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chapter 6 “Creole disneyland” But no one need worry. In spite of all the time and efforts expended by preservationists , the Vieux Carré will ultimately wind up a Disneyland with only a historical backdrop to distinguish it from the present California and Florida originals. —mary m. morrison (1989) On October 30, 1971, New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) motorcycles led a procession of horse-drawn carriages, hoopskirted southern belles, and a Dixieland brass band departing from the statue of New Orleans’s founder Jean Baptiste LeMoyne , Sieur de Bienville. One of the carriages conveyed Marcel Robidas, mayor of Longueuil, Québec, Bienville’s onetime home. The mayor, along with the French and Canadian consuls, several New Orleans dignitaries, and New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu, rolled through the narrow streets of the French Quarter, ending their circuitous route at Bienville and Dauphine Streets outside the Chateau LeMoyne, the last of the “sugarcake imitations” completed under a grandfather clause in the city’s hotel moratorium, passed two years earlier. A syndicate of New Orleans investors backed by a major Houston development firm built the hotel, which replaced a modern French Quarter–style parking garage that the Vieux Carré Commission (VCC) had approved only a decade earlier.1 In their attempt to paper over the public outcry against French Quarter hotels by fabricating a connection to the city’s founding and its French heritage, the officials at the dedication reflected a budding relationship between city hall and the expanding tourism industry that manifested itself more than ever in the 1970s. This relationship contributed to the transformation of New Orleans, especially the French Quarter and the downtown riverfront, into a place that responded to white tourist expectations of what New Orleans should be, leading one observer to characterize the Vieux Carré as a “Creole Disneyland.”2 Mayor Landrieu entered office in 1970 with a keen conviction that New Orleans needed to capitalize more aggressively on its tourist image. Economists’ warnings that the city could not realize its potential while remaining dependent on tourism, shipbuilding, and the port went unheeded. Landrieu’s ebullient, energetic persona, along with the gleaming skyscrapers that now soared above a 160 new orleans on parade skyline little changed since the Great Depression, created an atmosphere of optimism about the city’s future.3 City hall had long been involved in tourism through its management of the French Market and Upper Pontalba Building, regulation of French Quarter façades, and law enforcement, crowd control, and sanitation during Carnival. But the Landrieu administration marked the arrival of unprecedented efforts to shape the tourist experience through redeveloping and enhancing the cityscape, marketing the city’s distinctive image, and balancing competing interests in the public spaces impacted by tourism. This heightened municipal involvement continued into Dutch Morial’s mayoralty, when the city also joined the state and federal governments to build a mammoth convention center and host a world’s fair. This chapter demonstrates the broadening municipal influence over New Orleans tourism between 1970 and 1984, which set the stage for the elevation of tourism as the city’s only remaining hope for progress in the troubling years that followed. The tourism boom of the 1970s and early 1980s cannot be understood apart from a series of profound changes that swept New Orleans in the wake of the civil rights revolution—the election of a prodevelopment and socially progressive mayor who offered hope to an increasingly impoverished populace; expanding exploration of offshore petroleum reserves; and the growing strength of new business leaders who eclipsed the political, economic, and, to a lesser extent, social supremacy of the city’s power establishment. The transformation of the city’s political and economic order which became apparent in the 1970s overturned many of the conditions that had helped preserve New Orleans as an anomaly in the modern South; it also hastened the city’s modernization and the expansion of tourism to become its leading industry. It did not, however, lift the city’s poor out of their miserable lot. As historian Arnold Hirsch argues, one of the most critical factors in bringing fundamental change to New Orleans was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which slowly enfranchised African Americans who had been largely shut out of municipal politics since the 1890s. The election of Moon Landrieu in 1970 owed much to the black vote, which had risen to nearly three-tenths of the city’s electorate on the eve of his campaign. When Landrieu faced Jimmy Fitzmorris, the old...

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