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epilogue In an interview by Times-Picayune journalist Chris Rose in 2001, New York film and literary critic Rex Reed reminisced about his forays into decadent New Orleans as a youth growing up in 1950s Texas and Louisiana. Reed described the city’s French Quarter as “Sodom and Gomorrah at my back door.” He remembered nights spent watching “people doing conga lines in Chanel dresses with sailors and drag queens” at La Casa de los Marinos on Decatur Street, where the French Quarter’s tattered edge flirted with a netherworld of warehouses, seamen’s bars, and wharves along the Mississippi riverfront. Reed’s recollection was of a city still in the process of myth making, a place that still brought together one of the most diverse assortments of humanity, resident and transient, on the continent . The New Orleans of Reed’s memory was, for “a little Methodist kid from Texas who didn’t know what a crawfish was, . . . an eye-opening experience.” The French Quarter, like the city itself, was a place in transition from a unique locale where outsiders marveled at a distinctive culture that seemingly diverged from the mainstream of post-1930s modernization, to a place that consciously cultivated and packaged this image as part of a multibillion-dollar hospitality industry. Like many who visited the city at an earlier stage in the tourist transformation, Reed lamented that while he had “always wanted New Orleans to maintain that sense of laissez-faire decadence that I experienced at La Casa de los Marinos,” the city had become something far different. For all the efforts New Orleanians made to capitalize on tourists’ expectations of their city by safeguarding, enhancing, and institutionalizing its distinctive attributes, New Orleans morphed, in Reed’s words, into “millions of tourists walking around with Hurricanes in the street.”1 Indeed, a tourist visiting New Orleans today would be far more likely to forge memories of navigating a sea of drunken T-shirt-clad tourists on Bourbon Street, sipping fruity, red Pat O’Brien’s drinks from souvenir “go-cups,” and shouting for other tourists perched on iron balconies to toss beaded Mardi Gras necklaces purchased from gaudy souvenir shops that blared Cajun music through open doorways. Like so many Americans who knew New Orleans before the height of its tourist transformation, Reed captured the same sense of loss that gripped 222 new orleans on parade tradition-minded locals. Tourism, in their eyes, had turned the Crescent City into an ersatz caricature of itself, a “Creole Disneyland.” Columnist and civil rights activist Lolis Eric Elie lamented that soon locals’ “main job will be to lend an air of authenticity to a city that once had it in spades.”2 Clearly, tourism has transformed New Orleans, plugging it into a global marketplace in which the tourism industry “manufactures” and “sells” experiences from San Francisco to Venice, Rio de Janeiro to Cairo, Honolulu to Hong Kong. Promising the possibility of discovering and experiencing the unique, tourism instead exerts a standardizing force on cities that cultivate it. Although the sights are different, everywhere one can count on recognized hotels, souvenir stands, shopping malls, and locals eager to extend their hospitality through service and entertainment. In New Orleans one can experience Carnival on demand by visiting the Mardi Gras exhibition at the Louisiana State Museum or purchasing and wearing purple, gold, and green baubles from French Quarter retailers even though actual Carnival parades no longer wend their way through the narrow Vieux Carré streets because the enormous crowds they now draw would severely compromise public safety. One can visit Preservation Hall, the jazz museum in the Old Mint, or any of several jazz clubs throughout the city, but on famed Bourbon Street one is more likely to hear country, pop, or dance music than anything indigenous to New Orleans. Noting the impact of tourism, Jack Mahen, a clarinetist in the Original Dukes of Dixieland from the 1950s to 1990s, said of Bourbon Street: “I don’t go down there much anymore. There’s very little jazz, and now there’s very little of what made the street famous.” In fact, in the opening years of the twentyfirst century, out-of-town investors are firmly entrenched as nightclub operators, helping drive up rents on Bourbon Street between 50 and 100 percent as they mimic the types of entertainment one may easily find in other cities frequented by conventioneers.3 If New Orleans has in some respects adopted many of the characteristics of...

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