New Orleans Musical Legends Park Bourbon Street Life-size statues of local musical legends line this park, which is a sort of quiet respite from the noise and thrum that lines this portion of Bourbon. Leave the lemon wedge and salt at home. Chris Owens Club by Cheryl Gerber. Her live revue is equal parts playfully naughty and a showcase of a living legend.
Tropical Isle by Cheryl Gerber. They taste like candy, but they are very potent. It also has a lovely courtyard and a big balcony. We have to give this spot credit: it was an early adopter of karaoke, back when people sneered at the idea of karaoke in a bar.
There are also dueling pianos. Take a seat, enjoy the tropical ambiance, and order a specialty drink — the Hurricane, of course. Bourbon Street Honky Tonk Bourbon Street One of the five locations of the Tropical Isle chain with potent drinks and, as you might have guessed from the name, live country music. The walls are adorned with masks, gris-gris bags, spell candles, and all kinds of other cool magical paraphernalia. Check out the handmade voodoo dolls fashioned from Spanish moss, and have yourself a consultation — these folks are true believers.
Ann streets is known as the Lavender Line, which marks the beginning of the LGBTQ section of Bourbon Street you may also be subtly tipped off by the enormous rainbow flags. Oz is one of the more popular gay dance clubs in the city; expect drag queens, shirtless dancers, and all the rest. The Historic New Orleans Collection. Americans by this time were increasingly venturing out to see their country.
Industrialization had helped raise the ranks of the middle class, and families had more disposable income to spend on leisure travel. New railroads made once-arduous journeys swift and comfortable, and new parks and resorts presented enticing destinations. In , a councilman named Sidney Story crafted an ordinance forbidding prostitution from all areas except sixteen contiguous blocks behind the French Quarter, where, by default, it became legal.
A later amendment forced concert saloons and other sexually themed venues to locate nowhere else but the aforementioned space, which came to be known as Storyville.
Businesses of the upper French Quarter reeled from the shift of nocturnal entertainment to Storyville. But it would not remain there for long. It was at this point, during Prohibition, that Bourbon Street gained a key advantage in the nighttime entertainment scene. Unlike in concert saloons, an air of exclusivity circulated in nightclubs.
Restaurant service made nightclubs a total-evening experience, and patrons danced, as most arrived as couples, quite different from the male-dominated scene of concert saloons. Nightclubs catered to the liberated lifestyles to which women in the s were laying claim; here was a place you could bring a girlfriend or wife and feel safe, entertained, and exclusive.
After Prohibition, and despite the Depression, Bourbon Street had attracted roughly three dozen clubs and bars. It was locally noted as a fancy nightspot, but all but unknown nationally. All that changed when World War II broke out, and millions of servicemen and war plant workers found themselves crossing paths in New Orleans.
Over the next twenty years, capacious burlesque clubs with elaborate shows and renowned entertainers operated door-to-door with bars and fancy restaurants. There was a little Chinatown on the block, and while renters lived in the garrets, working-class folks mostly of Sicilian or Creole descent lived in the residential blocks downriver.
Until , the Desire streetcar line, made famous in the eponymous play by Tennessee Williams who once lived around the corner , ran down the entire length of Bourbon to Desire Street. Itinerant photographer on Bourbon Street, Residents of the French Quarter, which was gradually gentrifying in this era, bitterly fought Bourbon bar owners over vice, noise, signage, litter, architectural transgressions, and other flashpoints.
Like the rest of New Orleans and the South, Bourbon Street was also strictly segregated, and was pointedly unfriendly to African Americans in any role except that of entertainer or laborer. Bourbon Street changed dramatically in the s. Most significantly, the newly elected district attorney Jim Garrison, aiming to appeal to voters with a reformist anti-vice crusade, calculated that burlesque clubs were costly operations with big staffs and could only turn a profit if they ran illicit activities on the side.
By cracking down on the illegal but lucrative activities in the back of Bourbon Street clubs, Garrison made the legal but costly main attraction untenable. Clubs closed left and right during —, and were gradually replaced by tawdry joints and junk shops whose operating costs were low enough to turn a profit. Hippies and rubes started to outnumber couples on fancy dates, and businesses repositioned themselves accordingly.
The decline of the traditional burlesque scene meant that visitors increasingly strolled up and down the street past the clubs and bars, even as barkers cajoled them to enter.
In , a whopping New Orleanians actually resided on Bourbon, and it would stay heavily populated all through the Antebellum era. Can you imagine that, for decades, the infamous boozing and flesh-peddling destination that is Bourbon St was once filled with moderate, mixed-race, middle income folks just going about their lives?
It boggles the mind. Thank goodness they rebuilt, or today there would be no cheap T-shirt shops selling hot sauce and Mardi Gras masks to mark your visit to NOLA. In , the impressively named Charles Boudousquie managed to finagle over a hundred thousand dollars to open the French Opera House on Bourbon and Toulouse Streets, which he touted to best even the most venerated opera houses of Paris. A cold one for less than three bucks? This is New Orleans ingenuity at its finest.
You can still catch the excellent Latin night at her namesake club weekly on Bourbon St. John, The Meters, and so many more.
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