I spent the day after that horrific New Year’s Day atrocity in the French Quarter, watching how the hospitality sector in the city’s historic core was faring.
It turned into a solo tour of the Vieux Carre, from a morning coffee at the old school diner Mena’s Palace to drinks at the modern cocktail destination Jewel of the South by the end.
It was a day that reinforced the reasons why I love the French Quarter and believe it needs more New Orleans love flowing back to it now.
The French Quarter is a symbol of New Orleans that carries across the world, as the headlines from the New Year’s atrocity appallingly demonstrated.
But as New Orleans people, we have a say in just what the French Quarter symbolizes. Right now, we can invigorate it with our belief in our city and we can do that by taking part in the French Quarter.
It’s more than just opening your wallet to support. It is reclaiming the hub of our city’s hospitality culture as a place where New Orleans people practice New Orleans life.
The French Quarter is tourist central, and of course Bourbon Street is its main line. But there’s New Orleans soul all over. It comes from the people who still live here, who work here and who bring their celebrations here, and also from the visitors who really get it, without whom this city would feel pretty small.
We come for grand restaurants that feel like extensions of family life for the way they keep our traditions. We go from modern restaurants, interpreting the same historic framework with the next generation's ideas.
And I love the bars, peppered through the blocks that can make the French Quarter feel like your own neighborhood, if just for a drink.
And that’s just it: the French Quarter is the old neighborhood for all of New Orleans.
It would take blinders bigger than those on the mules pulling carriages around the French Quarter to miss its many warts and problems. But it’s the enduring beauty and the way New Orleans people animate it with their personality that makes it so gratifying and worth lifting up.
