Frenchmen Street: What the Treme Saved After Katrina

After Katrina, the question everyone was asking was whether the Black cultural community that had made New Orleans what it was would come back.

The French Quarter would come back. It always comes back: the tourism infrastructure is too large, the economic incentive too powerful, the buildings too solid. What was uncertain was whether the musicians and the Social Aid clubs and the second-line tradition and the Mardi Gras Indians and the neighborhood fabric that actually made New Orleans New Orleans would survive the displacement of a quarter million people across fifty states.

Frenchmen Street in the Marigny, a few blocks east of the French Quarter and adjacent to the Treme, became the answer. Not because anyone planned it that way, but because the musicians who came back needed places to play, and the clubs on Frenchmen Street were the right size, the right price, and the right distance from the tourist economy of Bourbon Street to allow something genuine to reassemble. Local musicians played for local audiences. The scene that developed was not a preservation society. It was a living thing, built by people who had left and chosen to return.

The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and the Amistad Research Center both document the Frenchmen Street revival as the clearest post-Katrina cultural success story in a recovery that had, in most respects, proceeded unequally and incompletely. The neighborhood behind it, the Treme, was under severe gentrification pressure by the time the music scene was thriving. The success of the revival did not protect the community that produced it from the economics of desirability. That tension is still unresolved.