ABSTRACT
In 1959, a business consultant named James C. Downs Jr. advised the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce to retain both history and honkytonks in its promotion of the Vieux Carré, but he warned them that this valuable economic asset could be “killed” by the excesses of either “history buffs” or the “entrepreneurs of sex and sin.” Instead, it is the balance of the two, he said, that makes the Vieux Carré what it is: “the single largest day-in, day-out concentration of out-of-town visitors that exists anywhere in the United States,” “a major factor in New Orleans reputation as one of the four most ‘popular’ convention cities in the nation,” and an influence on decisions to locate regional and national offices in the city. The responses of a Vieux Carré Commission (VCC) spokesperson and of a Bourbon Street bar owner give credence to Downs’s warning. The first claimed “we could clear out Bourbon St. from one end to the other and … [not] affect the French Quarter one-half of one per cent.” The other retorted, “People don’t come to New Orleans to see the buildings and antique shops; … they come to New Orleans to let their hair down.” 1 By 1959, the French Quarter’s reputation for the uneasy coexistence of historic preservation and vice—legal or illegal—had been decades, even centuries, in the making. At stake in that coexistence and its reputation are issues of land use complicated by competing stories about economic growth and social justice.
