Bourbon Street

Text Box: Reporter’s Notebook On Bourbon Street, the Party Picks Up By KEN WELLS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 30, 2005 NEW ORLEANS -- For those concerned that the lusty spirit of New Orleans was broken by Hurricane Katrina, don't worry. It's 9:45 on a recent night on Bourbon Street, the booze and sleaze epicenter of the Big Easy, and the place is shrugging back to life. By actual count, 14 bars, including two strip joints, are now open and there are at least a dozen more bars that have turned on their marquees and opened their doors in the rest of the French Quarter since power was restored on Monday. The Steak Pit at Bourbon and Toulouse is doing its part to jumpstart commerce after Katrina so rudely crashed the party. On the sidewalk outside, a gangly man on a stool holds a huge printed sign stapled to a two-by-four advertising "Huge Ass Beers to Go." It turns out he's in business, too. For a buck, you can take his picture. "C'mon man. Help a refugee!" he says. "Snap me!" We pay our dollar and wander inside, wondering exactly how huge these leviathan beers would be. But in a sign of the fits and starts that will plague New Orleans for a long time to come, the taps have malfunctioned. Tim Ponthieux, the amiable bartender, kindly holds up a plastic cup into which the beers would have gone save for mechanical problems. (Two quarts of beer for $3 bucks does seem like a bargain.) There are exactly nine people in the Steak Pit, including a three-man, no-name band just finishing its one set of the night with a raucous version of the Beatles "Can't Buy Me Love." Nearby, Toni Ester, who moved to New Orleans recently from Chicago, is being interviewed by two journalists from Paris. "This place has soul, and the soul of this city can never die," she says into a boom microphone shoved across the bar. "We just have to get the people back in here," she adds, making a sweeping gesture at the mostly empty bar. Bruce Wilson wanders in trying to do his part. He's wearing a floppy green fishing hat dangling with lures and a mismatched gray, short-sleeved Homer Simpson shirt. His Social Security number is written in Magic Marker on his right arm, along with the words "Diabetic" and "No Morphine!" "This is just in case," he says—"in case" meaning, should there be another hurricane or calamity and he has to be rescued, unconscious or worse. He has a good chance of being found: National Guard troops or law enforcement officers probably outnumber citizens 6 to 1. Mr. Wilson, in his late 70s, describes himself as a die-hard New Orleanian with a French Quarter apartment just a couple of blocks away. He stayed through Katrina, left when the looting started and returned "for good" several days ago. He has been making rounds through the neighborhood, and turns on his digital camera to show off some of what he saw. "That's the nice Red Cross lady," Mr. Wilson says, flipping through other shots of troops, pets, cops, friends and then a girlfriend. She appears much younger than he—30 years at least--and is lying naked on a bed. At Razook's and the Bourbon Street Blues Club, people are milling about but in numbers far smaller than during the good old, tourist-rich, pre-Katrina days. Still, no one is really complaining. "It's good to see people again, and all the people here are people who came to help," says Angie Marks, the sole drink server at the Blues Club. On a normal night, she would be one of seven or eight bartenders "and that doesn't count the shot girls." "We'll be all right," Ms. Marks adds "eventually." That's pretty much the prognosis at the Famous Door, which reopened Wednesday afternoon. "Man, it had been slow," a bartender jokes. "One drunk guy sitting at the end of the bar getting eaten by flies." Then came dark and the bar got busy with lots of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers badly in need of a drink. At Deja-Vue, the first Bourbon Street strip club to reopen after the storm, the crowd approaches pre-Katrina levels. There are at least 50 people in the joint and the Bud Light is flowing. On stage, two women are, uh, dancing. They're in a safe place—surrounded by off duty cops, firemen and soldiers. We meet a police officer from Kansas who is taking this in and all he can say is, "Yeah!" Out on the sidewalk, we catch up with a Louisiana State Police officer who'd come in, in uniform, just to make sure there was no trouble inside. He says: "This is the perfect core to jumpstart the bars—cops, firemen, soldiers. Man, what else could they ask for?" "Oh," he adds. "And journalists, too."

Hawking customers at the Steakpit on Bourbon Street.

© 2005 Ken Wells