For many New Orleans locals, Bourbon Street is a place to be avoided: a thicket of trashy T-shirt shops, classic rock cover bands, and badly behaved tourists. But when historian Richard Campanella published Bourbon Street: A History (LSU Press) in 2014, he argued that the street was rich with culture and history, and deserved sympathetic attention. What may look like a tourist trap, he argued, is in fact abuzz with authentic culture, if you look at it the right way. Campanella spoke to Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to defend the reputation of one of America’s most popular and yet most disdained streets. 

Robinson:

First, could you remind us a bit of what’s on this small 5,000 foot stretch of street and what makes it such a fixture of the city? If someone had never heard of Bourbon Street, how would you describe it to them? 

Campanella:

Let’s cover the basic facts first. Bourbon Street is a narrow one-way street measuring exactly 5000 feet long, with thirteen of its blocks in the French Quarter and one and a half in the Faubourg Marigny. It was laid out in 1722 as one of the original rues of the nascent French colonial outpost of New Orleans, founded four years earlier. It runs along the backslope of the natural levee of the Mississippi River at a consistent elevation of 5 to 6 feet above sea level. Bourbon Street today presents an ensemble of historical architecture, spanning from the 1770s through the 1920s, which is generally representative of the city’s downtown built environment during those 150 years, in terms of typology, style, size, adornment, programming (use), and urban granularity. The upriver half of Bourbon Street is commercial in the most rambunctious sense, but after a transition zone on the 900 block, it becomes an astonishingly tranquil residential neighborhood.

That commercial section, from Canal Street to just past St. Ann Street, hosts a nightly concentration of perambulating humanity like few other urban spaces. It has structure, regularity, and spatial logic to it. Figuring out why—specifically why here, why this particular street—and when, and who, and how Bourbon Street works, was the focus of my research about fifteen years ago. Bourbon Street: A History (LSU Press) came out in 2014 as the first full academic investigation of this place—this phenomenon—and it remains really the only book about Bourbon Street, aside from photo essays or potboilers.

Robinson:

What would you encourage people to think about or observe when they next take a stroll down Bourbon Street (as they navigate the various obstacles and human chaos)? 

Campanella:

Notice how businesses blur the line between indoor and outdoor space, by throwing open doors (despite heat and cold), by removing tables and chairs in favor of bar stools at counters, and by vending  through apertures such as carriageways and doorways. They know the action is in the street.

Robinson:

When did Bourbon Street first become Bourbon Street? Has it always been an infamous site of revelry? Has it changed over time? 

Campanella

Bourbon Street was just another city street from the 1720s through the 1850s, with no salient characteristics. It “became Bourbon Street” over the next century, 1860s through 1960s, with a number of inflection points.

The first came right after the Civil War, when the French Quarter experienced an economic decline, and the upper Quarter became rife with concert saloons, gambling dens, and brothels. Bourbon Street had its share, but it also had theaters and, most famously, the Old French Opera House, which gave it a little class as well as a nocturnal entertainment scene.

The second inflection point came with the decline and closure of Storyville—the legal red-light district located five blocks behind upper Bourbon—during 1914 through 1917, when sent the nighttime economy seeking a new home. It found one in the “Tango Belt” around Rampart and Burgundy streets in the upper Quarter, until this district came under police raids in the early 1920s.

At around that time, Bourbon Street made a key move by offering a new social innovation, the “night club,” also known as supper clubs or niteries. Unlike concert saloons, which were male-dominated spaces where “decent” women would not be seen, night clubs catered to couples, serving dinner and drinks (despite Prohibition), and featuring named entertainers; importantly, they had doormen, which imparted an air of exclusivity. Night clubs made Bourbon Street fancy—a place you dressed to the nines and proudly took your date—and their spatial clustering enticed bars, eateries, and trinket shops to open adjacently to tap into the foot traffic and cash flow. Bourbon Street had become locally famous.

Then came World War II. Servicemen by the millions trained in Southern boot camps and took their R&R at New Orleans, including my own uncle. They bee-lined to where the bars, clubs, and restaurants were all conveniently concentrated. When they went home after the war, veterans became pro-bono “ambassadors” for Bourbon Street, spreading the word about the tantalizing strip, and making it nationally famous.

The next two decades are often thought of as being Bourbon Street’s golden age, of burlesque clubs and colorful characters. And it was—but it was also strictly segregated racially, and rife with illegal gambling, B-drinking scams, prostitution, exploitation, and other organized criminality. The back-of-the-house swindles had been subsidizing the glittery floor shows in the front of the house. When District Attorney Jim Garrison cracked down on Bourbon Street vice in the early 1960s, many clubs lost their illicit revenue streams and closed, as did others later in the decade, when hippies scorned all the old squares going to hear old-time Dixieland at some overpriced club. Bourbon Street was in trouble.

But around 1967, it came up with a clever solution: instead of convincing people outside to buy drinks inside, why not sell inside drinks to people outside? Merchants and bar owners began “window hawking”—that is, selling drinks straight through open windows and doorways—and let the show happen for free on the pavement of the street. Drink in hand, spectators became the spectacle; the action shifted from private indoor space to public outdoor space. Thus was born the nightly pedestrian parade, and it’s been going ever since. Clear through to New Year’s Day.

Robinson:

What aspects of the street’s history have been forgotten? 

Campanella:

It was a place where a number of entertainment innovations were first offered to New Orleans. It once had a Chinatown. For that matter, it was once a francophone Creole neighborhood, and later largely Sicilian. It was home to the last great bastion of French Creole performance culture, the Old French Opera House, until it burned down in 1919.

The Bourbon Street we know—and love, and hate—today was formed inadvertently by working-class characters toiling individually but prospering collectively, through the clever use of space and the unapologetic commodification of culture. Bourbon Street is at once “the biggest disorganized street in the whole country,” as the late Earl Bernhardt (co-founder of Tropical Isle) told me, and a well-honed economic engine that employs thousands, pumps hundreds of millions of external dollars into the city’s economy, and single-handedly produces imagery and repute about an entire metropolis—for better or worse.

Robinson:

Bourbon Street is both loved and unloved. Obviously it’s a hugely popular tourist destination, so many people enjoy it. But you mention that many locals “hate” Bourbon Street. They “view it as tasteless, inauthentic, and immoral, and worry that it stigmatizes the city.” Why? 

Campanella:

Bourbon Street from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s was campy. The Oyster Girl and the Tassel Spinner were proudly featured for their stylish eroticism. We laugh at them today, and spoof them in irony, but they were presented earnestly, with the intent to dazzle and titillate. Mid-century Bourbon nightclubs had enough decorum to make the kitsch campy.

What happened on Bourbon Street in the 1960s-1970s was that the earnestness went out of the camp and left behind only the kitsch. It sold well nonetheless, because the nightly parade of tourists had no collective memory. So the service got lazy, the merchandise cheapened, the bands lost their edge, the strippers let their bodies go, and Bourbon Street became, in the view of most locals, a tasteless and vapid strip with a bad case of cultural sclerosis.

And Bourbon Street doesn’t necessarily disagree. Or agree. One of the benefits of being a self-organizing aggregation is that Bourbon Street cannot take offense. In fact, Bourbonites really don’t give a damn; if they cry “alligator” tears at all, they do so all the way to the bank, thank you. And sclerotic? Hardly. Those who don’t adapt go bankrupt; those who survive must be giving the people exactly what they want—and that may well be tasteless.

Robinson:

You’re a local, but you don’t hate Bourbon Street. In fact, you’re fascinated by it, and think that the disdainful local view misses important aspects of it that are impressive and worth celebrating. So tell us, what’s special about Bourbon Street?

Campanella:

What’s fascinating about Bourbon Street is that it brings out love and hate in people. Even the hate is interesting! Americans on either side of the culture wars hate Bourbon Street—but they hate it for entirely different reasons. Traditionalists on the right hate Bourbon for its iniquity; progressives on the left hate it for its inauthenticity. The right hates it for its commercialization of sin; the left for its commercialization of culture. The right hates it because it is dangerous pretending to be safe; the left because it is safe pretending to be dangerous. The right, because it’s funky and honky-tonk; the left, because it’s neither. The right, because it makes the bourgeoisie indecent; the left because it appeals to indecent bourgeoisie.

To me, that’s what special about Bourbon Street. It runs hot and cold; it delights and it outrages. If everyone loved Bourbon Street, it would be, well, Jazz Fest.