New Orleans tourism lull a test of balance

Residents divided over whether they miss drunken debauchery

NEW ORLEANS – For Jack Greenwood, COVID-19 lockdowns brought sadness but also a revelation: He was making more acquaintances with fellow residents – people he might not have noticed before tourism dried up in the French Quarter.

“I’ve seen and met more neighbors now than ever before,” said Greenwood, who has lived in the Quarter for more than two years. “When there’s a normal amount of tourists in town, people’s faces can kind of get lost in the crowd.”

The absence of tourists – and the impending reopening of many of the attractions that draw them – have led French Quarter inhabitants to reflect on the neighborhood’s sometimes precarious balance between the interests of businesses and residents. Some said that before the pandemic, that balance had tilted too far in favor of commerce, putting the quarter’s unique character at risk.

The French Quarter is the 300-year-old historic heart of New Orleans. First settled in the 1700s, ravaged by fire twice, it is 13 blocks long and roughly six blocks wide. It is best known as a tourist spot and commercial district where fine restaurants, antique shops and art galleries coexist alongside tacky Tshirt shops, strip joints and bars blasting live music by cover bands.

It is also a neighborhood. For residents, the same coronavirus closures that have shut down favorite restaurants and bars also brought a welcome respite from snarled traffic on narrow streets, all-hours music and noisy late-night stragglers from Bourbon Street.

Chad Pellerin, a retired attorney and a resident of the Quarter for 50 years, sometimes delights in tourists. She said she has invited out-of-town visitors to get a look inside the late-19th-century Victorian “double” (side-by-side residences in one building) she inherited from her aunt. But she doesn’t appreciate the belligerent drunks who keep her up at night and leave garbage – sometimes human waste.

“I can’t tell you the number of times where I’ve opened the door and people are having a party on the front steps, at 3 or 4 in the morning,” Pellerin said. When she asks them to move? “They cuss me out.”

Others want the tourists back. Kari Mote, who lives in the nearby Bywater neighborhood, is a waitress who lost her job at a French Quarter restaurant when the state shut down on-site dining. She acknowledged the mess left behind by drunks in the historic neighborhood but said, “Everybody knows it’s the deal if they live in the Quarter.”

New Orleans began easing social distancing restrictions ordered weeks ago to help contain the spread of the coronavirus. Establishments with state health department food permits have begun limited on-premises dining. Bars without food permits remain closed, and stretches of Bourbon Street and other entertainment-centric thoroughfares remain largely boarded up.

It provides a bittersweet scenario for Chapman, who said he’s made it a point to get out and walk the streets in the evening: Bourbon Street (named for a French royal family, not whiskey) and the parallel Decatur Street, near the French Market and the Mississippi River. Both are lined with bars and restaurants.

“It was quiet. And there was a beauty in that way,” Chapman said. “But it was also haunting because just so many places were boarded up.”

The quiet has been a balm for those who feel the quarter has simply become too commercial over the past 30 years.