Get your souvenirs here
My annual pilgrimage to New Orleans is a week away. (Both Chaka Khan and Al Jarreau at this year's JazzFest, everyone!) Indisputably, part of the New Orleans and Vieux Carre experience is the T-shirt and souvenir shops. They number many in the Quarter, but are actually limited almost entirely to two streets, Bourbon and Decatur, and stay safely separated from the expensive shotgun-style, courtyard-ed and gardened homes, the city's most elegant hotels, and the plentiful number of art galleries that populate Royal Street. Now some neighborhood groups want them out.
Some of these stores' proprietors are pushy as hell, I will say that (it's a cultural thing), but I accept them as part of the fabric of the neighborhood I so enjoy visiting. Apparently some have been in business for almost as long as Louis Armstrong's professional music career lasted. But why indeed does "this beautiful historic gem (the French Quarter) allow the proliferation of T-shirt shops"? Probably because it's the same neighborhood that tolerates two different Larry Flynt Hustler clubs and lets shitty techno music blare out onto Bourbon from frozen daiquiri shops so that even on warm, unimprovable evenings, Maison Bourbon has to close its doors and windows if the patrons are to be able to hear Jamil Sharif play his horn.
Yeah, these shops are tacky, but if the neighborhood groups are this uncomfortable with the idea of the sacred mixing with the profane-- so opposed to "tacky"-- then maybe the shop proprietors are operating more in line with the essence of the Quarter than are their critics. Besides, I need a new T-shirt this year. And something for my wife. And a Fleur-de-lis necklace. And maybe a pirate hat for next year's Carnival.
posted by CM @ 8:34 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home