Holiday Special Episode
Tourism in NOLA: Then & Now
Sightseeing tourists in early 20th century. Louisiana Digital Library, State Library of Louisiana.
Public debate, for example, on the question of how twenty-first-century cities and towns might effectively grapple with—and, in the case of New Orleans, remove—monuments that have long stood as prominent and celebratory reminders of “Lost Cause” mythology are taking place concurrent to discussions on how to complicate existing interpretations of our city’s past.
Erin M. Greenwald, “Forum on Black New Orleans: New Orleans Public History and the Domestic Slave Trade.” The Journal of African American History. (Fall 2018): 656.
OCW Taylor, “The Crescent City Pictorial.”
OCW Taylor Papers, Amistad Research Center, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University. 1929.
Although Black business owners were excluded from New Orleans’ Association of Commerce, many businessmen established their own chapter of the National Negro Business League.
Photo from CreoleGen, ca. 1917
‘Gentrification’ in 1937
when “Vice Raids” swept the French Quarter
Lafayette Daily Advertiser.
March 25, 1937 & April 2, 1937
The Travel Writers
Grace King
New Orleans the Place and the People. MacMillan & Co, 1895.
Harnett T. Kane
Plantation Parade: The Grand Manner in Louisiana. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1945.
Lyle Saxon
Old Louisiana. The Century Co., 1929.
Eugene Cizek remarks on his mentor and inspiration, Harnett T. Kane, when accepting Kane’s namesake award for preservation and education, in recognition of Cizek & Sensat’s work at Destrehan Plantation Museum and the Education Through Historic Preservation program. Eugene D. Cizek and Lloyd Sensat Jr., “Address Given as Joint Recipients of the 1991 Harnett T. Kane Award for Preservation / Education,” April 7, 1991. New Orleans Public Library, Manuscripts Collection, Education Through Historic Preservation.
CW: offensive & dated language
The themes of “old and new” existing simultaneously in New Orleans has featured predominantly in tourist literature from the outset of the local industry.
Pictured is the first page of content (xviii) in The Louisiana Writers’ Project Guide to New Orleans, published in 1938 under the Federal Writers Project and FDR’s Works Progress Administration.
Read online at Archive.gov.
New Orleans & Company
“New Orleans & Company Statistics: Tourism Drives our Economy and We Drive Tourism.”
For the history and controversies of the Vieux Carre Commission:
William H. Forman Jr., “New Orleans Historic Preservation Law; Its National Impact.” Committee on Urban Environment: Historical and Architectural Controls. The Urban Lawyer 13, No. 4. Fall 1981. Read on JSTOR
For a comprehensive history of tourism in New Orleans:
Anthony J. Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. University of Georgia Press, Athens, 2006. Buy from UGA Press
For a biographical article on author Lyle Saxon:
Anthony J. Stanonis, “‘Always in Costume & Mask’: Lyle Saxon and New Orleans Tourism.” Louisiana History 42, No. 1. Winter 2001. Read on JSTOR
For a discussion on local tourism and its impact on locals:
Timothy J. Tyrrell and Robert J. Johnston, “Measuring the Performance of Convention and Visitors Bureaus,” in Accounting for Social Value. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Read on ResearchGate