I joked to Richard H. Levey, my fellow reporter down here, that traditionally one could divide tourists to New Orleans into two markets: Bourbon Street and Royal Street.
Bourbon Street tourists are the conventioneers, the football fans, and the kids on spring break. New Orleans is made up of Harrah’s, go-cups, and good-natured sleaze. New Orleans is the ultimate frat-boy party town.
Royal Street tourists are the strangers and the sojourners. New Orleans is made up of the food and the music and the art of living. New Orleans is the ultimate old-cathedral Mediterranean town.
Or to force the metaphor to include a topical reference: Bourbon Street tourists think of the public Mardi Gras parades; Royal Street tourists think of the private Mardi Gras balls.
To be fair, there are plenty of Bourbon Street tourists who are also enthusiastic, and sometimes knowledgeable, visitors to the museums and galleries in the Warehouse District, from the D-Day Museum to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. And there are far too many Bourbon Street tourists for whom even the delicious, if low-brow, pleasures of Christmas at City Park would be a stretch.
Now in the interests of full disclosure, not only was I a Royal Street tourist, but also was I planning to emigrate to New Orleans. I’ve been visiting the city every couple of years for more than two decades and have developed a deep affection for the local culture, which delights in the rituals of civility and an appreciation of making small things – ephemeral things – wonderful. It is whether gumbo is better with file or with okra and who makes the best of each. It is not just the music at Mulate’s and Tipitina’s, but also at a row of dive bars in the Faubourg, jumping with house bands and local talent.
Of course, after Hurricane Katrina, the question becomes will there be any tourists at all coming to New Orleans, let alone amateur immigrants like me.
In its favor, New Orleans does have a long tradition of positioning itself and its history to its political and economic advantage. The tradition began in 1803, when the citizens of French and Spanish descent resented and resisted the American takeover of their ports because of the Louisiana Purchase.
In a paper presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Kate Holliday, University of Texas, Austin, suggested that “[a]s the city’s American political identity began to take hold, the previously dominant idioms of French and Spanish identity began to fight for their own survival. The shape and planning of the city in the 1830s shows the survival of the physical demarcations between French, Spanish, and Anglo territories.”
Holliday went on to note, “Though New Orleans’s post-colonial identity was founded in no small part on the survival of its colonial identities, interestingly enough, by the 1830s notions of the “old quarter” and is connections of French and Spanish ways of life were already hybridized and fictionalized, the result of the intermingling of European traditions with each other and with those imported by African and Caribbean slaves.”
Scarcely half a century later, Lafcadio Hearne would crystallize those romantic notions of Creole cultural superiority over crass American capitalism. As New Orleans’s economy changed and the city had to rely more and more on the kindness of strangers, it was easy to turn its already fictionalized legacy into attracting gentlemen callers, whether those gentlemen, and not a few ladies, were Bourbon Street tourists or Royal.
But others differentiate between the legend and the legacy. Andrei Codrescu, the writer and NPR personality and commentator, whose books and essays about New Orleans have made him something of the Cavafy of the Crescent City, sent me a blunt e-mail: “The legend is nothing but a concoction invented by marketers to make money from authentic culture.” He added, “Tourists should come here to witness the real thing, not the simulated kitsch of ‘legends’.”
For Codrescu, what he finds unique and important about New Orleans, others would find as another part of its legend. “What attracts people here is precisely New Orleans’ resistance to America; we are a rebellious city.”
He concluded, “I don’t believe slick lure will work to bring anybody back. We need real opportunities: affordable housing, good jobs, better schools, respect for genuine culture. The language of advertising is a priori self-defeating for this purpose.”
I’m not sure the Bourbon Street tourist is having any less an authentic experience than the Royal Street tourist. Perhaps each experience is authentic in its own way. However, positioning and marketing one at the expense of the other does raise the larger issue of only preserving that history which can be used to sell goods or services. Or cities. The question becomes urgent if the marketing of New Orleans could destroy the very essence it is trying to save.
