Five days after the Bourbon Street Attack, I managed to make my way to the French Quarter. I had a mission to get some footage for a video I’m working on about Storyville. As I crossed Bourbon Street, the brass band nearby started playing “I’ll Fly Away.” Everyone’s mask melted a little. Everyone, just barely holding it together, a little closer to the breaking point. I saw and gave less bright smiles.
In a January 6 article for the New Yorker, Paige Williams got to follow Frank Perez around for the day. Frank is my tour guiding mentor and a true culture bearer for the city. She captured this interaction:
A drunken man wearing Mardi Gras beads greeted him with, “What’s up, family?” Perez didn’t know him. The guy said, “Let me tell you something. This motherfuckin’ scene that we went through? You don’t have to be Black, white, whatever. Love us. Am I correct?”
“You’re absolutely right,” Perez told him.
“I’m American, homie.”
American. Not some strange foreigner with different culture and different values, but American. So many people keep questioning, why New Orleans? We’re just down here minding our business eating beignets and making a roux, swirling a Sazerac waiting for crawfish season. We’ve got no tall buildings in your way and no obnoxious billionaires spoiling the vibe. Why would anyone want to bother lil ole us?
Is this why? New Orleans is that very American place that I’ve been trying to explain. We are American, homie. The embodiment of America from before America existed. The harbinger.
The Most…American
Eight days after the attack, I went to a talk in the French Quarter entitled, “The Royal Street Corridor: America’s Most Literary Neighborhood?” Question mark necessary as so many will scoff. Dr. TR Johnson, a professor at Tulane, thoroughly and beautifully explained that the 13 blocks of Royal Street in the French Quarter have been home to the people who produced the greatest American literature, a claim true of no other 13 blocks in the country.
Many of them were not from New Orleans, but came here, let the city change them, and then changed the rest of the world with their writing. The big ones — Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Kate Chopin — did their most important work while in New Orleans or after their experience in the city, specifically the French Quarter.
In the LGBTQIA+ History of New Orleans class I took with Frank, he shared the revelation that the beginning of Leaves of Grass can be found in the notes Walt wrote as he left the city in 1848. Dr. Johnson confirmed this in his lecture. He also explained that Faulkner, nearly a century later, was an ordinary Victorian poet until he came to New Orleans and started transforming into a Nobel Laureate. Tennessee Williams himself said that he wrote half of his best work in New Orleans. The Awakening by Kate Chopin is the fifth most assigned book by a woman in college literature classes.
The most startling nugget he shared though was that Abraham Lincoln, the man who would sign the Emancipation Proclamation, spent time in New Orleans. He came down the Mississippi on a flatboat, like so many other young men, in 1828 and 1831. The site of open slave markets disgusted him and changed him. A truth that would eventually change America. The harbinger.
Beloved Bourbon
Unfortunately, insomnia meant that I knew about the attack almost instantly. I saw a post on social media from a dancer on Bourbon Street explaining their experience. It didn’t sink in.
My partner woke up a few hours later, “Someone drove a truck through Bourbon Street!”
“I saw,” I replied, still not quite grasping that it was a terrorist attack. I pulled up the live local news on YouTube, and spent the next 15 hours trying to parse the information they fed me. When they started detonating IEDs in the French Quarter, I started to understand. I drank whiskey from a dusty bottle on my bar. Bourbon.
Many people will claim that locals do not go to Bourbon Street, but half the victims were locals celebrating a renewing year. I know how beloved Bourbon Street is, even to my own family. My parents met at Pat O’Brien’s, a tale as old as New Orleans itself. My father is one of those people who came here and never managed to leave. For the record, so was my grandfather. And my great-grandfather.
Evolution
Bourbon Street has evolved. My mom remembers a time when you dressed up to go to Bourbon Street. It was an elegant affair where husbands brought their wives to dinners and shows. Even before my mom, the French Opera House, seat of New Orleans society of the turn of the 20th century, was situated right in the middle of Bourbon until 1919. The area slipped into a slum around this time until the 1920s and 30s saw a revival of art and literature in the French Quarter. In the 1940s, admidst the literati revival scene, the first gay bar in the United States opened on Bourbon Street, Lafitte’s in Exile.
In the 1960s, Jim Garrison became district attorney and made a name for himself in several ways. One of his imprints was his crack down on crime on Bourbon Street. One version of this tale appears in The Last Madam by Christine Wiltz. Another in Cityscapes of New Orleans by Richard Campanella. Seems that Garrison’s efforts to drive out crime drove out the underground businesses that sustained the classy drinking establishments people dressed up to go to. Once sex work and gambling were run out, the dollars they drew didn’t come. Turns out those were the true source of income for the classy bars, and soon dives and strip joints replaced them. My mom remembers when the swinging legs at Big Daddy’s were an actual woman. Drinking on the street instead of going into the sticky floored bars became the norm.
During my childhood in the 1990s, Bourbon Street was sleazy, but still a tourist site. Every time family visited, we walked down Bourbon Street. As an adult, we still make a pilgrimage to Pat O’s for a drink and to thank the booze gods for my parents’ marriage. One of the first times I stayed in a hotel in the French Quarter was when I was about 17 years old. I came with a friend to a singing competition, and we stayed at the Astor Crowne Plaza on the corner of Bourbon and Canal.
One night during college, we decided way too late to drive to New Orleans to go to Bourbon Street. Once we arrived, one of my friends realized they didn’t have their ID. We were barely even 21, so there was no hope of getting in any bars. We drove back to Baton Rouge while the sun rose. I moved to New Orleans in 2008, and the transformation to adult Disney land had begun. They took the swinging legs down that year, but you could still find bars on Bourbon playing porn on every tv screen.
I have impasto smears of memories of Bourbon Street the night the Saints won the Super Bowl in 2010. My partner was there that night. He was new in my life and was the catalyst for our venture to Bourbon Street. “We have to go to the Quarter!” Everyone had the same idea. More people than any Mardi Gras I’ve experienced, a wall bricked with smiling faces and loud WHO DATs. The gravitational pull of the whole world latched onto Bourbon Street. So many bad things could have happened that night. But everyone was so deeply joyous that only someone intent on terrorizing…
America, Mirrored
I’ve taken a lot of friends to their first taste of Bourbon Street. I try to remember the wonder they experience as their senses are assaulted and beckoned simultaneously. Dr. Johnson ended his lecture about Royal Street with a thought about how New Orleans is the mirror the rest of the country uses to see who they are, an idea explored in A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, an idea I’m still trying to understand. Another guest chimed in saying that while other places have become more homogenized in the age of the internet, New Orleans has maintained a unique identity that feels more like home even if you’re from a thousand miles away. Kind of how we can’t understand terror or joy until we’ve experienced the opposite.
At points in history, New Orleans was the biggest city in the South, the largest slave market in the country, the largest community of free people of color before the Civil War. New Orleans is the home of Folgers coffee and Domino sugar along with jazz and gumbo. We get more rain than Seattle, send a lot of crab up to Maryland, and I’ve certainly heard far more stories about lovers meeting in New Orleans than Virginia. But New Orleans isn’t really known for any of these superlatives like other places.
Thirteen days after the attack, I started a part time job in the French Quarter. I have never seen the French Quarter from one perspective. The French Quarter has always been frenetic, always in motion, hyperactive and slow simultaneously, no where to stop and no where to pee. As I approached the building contemplating this, the familiar echo of someone yelling at their demons filled the narrow street and a flicker of fear ran through me, the closest to terror I felt the whole day. I’ll be reading A Hall of Mirrors between shifts and reflecting on the remnants of the greats as I sink deeper into the swamp, with joy.
Recent Essays about New Orleans
Hirsch, Jordan. “What Bourbon Street Stands For: A week after this horrific attack, I can’t stop thinking of what America’s rowdiest street has taught me,” Slate.com, January 7, 2025. https://slate.com/business/2025/01/new-orleans-attack-why-bourbon-street.html
Buckles, Jr. Edward. “Stop Telling New Orleans to be Resilient,” Time, January 7, 2025. https://time.com/7205139/stop-telling-new-orleans-to-be-resilient
Williams, Paige. “Bourbon Street After the Terror: In the wake of the New Year’s attack, party-hard New Orleans staggers to its feet.” The New Yorker, January 6, 2025. https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/in-new-orleans-the-party-goes-on
