(4 of 5)
Something like that might have happened anyway, but it became inevitable when the world suddenly found itself with too much oil and even Houston wasn't like Houston any longer. The oil glut dealt New Orleans a mighty blow that went beyond the loss of oil-related jobs. After 50 years of depending on state oil revenues to help finance basic services, the city is so lacking in a normal tax base that a lot of New Orleans residents are shocked at the notion of paying any property tax. In the cushy days of OPEC prices, nobody seemed to notice that the port business was sagging. There were once something like 18,000 working longshoremen in New Orleans; there are now 7,000. New Orleans has virtually no manufacturing anymore, and it's short on the sort of assets that might attract any. A lot of people who could afford to leave town have left town. A lot of the working poor have been replaced by welfare poor. New Orleans has been poor before, of course, but this time there's an edge of desperation in the talk about the city's financial problems. I've heard New Orleans compared to the heir of a mildly dissolute family whose males have always got by on charm and a modest trust fund: the money has finally run out, and he can either get to work or head for the men's shelter. "It's still a lot of fun to live here," a friend who has lived in New Orleans all his life said recently. "It's just a shame we're in collective Chapter Eleven."
A long stretch of river, from a Rouse development on the site of the World's Fair to the refurbished Jax Brewery on the edge of the French Quarter, is now basically an upscale shopping mall of the sort that in other parts of the country has at times made me feel that I've been overexposed to exposed brick. In the way New Orleans views tourism, the spirit of Bacchus has emerged triumphant over the ways of the old-line krewes. There are now plans to fill one of the gaps on the river with an aquarium, partly because market research has shown that New Orleans is thought of as a party town but not as a place to bring the kids. The French Quarter has half as many permanent residents as it did ten years ago; New Orleans has three times as many tourists as it did ten years ago. In the '60s, there were about 7,000 hotel rooms; today there are 27,000.
Some of the preservationists find it ironic that they saved the riverfront from an expressway to turn it over to Benetton and chocolate-chip-cookie boutiques. Some people talk with dread about the city's becoming a display ("It's only a matter of time before they have us all down there parading around in period costumes"). But the grumbling is remarkably muted. Many people seem to have come to the conclusion that New Orleans has no choice but to go all out as a convention town. When I was in Atlanta recently, a friend of mine there, thinking of New Orleans' traditional cynicism and Atlanta's traditional boosterism, said, "New Orleans sees having a national political convention as a chance to take some money off the rubes. Atlanta sees having a national political convention as An Opportunity." Not exactly. New Orleans sees it as a way to get more conventions.