The Fritzel European Jazz Club is where to be for old-fashioned jazz. This building has been around for more than years. The nightclubs along Bourbon Street have been there since the s and s. There were more than 50 burlesque shows as well as exotic dancers. This street is for the better part of the day very quiet. One popular festival is the annual Mardi Gras. Bourbon Street is party central for bachelorette parties, bachelor parties, and birthday celebrations.
Lafitte-In-Exile is one of the oldest gay bars in the United States. Most of the gay bars are found at the intersection of Bourbon Street and St. The Southern Decadence Festival which is held in this famous street hosts an array of gay-friendly festivities. These festivities last for the entire week. It attracts more than , participants.
He was appointed Director-General for developing a colony in the territory. It was named by a French engineer, Adrien de Pauger in He named the street after a French Royal family that ruled New Orleans at that time. The French moved to Louisiana in the s. Bourbon Street became an entertainment strip in the late 19th century towards the early 20th century. The street became less of a residential place and more a party district. The nightclubs had jazz artists perform live for the revellers.
The clubs did not have air conditioning but the people were not bothered. Dozens of drinking dens were opened along Bourbon Street that offered live music, gambling, and burlesque shows.
In , about residents of New Orleans lived on Bourbon Street. The Street was heavily populated throughout the Antebellum era. Middle-income families lived on this street. 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 , one enterprise came up with a better idea: instead of convincing people outside to buy drinks inside, why not sell inside drinks to people outside?
One by one, bars and clubs opened tiny window or alleyway outlets through which they sold beer, drinks, hot dogs, and snacks directly to pedestrians. The go-cup was born, and it would soon completely rewire the social and economic dynamics of Bourbon Street.
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.
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