Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture, and Race in the Big Easy

6 From a Culture of Tourism to a Touristic Culture: The 1984 Louisiana World Exposition and the Holy Trinity of New Orleans Tourism

From a Culture of Tourism to a Touristic Culture The 1984 Louisiana World Exposition and the Holy Trinity of New Orleans Tourism The Council for a Better Louisiana urges your favorable consideration of a world exposition in New Orleans in 1980, or as soon as thereafter possible. . . . In the judgement of the Council, a world exposition would not only bring a badly needed economic boost to Louisiana but it would also serve as a catalyst for securing many needed permanent public facilities in the state and would be a means of unifying the leadership of the state in programs for advancement. In the economic outlook for Louisiana, a hard fact is that the production of oil and gas which has supported much business activity is on the downturn. Reserves are being depleted and the state needs to promote other bases for economic growth such as tourism. —Council for a Better Louisiana to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, 19771 One hundred years after hosting the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884, New Orleans was again the host city for another international exposition, the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition , the last world’s fair held in the United States. Initial discussions for hosting a major exposition came in the 1960s when a statewide coalition of business leaders formed the Council for a Better Louisiana (CABL) to remedy the state’s lagging economic growth and attract new sources of capital investment. Over the decade, CABL and the Louisiana Tourist Development Commission outlined an ambitious plan of economic development that included the staging of an international ex6 116 position. Economic and political elites, including Louisiana State Comptroller S. E. Vines, Governor Edwin Edwards, and New Orleans developer Lester Kabacoff supported CABL’s plans for a world’s fair that would rejuvenate the state economy. These individuals eventually formed the nonprofit Louisiana World Exposition, Inc. (LWE) to plan and finance the exposition through a public-private partnership between the state and local governments and the local business elite. Fair organizers and planners chose to locate the Exposition on an eighty-two-acre site along the Mississippi River, adjacent to the Central Business District, and encompassing the historic Warehouse District. The major theme of the exposition, “Rivers of the World—Fresh Water as a Source of Life,” reflected the United Nation’s designation of the From a Culture of Tourism to a Touristic Culture | 117 Fig. 6.1. Aerial model of the proposed “master plan” showing the Louisiana World Exposition, Inc. (LWE’s) vision of what the 1984 Exposition would look like along the Mississippi River. The Crescent City Connection bridge is at the bottom left. Also visible are the gondola ride and monorail that circled the exposition grounds every twelve minutes. The large structure with the “inverted V” roof elements served as the exposition’s Great Hall. After the fair closed in November 1984, it was converted into Phase I of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. (Reproduced by permission of the New Orleans Public Library, Louisiana Division and the City Archives) 1980s as the Decade of International Drinking Water and Sanitation (fig. 6.1). In June 1981, the Exposition received formal certification by the Bureau of International Expositions in Paris, and by the end of the year, planners and organizers were moving ahead with site acquisition, construction, and marketing to attract visitors to the fair. The exposition opened on May 12, 1984, to international acclaim and media fanfare , and it closed on November 11 under a shadow of negative publicity and financial trouble. Like expositions in San Antonio (1968), Spokane (1974), and Knoxville (1982), the Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans embraced a strategy of producing a single theme fair that would have residual effects : the construction of permanent tourism facilities and riverfront development to enhance the city long after the fair was gone. In 1981, the Reagan administration alerted exposition officials that it was willing to spend only $10 million on the U.S. Pavilion for exhibitions and other expenses, unlike the $20 million it had allocated for its Knoxville pavilion . Nevertheless, local architects and planners predicted that the exposition would transform the Mississippi riverfront “into a world of pavilions , lagoons, rides, watercourses, floats, exhibits, entertainment, cuisine and music.”2 A permanent $88 million Exhibition and Convention Center formed the centerpiece of the fairgrounds, and several corporations including Liggett and Meyers Tobacco and Chrysler...