In the Quarter, the entertainment focus shifted to live music, gambling, burlesque shows, and drinking establishments, dozens of which opened on Bourbon. At the time, Mayor Martin Behrman said, “You can make it illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular,” and while the “it” he referred to was prostitution, the legal nightlife that surrounded that practice quickly filled the Red Light vacuum. Ironically, the shuttering of Storyville’s brothels in 1917 likely accelerated the French Quarter’s popularity as a place to party. jazz) artists weren’t headlining festivals in Montreal or Switzerland - they played for customers who patronized Basin and Bourbon Street’s sweaty brothels and music halls (on a side note, those music venues stopped being quite as sweaty when they started installing round-the-clock air-conditioning about half a century later - some of the first nightlife spots in the world to take that step). Bleed-over from the Red Light District begot a shift in the Quarter, which became less residential and more entertainment-oriented. For most of its history, Bourbon was a modest residential street, populated by a mix of Creoles (New Orleanians of Franco-Spanish descent) and the successive waves of immigrants who have settled the French Quarter.īourbon began morphing into an entertainment strip in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Red Light District of Storyville was established a few blocks away on Basin Street. Like much of the French Quarter, Bourbon Street’s historic architecture owes far more to Spain than France most of the street’s French buildings were destroyed in the Great New Orleans Fire of 1788, when the city was a Spanish colony. The street, then located in the colony of New France, was named for the French royal House of Bourbon (which bourbon, the drink, was ultimately named for). That particular iteration of brown liquor had not even been invented when the street was laid out in 1721 by Adrian de Pauger. First, despite popular rumor to the contrary, Bourbon was not named for bourbon. Let’s start, appropriately enough, with the history of one of the oldest streets in North America. In short, while there’s plenty to discover off of Bourbon, there’s a lot to discover on the iconic street as well that may surprise you.
It’s a thoroughfare with an utterly fascinating history, home to some of the oldest bars, family-run restaurants and gay entertainment districts in the country.
This street is a tourist destination for a reason.