AKA the lies of tour guides…

I never expected how competitive tour guiding is in a laid back city like New Orleans, or how willingly so many lie because they think the false story is better. I want to correct the narrative by using the stories of buildings and people that aren’t widely shared to refine our historical framework of both New Orleans and the United States. I have yet to come across a story where the truth is less interesting that the bland lies typically shared by tour guides — complex stories somehow summed up neatly with a bow in 2-5 minutes with very little to challenge your preconceptions.

My tour guiding inspiration is Rick Steves and his public television show¹. This is why I freely share information I learn. He democratizes traveling Europe for the United States, providing free tours and deep looks into historical spots that some may never be able to visit.

New Orleans has just under 400,000 people and about 350,000 of them claim to be some kind of tour guide. That may be a slight exaggeration (a tour guiding term I’ve learned to hide lies), but the industry of “tourism”, or restaurants and hotels according to the Data Center who counted 207,863 total workers in New Orleans in 2018, employed 14,804 and 11,647 people respectively, according to their 2018 study². This 26,451 total (or 12.7% of all workers in New Orleans) doesn’t include a single tour guide! In contrast, the Port of New Orleans supported 21,700 jobs statewide in a 2019 report by the American Journal of Ground Transportation³.

“In 2022, we welcomed 17.53 million visitors who spent $9.1 billion. In 2019, that number was 19.75 million visitors, with $10 billion of spending,” Rich Collins wrote in a 2023 article for Biz New Orleans⁴. In this article, tour guides are included in a 75,000 count for individuals employed by tourism in New Orleans, or about 36% of workers in 2019. This number is nearly three times the Data Center’s estimate and probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I have also seen estimates that claim 80,000-100,000 people are employed in the tourism sector.

The products of the ports may be the biggest industry in Louisiana, but by many measures tourism outpaces other industries in the city of New Orleans. You’d think there would be plenty to share as a result. Even at the upper estimates of tourism jobs, 100,000, and the lower estimate for tourism spending in 2022 ($9,100,000,000), that works out to $91,000 per person, or plenty to share.

I still have not yet gone on a tour where some bit of untruth was shared, including my own. Not because I intended to lie but because my shallow understanding hadn’t yet connected some pieces. I am quite sure this is true for many tour guides who accidentally spread false information, but I’m not sure how many tour guides are following up to learn more and correct their own narrative. My work with NOLA VIP Services spawned in part from Albee’s desire to get the stories right by taking continuing education courses to learn more, where we met.

Our visitors come from around the world, each with their own personal taste. My tours will not be satisfying to some. I want visitors to have a fantastic experience on the tour that will please them the most. If that is a ghost tour of the mythical creatures that haunt New Orleans, then I am not the tour guide for them. I will burst all those bubbles. However! I would love to recommend an amazing tour guide who could satisfy that desire for those visitors, which gives me time to tour the folks who will enjoy my tour and challenge my (inadvertent?) tour guide lies.

Some Lies I’ve Told as a Tour Guide

I like challenges on my tours so I can grow. When someone questions something I say, I have an opportunity to learn something new or teach them something new. I try to question everything that seems unusual and look for sources to explain it, but some things do not seem unusual to me like they do to people from other places or who grew up in a different time.

Once someone questioned why St. Patrick’s Church claims in its tour brochure that the Irish immigrants wanted a place where God spoke English as French was spoken in St. Louis Cathedral.

“Didn’t they speak Latin?”

Wait…didn’t they? Did I just do a tour guide lie?? Turns out the Liturgical Movement started around the time that St. Patrick’s was built with the aim of helping congregations better understand the scriptures by speaking the vernacular languages in churches⁵. The movement culminated with Vatican II in the 1960s. The emphasis on Latin in churches was de rigueur in the first half of the 20th century, but apparently they spoke vernacular languages commonly before that⁶. I learned a lot because of this question, and now I can share that info and its sources with others.

I also once mistakenly claimed that Gallier Hall was city hall for a different city (lie) and that the third Jackson statue was in Virginia (it’s in Nashville). Actually that last one I did over and over until I was recently questioned! I’ve also said that O’Reilly hung the Frenchmen (they were shot).

I welcome pushback because that’s the only way I’ll get better and stop telling the lies. I’ll never know it all. To quote Dr. Crow, a speaker in my History of Voodoo in New Orleans class at Loyola University, “We are all still learning.” But I can try to absorb the knowledge I brush against and disperse it to strangers as I wrap my soul wider and tighter around the sticky mud and shimmering sweat in the crescent cushioned by the Mississippi, simultaneously the most American city and the most interesting city in America, my home — New Orleans.

If you have a tour guide tale you’d like help verifying like Romeo Spikes and Fire Marks, let me know. Maybe we can solve it together.

Sources:

1. Rick Steves’ Europe. https://www.ricksteves.com ↩︎
2. “Benchmarking New Orleans Tourism Economy Hotel and Full Service Restaurant Jobs” Robert Habans (The Data Center) Allison Plyer (The Data Center). December 7, 2018. https://www.datacenterresearch.org/reports_analysis/benchmarking-new-orleans-tourism-economy-hotel-and-full-service-restaurant-jobs ↩︎
3. “Port of New Orleans supports 119,510 jobs nationally, 21,700 jobs statewide” by American Journal of Transportation. April 12, 2019. https://www.ajot.com/news/port-of-new-orleans-supports-119510-jobs-nationally-21700-jobs-statewide#:~:text=Within%20Port%20NOLA’s%20three%2DParish,%244.3%20billion%20in%20economic%20output. ↩︎
4. “Tourism is Economic Development” by Rich Collins (Biz New Orleans). November 1, 2023. https://www.bizneworleans.com/tourism-is-economic-development/ ↩︎
5. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Liturgical Movement”. Encyclopedia Britannica. March 16, 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Liturgical-Movement. Accessed 5 April 2024. ↩︎
6. “Forbidden Translations: A Brief History of How the Mass Came to be Rendered in the Venacular” by Jeremy J. Priest (Adoremus). January 13, 2019. https://adoremus.org/2019/01/forbidden-translations-a-brief-history-of-how-the-mass-came-to-be-rendered-in-the-vernacular ↩︎