“It was clear that the French Quarter and its surrounds was the epicenter. In a city that care supposedly forgot, it was one of the spots where care had been taken, where the money was spent. Those tourists passing through were the people and the stories deemed to matter. ”
When I first arrived in New Orleans, the French Quarter was dazzling. Its pastel buildings, quaint galleries, and endless live music felt like walking into a movie. But as the days went on, that sparkle wore off, and I could finally see past the glitz and glamour. Underneath I saw the cracked pavements, the uniformed workers wiping off sweat from their brows from standing in the heat, and a city selling itself bite-sized portions. This was much harder to romanticize.
Everyday we trek through crowds of tourists in search of something “authentic.” But the more I looked, the more I saw how much of the French Quarter was made to perform, to please, and to sell. It really hit me during the ghost tour.
It was exactly as our Professor described it, absolute “touristy schlock.” At first, I played along. I’m not one for spooky stories, but they’re some easy fun. However my tune changed when the guide shared the tale of little boy ghosts who supposedly stole women’s undergarments at the Andrew Jackson hotel, just minutes before launching into the brutal story of Madame Laluarie, a woman who tortured and murdered enslaved people in her mansion.
I was stunned. How could these two stories, one comical and the other rooted in real, traumatizing history be on the same tour as if they were equally trivial? It felt so disrespectful.
At the same time, our class was diving into the deep-rooted traumas of slavery that underpin New Orleans’ history. It made me re-evaluate my thoughts of the city. There was such a contrast, the curated whimsy of the French Quarter versus the weight of the city’s heavy history. How could a place whose story and history has so much pain attached to it, be repainted and rebranded as a city of mystic and partying?
A picture I took of the Voodoo Museum gift shop. No words.
The same discomfort resurfaced at the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum. Vodou (spelled the correct way) is a deeply spiritual practice and an intertwining of Afro-Haitian traditions with Roman Catholicism. But here, it was reduced to dolls, trinkets, and love potions, with no effort to explain the difference between Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo. Even the usage of “Voodoo” felt like a slap in the face, fortifying the long history of demonization of the religion that was used to justify slavery, uphold white supremacy, and stigmatize Black religion.
The lack of these explanations and the gimmicky nature of the museum disrespects both versions of the religion and furthers the misrepresentation of it as a whole.
““The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city”
”
What I was seeing in the Quarter was painfully familiar. It reminded me of Waikiki back in Hawaii, another place that unfortunately rebrands culture for tourism that further silences much of the true history and story of the area. Everything becomes repackaged, commercialized and inaccurate to make it digestible to the palate of a paying customer.
Sarah M. Broom, as a resident of New Orleans East, is able to capture this paradox beautifully. In her book, The Yellow House, she makes many points that show the story of New Orleans that is shared is not the story of its people. The myth of New Orleans not only misrepresents the city, it erases the hardship, injustice, and the very people whose labour and culture are being sold back to tourists.
As a class we visited the ruins of Jazzland, an amusement park in Eastern New Orleans decimated by Hurricane Katrina. We were honoured enough to receive a tour by Elvin Ross, the founder of the production company e.ross studios which now owned the land. He showed us around while sharing the details of reconstruction for the space.
Walking through the overgrown attractions, I started talking to Mason, the project manager. We went on commenting on the scene around us before he asked where I was from. When I told him I was from Hawaii, we immediately bonded over our shared frustrations. He told me of the city post-Katrina: long-time residents were displaced, corporations buying up land from desperate locals, and the subsequent jacked up prices, a problem also happening back home.
I asked him to voice his thoughts of the French Quarter, and he said plainly, “It ain’t all that.”
I agreed.
He said the true culture of New Orleans lives outside of the Quarter: in second-line parades, in the music, and in the voices of the people who live here, not just the craziness of Bourbon Street. He seemed pleasantly surprised when I told him our class already knew of these things, and were joining in.
Another great voice belongs to Brandon, the elderly man who manages the Royal Pharmacy. I finally was able to catch the shop open, and learned the reason was because he was the only one working there. As I sat on a stool at the soda fountain bar, he told me, half-joking, that a pelican (the state bird!) hit the shop’s wall during a storm when he was born, dropping him into the arms of the owner’s wife, and he's been there ever since.
I told him I was a pharmacy student and he shared that the Royal Pharmacy hasn’t had a licensed pharmacist for two years, since the last one retired. In fact, there are no pharmacists in the French Quarter currently, not even at Walgreens or CVS. We chatted a bit about life in the French Quarter. He complained about the maintenance of the historical look, the smells of the streets, and, of course, the tourists.
“Tourists never wanna hear the real history of this city. Spoils their vacation.”
That part.
In The Yellow House, Broom writes of a New Orleans that exist in fragments, a memory of a place thats been paved over and priced out. The New Orleans I’ve come to know is a layered and beautiful city full of joy, rhythm, and resilience. But when it’s history is packaged for mass consumption, what’s left out is authenticity, the people who shape the city, and their stories.
That same complicated feelings Broom expresses is what, I too, feel. As a visitor, I can’t pretend to understand it all. But I can choose to look beyond the dazzling lights of the Quarter and listen to the real voices of the city, the ones ever-present and waiting to be heard.
