Bourbon Street: A History by Richard Campanella (review)

Bourbon Street, one of the four original streets in the city of New Orleans, has evolved over more than three centuries from a middle-class mix of homes and schools to a center of entertainment ranging from the bawdy to the elegant. In this role, it has come to represent, in the mind of many, the city itself.

Geography, as Campanella shows, shaped history. First staked out by France in 1682, La Nouvelle-Orleans was designed and built between 1717 and 1722, angled to follow the Mississippi River and to provide a sound defense against other colonial powers. Rue Bourbon, named for the French royal House of Bourbon, was the fourth street from the river; as the settlement grew, it fell between the busy docks and the elegant Royal and Chartres Streets near the Mississippi River and the less affluent backside of the town, mired in swamps, at the far end. For most of a century, including sixty years of Spanish rule and the eventual Louisiana Purchase, it remained the community’s most populous street, a mixture of residential and commercial properties, of all classes and many ethnicities, including slaveholders and slaves.

The French Opera House, which opened in 1859 and survived for sixty years, was the first outpost of entertainment on the street. For decades, it was the site where the kings of Mardi Gras, Rex and Comus, would meet. The tawdry zones of the city splayed out in a crescent around it. As Campanella points out, the city was destined for wildness, its economy driving its personality. As a port city, it was subject to transience; as a Latin Catholic city, it provided tolerance, in the same manner as its South American and Caribbean basin cousins Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and Vera Cruz. The upward mobility of immigrants drove economic growth, though, in the case of Bourbon Street, it excluded African Americans as well as free people of color.

Bourbon Street as we know it today had its origins during and after World War II, when servicemen from the many camps around the region embarked and disembarked in the city, visited it on leave, and then returned home with tales of its fascination. Drawing from a wide variety of sources, including oral histories, newspaper accounts, and personal conversations, Campanella describes the seedy strip clubs, the jazz-based nightclubs, and the fine restaurants that dotted the street, which, like the city’s economy, rose and fell throughout the decades. In the 1980s, economic stability and increased tourism enabled the street to become the singular mix of bars and restaurants that exists today.

The flaws in this well-researched, well-presented book are few. More footnotes would have been welcome, especially regarding Huey P. Long’s relationship to organized crime (158). One quibble: The Jaffes took over Preservation Hall in 1961, not 1966 (I was an habitué when I lived on Bourbon Street from 1962 to 1963) (284).¹ But, on the whole, Campanella provides an entertaining but still profound historical, geographical, and economic tour of a street that he portrays as vital not only to the prosaic development of New Orleans but also to its more fanciful image—an image that historical and cultural preservationists strenuously oppose. Nonetheless, as Campanella illustrates vividly, in bars around the world and even in Disney parks, Bourbon Street has come to define New Orleans.