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."
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 the 1960s and 1970s, Campanella notes, 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.