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Sometimes, though, I'm not so sure. In the nearly 30 years I've been writing about New Orleans, part of what I've been writing about is the gradual fading of its foreignness. I suppose yats still hold practice parade the week before Mardi Gras, but in a lot of ways Mardi Gras has become a more American event. The number of people roaming the streets of the French Quarter on Mardi Gras day seems to have increased steadily and the percentage of them in costume seems to have decreased, as that part of the Carnival celebration has changed from a family costume party to another stop on the relentless tour of all- purpose American event-attenders. Mardi Gras turned a corner in 1969 when the Krewe of Bacchus was formed by restaurant and hotel operators to stage a parade tailored specifically for tourists -- a spectacle considerably more lavish than the parades of the old-line krewes. The king of the parade each year was not some anonymous banker, secure in the knowledge that anyone who counts knows who's behind the mask, but somebody like Jackie Gleason or Perry Como or Ed McMahon. Eventually, there was a second Bacchus-like krewe named Endymion. Its king last year was Spuds MacKenzie.
The absence of buildings in New Orleans done in the grand American scale was ordained partly by the sponginess of its ground. Anyone tempted to build a huge building had only to think of Charity Hospital, whose first floor had gradually become its basement. There is a theory that the person responsible for the greatest change in the city was the engineer who finally figured out how to build massive skyscrapers on river effluent. The result was a row of huge oil-company office buildings and, on the edge of the French Quarter, a gaggle of high-rise hotels -- hotels large enough to hold the sort of national conventions that could make every night in the French Quarter seem like the Saturday night of the Tulane-L.S.U. game. The French Quarter, particularly along its river edge, was slicked up for the increasing stream of visitors. As all of that began in the middle '70s. there was some grumbling about New Orleans turning into another Houston. My impression was not that New Orleans / was becoming much more like Houston but that it was becoming more like Houston's idea of what New Orleans ought to be -- a slicker, more conveniently packaged version of itself that some people called a "Creole Disneyland."