Bourbon Street: A History

14. Challenging Bourbon Street: The Rise of the Anti-Bourbons

283 14 Challenging Bourbon Street The Rise of the Anti-Bourbons In true capitalistic fashion, creative niches overlooked or underserved by Bourbon Street enticed entrepreneurs to compete with and drink from Bourbon’s beer. They gave rise to new places and spaces borne of the cultural negative space around Bourbon Street: the anti-Bourbons. Jazz buffs who bristled at the nightly repertoire of tired standards, for example , found an alternative in a smattering of clubs that encouraged the one thing Bourbonites forbid, and that was musical experimentation. All too often, unfortunately, the insurgent venues took the form of “a depressing bar usually owned by a well-meaning hipster, [with] morbid pseudo-modern paintings on the wall,” as one frustrated jazz enthusiast put it. “Such places [have been] in tenuous existence somewhere in the Quarter since time immemorial.” The Canadian-born owner of Cosimo’s Lounge—transplants abound at such places—drew a direct line between his claim to musical creativity and the shortfalls of the neon strip: “Bourbon St. has gone commercial,” he said in 1961. “Even the tourists are looking for a place off the beaten track where they can hear good jazz.”1 Places like Cosimo’s, the Playboy, Mambo Joe’s, the Pendulum, the Joy Tavern, Joe Burton’s, and the Hidden Door (a counterpoint to the Famous Door Bar) similarly challenged Bourbon Street musically. Of particular note was Lu and Charlie’s on North Rampart at Ursulines, which during the 1970s formed the city’s premier, and probably the only, black-owned contemporary jazz club—something that was doubly nonexistent on Bourbon Street. The decline of traditional jazz presented another anti-Bourbon toehold. It inspired Larry Borenstein, an art dealer from Wisconsin who became one of the Quarter’s biggest property owners, to hold recording sessions for old-time jazz bands in his St. Peter Street gallery steps off Bourbon. Tourists sat in to listen, bourbon street as a social artifact 284 among them a couple from Pennsylvania named Allan and Sandra Jaffe. Contributions were collected to keep the musicians going in what some called “Authenticity Hall,” but popularity soon called for more formal management. The Jaffes rose to the challenge in 1966 and took the reins of what had been renamed the New Orleans Society for the Preservation of Traditional Jazz. Aware of the slick and sleazy reputation of Bourbon Street clubs, the Jaffes crafted their “Preservation Hall” as the antithesis: a simple old building where aging gentlemen played traditional jazz for appreciative audiences who sat on wooden benches with no air-conditioning, no food, no drinks, and a spartan interior designed for verisimilitude . Within a couple of years, local music aficionados identified it as “most popular tourist Mecca of the French Quarter, [where] visitors flock in droves to hear the old-timers ‘speak the idiom as she should be spoke.’”2 Designed against Bourbon Street but benefiting from its throngs, Preservation Hall soon became a nationally recognized brand, and its musicians would play Carnegie Hall and tour the world. Never one to pass up a good idea, Bourbon itself got into the anti-Bourbon act, as Dixieland Hall, Maison Bourbon, and Fritzel’s adopted Preservation Hall’s approach, only with nostalgicized interiors and plenty of drinks. Similar experimentalist and traditionalist venues soldier on today in pointed defiance of Bourbon Street, which they perceive as having abandoned its roots and aimed for the wallet over the heart, soul, and mind. Early anti-Bourbons did not spatially cluster; rather they scattered hither and yon seeking cheap rent. What gave them an opportunity for propinquity was a transforming Decatur Street. Into the 1960s, lower Decatur was still the domain of the old Sicilian families, and the nearby French Market continued to serve neighborhood housewives seeking fresh fish and local vegetables. Their departure, and the impending conversion of the French Market into a festival marketplace, left lower Decatur in the early 1970s, particularly the 1100 block, “one of the darkest, dirtiest blocks in the French Quarter,” filled with “winos and bums. . . . [I]t was the slums.”3 Rents were so cheap that the French Quarter’s only health dispensary, run by hippies for hippies, could afford to set up shop there—until it got raided by the police.4 But one person’s slum is another’s opportunity. Consider lower Decatur’s attributes: it was zoned commercial for its proximity to the market. It had liquor licenses galore. It was convenient to downtown residents...