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253 12 Locating Bourbon Street Why Here? To all men whose desire [is] to live a short life but a merry one, I have no hesitation in recommending New Orleans. —henry bradshaw fearon, Sketches of America (1819) Bourbon Street happened when New Orleanians realized that their city’s “merry life,” as reported regularly in the nineteenth century by the likes of Henry Fearon, could be sold in the twentieth century to the traveling leisure class. It was forged into the marvelously lucrative perpetual gratification machine it is today through an ongoing civic wrestling match between enterprising plebian proprietors who figured out how to monetize merriment, and educated professionals and patricians who wanted peace, order, and preservation. Bourbon Street succeeded because it supplied the demanded indulgences within a walkable space amid an intimate historic setting, making it maximally appealing and consumable by pleasure pilgrims from places like Peoria. Which begs the question, why did that spatial concentration of bars, nightclubs , and restaurants end up on Bourbon and not some other street? After all, its predecessors were located as far down as Gallatin Street, as far up as Girod, and as far back as the swamp, Franklin Street, and Storyville. Why did Bourbon the Phenomenon not end up on, for example, St. Charles Avenue, Camp, Carondelet, Baronne, Magazine, or other streets in the Central Business District? A handful of nighttime entertainment venues did exist here, and do to this day, but high-priced office space, white-collar jobs, and incompatible zoning would have prevented a critical mass from forming, let alone along a single street. Additionally, the district’s arteries are multilaned, its buildings scrape the sky, and its urban granularity is hardly intimate. And, except for South bourbon street as a social artifact 254 Rampart Street, it was never home to the intrepid immigrants who populated the French Quarter and gave rise to the real Bourbon. Returning to the Quarter, why not Decatur or North Peters? Fronting the river, these arteries bustled with light industry and retail, and had up to four lanes of traffic. Lower Decatur in particular was “Little Palermo”—poor, elemental, and Old World, while upper Decatur had warehouses, trucks, and trains serving the nearby sugar-processing district. Would you want to take your date to a nightclub here? It was simply too commercial, industrial, and arterial to exude the right twilight aura. Likewise Rampart Street, which, from colonial times to today, always had a sketchy feel, not to mention four lanes of traffic and a working-class residential neighborhood on the other side. As Decatur and North Peters were too close to the river and its industrial nuisances, Rampart was too close to the urban and demographic echoes of the former backswamp. What about Dauphine or Burgundy? Readers will recall that Bourbon Street’s predecessor as a rowdy drinking and dancing district was the Tango Belt, centered on upper Dauphine and Burgundy. Could either of these streets have snared the club trade? Unlikely, because beyond the first few blocks, these streets were mostly residential. Cottages and shotgun houses do not make good nightclubs and restaurants . Dauphine and Burgundy simply did not have the right architecture to host Bourbon the Phenomenon, and subsequent land-use zoning made sure of that. Chartres and Royal are different stories. Replete with storehouses and townhouses , these elegant streets, famous in their own right, had since the 1860s laid claim to their share of nighttime entertainment, much like Bourbon. Royal in particular boasted the ca. 1892 Cosmopolitan Hotel, and still has the ca. 1912 Monteleone. Why they did not draw the nightclub economy may well be because they did not want it. The high-end antiquarian trade had come to characterize Royal (and, to a lesser extent, Chartres), and it both reflected and produced an aristocratic ladies’-club atmosphere that was more inclined to sniff at Bourbon Street than to emulate it. Antiques have dominated Royal Street for decades longer than nightclubs have been on Bourbon. Old-line antiquarians were not inclined to sell out to barkeeps and impresarios, and the proprietors of the pricey buildings were decidedly not the working-class Sicilians who owned much of Bourbon Street and the lower Quarter.1 The resulting contrast between Bourbon and Royal became an oft-observed dualism. Walt Disney, who so admired the French Quarter that he reproduced it at Disneyland, is said to have mused, “Where else can you find iniq- [3.144.212.145] Project MUSE (2024...

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