Several shootings in the French Quarter during the Bayou Classic weekend (a young local Pat O’Brien’s bartender was killed) put a damper on the holiday spirit, for sure, and certainly hurt the family and friends of this young man. Another life wasted. A friend pointed out that there was a fatal shooting last year in the Quarter during the same weekend. He asked why the city welcomed this event if it consistently ended in a murder of an innocent person. “After all,” he said, “the Bayou Classic is just a football game; it doesn’t really have anything to do with a New Orleans tradition or anything, like Mardi Gras.”
I doubt seriously if tourism officials and French Quarter businesses care when or how the shooting takes place. Of course, they’re concerned because the more visitors perceive New Orleans as an unsafe place, the less they’ll want to visit and spend their money here, whether it be for a football game, Mardi Gras, or one of the city’s many festivals. But I think my friend may have been referring more to the few knuckleheads who show up with guns.
Criminals with guns are probably just as bad as kids with guys. The Times-Picayune ran a chart recently that gave the median ages of those who had been murdered in New Orleans. I think it was about 25.
I don’t know what the solution is; my personal solution is to ban handguns and assault weapons (like that’s ever gonna happen in the US!).
But in a city like New Orleans, whose lifeblood is tourism, we need to do something. Maybe we should make the Quarter—obviously the most-visited place in the city—literally a gun-free zone. It would be illegal to carry or possess a handgun or an assault weapon within the Quarter. Residents couldn’t keep one, visitors couldn’t take one in. Checkpoints, anyone? It wouldn’t bother me, if I felt safer, but then I’m not whiny about airport security either. Oh, hell, let’s just make the entire city a gun-free zone!
Once again, Frenchmen Street is overrun with movie-makers. I spotted Peter Dinklage yesterday running across the street (or his extreme lookalike, which I doubt, since he’s a dwarf). Christopher Walken is somewhere out there on Decatur Street (I’d almost run out to get his autograph). The movie company has been kind (and smart) enough to put out a sign on Frenchmen that says “Businesses Are Open: Come On In…Watch New Orleans Filmmakers at Work”). I guess with my job in an office that overlooks the corner of Frenchmen and Decatur that I find the filmmaking process unbelievably tedious, and somewhat amusing: lots and lots of people (many of whom look totally extraneous to production to me) standing around doing absolutely, positively nothing. It’s very intelligent of the filmmaker to keep the merchants on Frenchmen Street happy, as it’s being used more and more as a movie set.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the debacle on Frenchmen Street during Halloween weekend. Apparently It’s perfectly legal to obtain a special events permit that allowed a rogue “outdoor club” on a vacant lot next to the Blue Nile; there was food, music, toilets and booze. The restaurants and clubs on the street were more than a little perturbed. There was even a legal permit granted that allowed a Jacuzzi on a flatbed truck to park in the street in front of the Spotted Cat. At that time, I recommended (for the third or fourth time) that the Frenchmen Street businesses join together so they can have some input on what goes on on the street that could affect their businesses: not only Jacuzzis-On-A-Truck, but issues on sanitation, safety, street closures, noise issues and more. I’m happy to say there was a meeting yesterday of many of the business owners and operators on Frenchmen, and that issue will soon be resolved. More to come as it evolves.
In the meantime, Happy Hanukkah!
