Mardi Gras is the tale of two cities, the New Orleans that was -- the home of elaborate Carnival floats and fancy dress balls, of coat-and-tie restaurants and Dixieland jazz bands -- and the post-Katrina New Orleans of For Rent signs, recorded classic rock, intoxicated frat boys and parades rerouted to skirt still-widespread devastation.
It's the promise of a million visitors and a billion dollars in tourist trade culminating today, Fat Tuesday, and it's the shopkeepers who close mid-afternoon because the only browsers are really just looking for clean bathrooms. It's a full house at Larry Flynt's Barely Legal strip club, and a dozing hostess at the empty Chris Owens music club. It's Jackson Square, 17 months ago gussied up for President Bush's promise of funding, now with its wrought iron gates locked to keep out the homeless.
It's a beefed-up police force (150 Louisiana troopers backing up the locals) and two shootings near the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. It's quartets of regional mounted police clopping along the boundary of the French Quarter, and the merest handful of mule-driven carriages giving tours. Where once there was a musician or stomp band every few yards, there are at most a handful in the whole neighborhood.
Barometer of the city's rebirth
The success of this year's Carnival season is seen by most New Orleanians as a barometer of the city's chances of rebirth. Last year, when it was primarily a local celebration (and hotly denounced as an inappropriate extravagance for the hurricane-ravaged community), the small crowds and truncated parade schedule were seen as a temporary setback. This year, small-business owners who have been battling bureaucratic and insurance red tape, expensive renovations and labor shortages are desperate for the traditional economic boost.
But there is widespread disagreement about whether Mardi Gras will produce one.
By mid-afternoon yesterday, the balconies of Bourbon Street were packed with bead-tossers, and breast-flashers and thong-wearers of both sexes were out in force. Mother Nature finally made her contribution to Carnival with warmer temperatures, a particular relief to body-painting artists, marching band majorettes and strip club employees out advertising their wares. Lundi Gras, or Fat Monday, as the day before Mardi Gras is now known, brought a full day of music and food along the river. The krewes of Proteus and Orpheus, Harry Connick Jr.'s company, rolled out in full splendor.
Local officials say that crowds have been growing all through the long holiday weekend and point to high hotel occupancy; off the record, other residents respond that being "full" is a relative matter, since many hotels still have floors under renovation. Bad weather in the Northwest has snarled air traffic into the city for days. And at ground level, vendors, buskers and fortune tellers say business is bad, and street crime increasingly frightening. One tarot reader who had relocated to Baton Rouge but returned for Carnival said he hadn't made back his gas money, a sentiment repeated a few hours later by a bead wagon man. Hercules "Hurky" Thomas, a Philadelphia native who's been living in the Big Easy for 20 years, said a recent murder case, in which a woman is said to have given her high-school-student son a gun and told him to kill a rival, had finally convinced him to move back to Pennsylvania. Terri, another fortune teller, said she had been no busier over the past several days than on any ordinary weekend. But she added that she and New Orleans were both born on All Saints' Day, Nov. 1 (the city in 1718), which made the city a Scorpio -- "which is the phoenix, and it will rise from the ashes." She says she'll keep praying.
First-time visitors, who call themselves "Mardi Gras virgins," are genuinely delighted with the pageantry and generally insulated from reports of stabbings and shootings. The city's 27th murder victim of the year was shot at a nightclub Friday night, but local leaders have been quick to suggest that such violence has been occurring mostly in poor neighborhoods where tourists rarely venture.
Deborah Thiessen of Tulsa and her friends rode out from the French Quarter to the upscale Garden District to see the parades in a more genteel manner, with kids playing ball and their parents in lounge chairs along the route. But David Darragh, a business executive who lives here and who was Friday-lunching at the famous Galatoire's, said he and his friends had felt uncomfortable on the parade route a few nights earlier; his wife had set up an online chat room to keep the neighbors informed of crimes not found in the newspaper.
Subtle signs of progress
In other subtle ways, there are signs of progress. French Quarter residents and store owners point to the obvious improvement in garbage collection. SDT, a local company that took over the trash contract a few months ago, has been working through the Quarter twice a day since the beginning of the year, making mornings far more pleasant; and the removal of millions of broken beads, plastic cups and Frisbees every night is a miracle in itself.
Brennan's restaurant, a former carriage house that lost its famous wine collection after the Katrina power outage, was still on a four-day schedule at the anniversary of the hurricane last Aug. 29; it's now open seven days a week. A Bourbon Street eatery that had been vacant until two months ago is now La Bayou, which this weekend is renting its second-floor balcony -- prime real estate for slinging beads and ogling and flashing -- for $175 a head.
And while a lot of New Orleans natives avoid the Mardi Gras madness, the truehearts remain. This morning, iconic clarinetist Pete Fountain was to lead his Half-Fast Walking Club down Canal onto Bourbon Street, followed by what are perhaps the two most famous krewes, the primarily black Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club and Rex, Carnival's king of kings. Fifth-generation resident Brian Begue and wife Karen, who live just outside the French Quarter in the gentrifying Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, will be parading today with a dozen of their friends, dressed in purple, green and gold saris and turbans -- a visual pun on the famous black Mardi Gras Indians -- from Washington Square to Bourbon Street and thence to Jackson Square.
For 24 hours, Rex will rule the city, until the midnight phalanx of mounted police and street sweepers announce the end of revelry. When Ash Wednesday comes, it will be time to tote up the city's bill and read its fortune in the debris.
