Each month Richard Campanella talks to WWNO about his Cityscapes column for NOLA.com and The Times-Picayune. This month: Bourbon Street.
The Professor of Geography at the Tulane School of Architecture has written extensively about the infamous French Quarter corridor. In January 1926 the first high-end night club opened on the street. Maxime's was inspired by Parisian establishments, and created by the same proprietor of Arnaud's Restaurant. It set off a trend of establishments with food, live music, and drinking designed to fit with the new liberated social trend of "dating."Richard Campanella on the "Golden Age" of Bourbon Street.
This was during Prohibition, and the cover of a night club allowed for alcohol consumption to more easily take place -- behind velvet curtains and in a "respectable" establishment. By the1960sand1970s,Campanellanotes, the action of Bourbon Street had moved from exclusive spaces to public space -- as the drinking of alcohol shifted to the sidewalk and into the street itself.
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