I was driving cross country on my way back to Los Angeles from spending Christmas in Tampa. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and I decided to spend a couple of days in New Orleans.
I’ve been going to New Orleans since I was 17 years old when my high school band, the Valdosta Wildcat Marching Band won a band contest, and our prize was to march in a parade that went through the French Quarter on Bourbon Street. I’ve returned many times since then. Eaten amazing food and listened to wonderful music. I’ve also been kicked out of bars and had some pretty wild times in New Orleans. Yet, I hadn’t been back since before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the Quarter and the Ninth Ward.
I’d heard that New Orleans had made a comeback, but I was wondering what COVID-19 effect would be on the Big Easy.
I’m sad to say that I think COVID-19 has decimated New Orleans almost as bad as Hurricane Katrina did. Why would I say something like that? Because the economic damage that I saw when I walked through New Orleans and the French Quarter was prolonged and it had been going on for months. There was not the catastrophic devastation that happened with Katrina, however the continual loss of life for over a year and the economic downturn that came with the pandemic in its own way had as much of a devastating effect on New Orleans as the hurricane did.
I checked into a hotel about eight blocks away from the Quarter. The hotel gift shop was closed, and the bar was closed, and the restaurant was closed. The reservation concierge behind the desk told me that the staff had literally been cut in half over the preceding months. After settling in my room and relaxing from the road, I walked down Canal Street to Bourbon Street and turned into the Quarter looking for some real New Orleans cuisine. As I walked down Canal, business after business was boarded up or had for lease signs in the windows. There was a lot of street construction going on so New Orleans is not completely dead, but the theaters were shut, restaurants were closed and even the few package stores that were open looked like they weren’t doing well.
As you turned into the Quarter you noticed that a lot of the store fronts were shut up. Now this was a weekday, but it was also 7:00 PM at night and as anyone who’s ever been to the Quarter knows that it never sleeps. Restaurants were closed, bars were empty or if they were open, they were only doing takeout drinks and there would only be one employee working. And even the bars and restaurants that were open were not full and some of them closed early. Pat O’Brien’s, a bar that I have never seen closed in my entire life was shuttered for the two days that I was there. The Quarter was a shell of itself. There were still tourists and there were still crazy people running around doing crazy things, but it certainly wasn’t the jam-packed Quarter that I remember from days gone by.
The only area that was full that I could tell was around Jackson Square. The restaurants around the square seemed to be doing OK especially Cafe Du Monde where you went to get chicory coffee and beignets. Yet even the street merchants and artists who sell their work around square seem to be struggling. There weren’t many street musicians who were out performing. In the two days that I was there I literally saw only one street jazz band. While the art galleries and souvenir shops around Jackson Square seemed to be attracting a lot of business, elsewhere in the quarter there were signs for apartments and storefronts for lease everywhere, and empty buildings with going out of business signs on every street.
Now maybe people were waiting for New Year’s Eve or they were waiting for Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to come into town so Drew Brees and the New Orleans Saints could beat them in the NFL playoffs (which did not happen), yet there was just a feeling as you went from street to street that there was a pall over the quarter. I don’t know what the rest of New Orleans was like. Maybe restaurants are doing well. Maybe people were going out and shopping, but the tourist area of the French Quarter was hurting really badly. And it was so very sad to see such a lively and vibrant place brought to its knees by an invisible enemy that no one has an answer too.
New Orleans is a resilient city. It will come back once people have found a cure for this pandemic. I just hope there’s enough of it left for people to want to visit when they do return.
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