I don’t think you can live in the French Quarter of New Orleans unless you’re a pretty tolerant person. On any given day you will encounter blocked streets, drunken tourists, mentally unwell drifters, potholes, screaming football fans, aggressive dogs, car stereos so loud they shake the old buildings to their foundations, and a lot of filth and stenches. The other day, someone left a pile of feces (human or animal was unclear) directly in front of my front gate, and I had to blast the whole area with a hose. It’s not a place for the easily annoyed. 

But it’s also a place of incredible beauty and diversity. Towards the more residential end, where I live, the 19th century architecture is gorgeous, there is lush flowering jasmine, and the sounds of people practicing jazz piano waft through the air. And while the French Quarter is often obnoxious, it is never uninteresting. Wedding parades with brass bands regularly pass by my front porch. So do mule-drawn buggies, naked bike rides, gay pride parades, and people in every conceivable kind of costume. One day you will wake up and seemingly everyone (including all the men) will be wearing red dresses. “Oh my God, what is this?” I ask myself regularly, as I turn a corner and find some fresh weirdness, some gang of vampires or men hauling tubas. A man dressed as a giant insect regularly walks down the street on his way to his job, which is to look like a giant insect. 

The Quarter is only a mile long, and I don’t know if there’s any other place on Planet Earth where you can encounter so many different types of people in such a small geographical area. In the last few months, I have seen CEOs, magicians, blues guitarists, soldiers, steamboat workers, burlesque dancers, Darth Vader, street poets, priests, sex workers, cops, anarchist punks, tuba players, Japanese tourists, pastry chefs, celebrities, and the tamale man in his big cowboy hat. Bourgeois and proletarian, sinner and saint, they’re all here. 18.5 million people a year visit New Orleans, and most of them seem to stop by the 85 square blocks of the French Quarter at some point or another. It is teeming with life all day and night. I love it, and I don’t know if I could ever live anywhere else. 

But because the Quarter contains multitudes, it not only showcases America at its most vibrant, but it also displays a lot of the dysfunctional and unjust features of our country more broadly. As I noted in a video I recorded a few years back on Esplanade Avenue, the juxtapositions around here can be jarring, even infuriating. You see people sleeping on the streets in front of colossal antebellum mansions, and people dealing with addiction slumped in doorways while executives eat hundred-dollar plates in the city’s finest restaurants. At M.S. Rau Antiques, you can buy some of the most expensive objects in the world, such as a Russian Imperial silver punch set from Czar Alexander III ($495,000), a diamond and enamel sword hilt commissioned by the Maharajah in 1903 ($598,000), and my personal favorite, the object I would buy if money were no object and it weren’t hideously immoral to spend a fortune on nonsense when people are dying from poverty: a singing bird cane from the early 19th century, the gold-plated handle of which flips open to reveal a mechanical twittering bird (price available upon request). Meanwhile, a few blocks away at Grace At The Green Light charity, people who cannot afford food and water line up to get access to the very basics necessary to survive on the streets. The contrast is grotesque. 

Because the French Quarter contains everything about America in a one-mile radius, I suppose sooner or later we were going to get a horrific mass killing. The recent massacre on Bourbon Street, in which an ISIS-inspired Texan man drove a truck through the crowd on New Year’s Eve, killing fourteen people and injuring dozens of others, was sadly not at all surprising, because random acts of public violence are a seemingly stable background feature of American life. People were shocked, but they weren’t that shocked, because somehow we have become used to the idea that this just happens sometimes. I walked through the neighborhood a block from Bourbon Street the day after it happened, and while the presence of police tape everywhere and people crying in doorways made it clear that something awful had happened, most things proceeded as normal. 18 hours after the attack, the police superintendent declared that “Bourbon Street is open,” and the brass bands are already back. On the one hand, it’s disturbing that we can all just move on from something like this so fast. On the other hand, what else can you really do except try to go about your life? 

It’s not like there are obvious political implications to this kind of violence. Donald Trump, of course, immediately suggested the attack was proof of his view that immigrants are committing much worse crimes here than native born Americans. This was nonsense, as the attacker turned out to be a U.S.-born Army veteran. (So was the man who, in an apparently unrelated attack the same day, blew up a Cybertruck in front of Trump Tower in Las Vegas.) The attacker does not appear to have had a clear agenda or message, except for a vague Islamic fundamentalism, and seems to have given just as much thought to killing his own family as killing revelers on Bourbon Street. He does not appear to have selected New Orleans for any reason other than the fact that large crowds of partiers gather here on New Year’s Eve. 

Of course, demagogues like Trump will, no matter what, use this kind of incident as fodder for the greater militarization of American life in the name of “security.” But to the extent that there is a public policy angle here, it’s that the government failed miserably to take obvious measures that could have reduced the potential for this kind of atrocity to take place. Five years ago, city officials were warned that Bourbon Street in particular was vulnerable to a “vehicle ramming” attack. They did install security bollards, but these these were “quickly jammed with Mardi Gras beads and stopped working.” (Of course they were.) Then the city dragged their feet on installing replacements, which were not complete by the time of the attack (and would not stop this kind of attack anyway). The federal government bears responsibility, too, because while “the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law created a $25 million fund for cities to install bollards to protect against accidental crashes and terrorism threats … Congress has failed to actually provide the money.” The U.S. is, on a basic level, dysfunctional, by which I mean that its institutions fail at basic tasks that they ought to be able to accomplish. Security bollards are a non-carceral way to provide meaningful protection (as opposed to security theater), meaning that this kind of failing is inexcusable.

I feel very fortunate that nobody I know was killed or injured in the Bourbon Street attack, although it always feels a little weird to be grateful that your friends are okay given that you’re sort of being thankful that it’s someone else’s friends who died. (Like the hurricane victim who thanks God their house was spared while all of their neighbors’ houses were destroyed.) The attack was spookily close to home, only a few blocks from both my house and the Current Affairs office, and near the route that I take daily to get from the one to the other.

Of course, I was unlikely to be on Bourbon Street at 3am myself, not only because I’m a teetotaler who goes to bed early, but because I’m one of those New Orleans residents who avoids Bourbon like it’s a festering sewer (which some would say it quite literally is). Bourbon Street is loud, boozy, smelly, and full of some of the worst music I’ve ever heard in my life. As Richard Campanella writes in Bourbon Street: A History, “most locals, particularly the cultural clerisy … hate Bourbon Street as an odious affront to their city.” Personally, I would never say I “hate” it, just that I don’t personally enjoy being there.

But Campanella’s book is a beautiful tribute to Bourbon Street that makes the case that there is, in fact, a lot special about it worth celebrating. It’s no small achievement, he says, for a small stretch of street to attract so many millions of people to it, and to successfully give them a good time. And he points out that typically the proprietors of Bourbon Street’s clubs and bars have been local, not giant national corporations. Bourbon Street has been built “without the benefit of a corporate structure, a team of experts, a board of directors, or a marketing branch,” formed by “working-class characters toiling individually but prospering collectively through the clever use of space and the adaptive commodification of culture.” Bourbon Street, he says, is not a hideous, aberrant antithesis of the “authentic” New Orleans, but is an inseparable part of the city: 

Hundreds of millions. That’s how many people, over the past two generations, have crammed themselves into a minor and rather middling artery in a secondary city on America’s Third Coast. They made it into one of the most famous streets in the nation, a brand that has diffused worldwide both nominally and phenomenologically, a metaphor in the English language, and the greatest sustained homegrown economic success of its host city. People by the thousands beeline for this narrow space, and parade up and down it nightly, because a rather curt and crusty cohort of shrewd locals figured out what pleasured them and delivered it with panache, while battling constantly police, patricians, preservationists, and pontificators. The street is named Bourbon, the city is New Orleans, and the story is fundamentally American.

Campanella’s book doesn’t make me want to spend more time on Bourbon Street, but it is a good antidote to snooty and disdainful attitudes about the place. After all, it’s just a bunch of people having fun. It’s a place of entertainment and good times. The human spirit lives there. New Year’s Eve on Bourbon Street can be seen as a drunken mess, but at its heart it’s a moment of collective joy, where people have gathered to relax and have fun and be together to celebrate something special. 

New Orleans has had to endure some awful stuff in its time. Hurricane Katrina, of course, was so destructive that people wondered if the city could ever come back from it. It did. The murder rate here fluctuates (it’s currently down), but we’re often one of the most dangerous cities in the country. The inequality is grotesque, the prison system appallingly unjust, and a lot of our infrastructure doesn’t function well (security bollards are just the start). But New Orleans is an impressively resilient city and is a big part of what makes America actually great (as opposed to “great” in the Trumpian sense). Current Affairs is, as far as I know, the only national magazine that makes its home here (others tend to be located in New York and D.C.), and we chose it because there’s just no other place in the world like it. It breaks my heart to see this place suffer again, when just surviving is hard enough. But we’ll make it through, and keep bringing joy to the world, because we always do. In the meantime, please keep this place in your thoughts and in your heart.