issues of signage, open-door policies, and ampli- fied music. Some tacitly acknowledged that The Street had an excess of massage parlors and cheap strip joints and a deficit of classy entertainment, but they let the officials know that “good burlesque doesn’t exist on the Street because clubs can’t afford to pay the cost,” evidence that the Garrison raids remained a sore subject even fifteen years later. The attendees offered some suggestions: to encourage everyone present to join the Vieux Carre Action Association; to designate a portion of the hotel/motel tax for police and sanitation, and—among the more creative—to install an arch over...