New Orleans Walking Tour - Bourbon Street

[Music] hey y'all it's andrew with free tours by foot new orleans and we're going to be walking down bourbon street this morning some people love it some people hate it but everybody's heard of it and it is part of the historic french quarter neighborhood which we are right on the edge of now this canal street is the border of the neighborhood everything gets started right here and if you want to get to know more about the whole place we've got a whole separate video for that but we're going to take you down the most famous street in the whole thing our bar strip and we're going to be seeing it at the beginning of its day without its face on it's 9 30 in the morning there's going to be a few people there but it's in a quiet time both for the time of the day and just the time of its life covet has things pretty quiet here right now we'll give you a sense of what it's all about some of the history that's easier to miss when things are at their full force come check it out [Music] so bourbon street they're the first block you wouldn't know where you were during the daytime and normally if you were here at night first thing you'd see as you got onto this side of the street is a brass band [Music] you have a big classic new orleans style brass band usually the tbc brass band playing right here giving you a very distinctively local welcome onto the street lots of the hotels are right around here most of the streetcar lines meet right around here so it's a really easy spot to get to this first block a lot of stores and restaurants one of them right at the end of the block up here is bourbon house and bourbon house is one of the very few places on the street where you're likely to actually drink bourbon so bourbon street is not named after the beverage it is coincidentally connected with the beverage but bourbon the drink is named after bourbon county kentucky where the thing was invented and that and bourbon street here are both named after the same thing the bourbon monarchy the french kings so back when france originally colonized louisiana louisiana was a lot bigger and it included kentucky so multiple things here were named after those people and it just so happened by complete coincidence that bourbon street and burbee county kentucky both became famous for alcohol in different ways so it hasn't always been the reputation here this used to be a quiet residential middle class corridor if we had renamed it for being a bar strip we'd probably rename it like beer street or daiquiri street or mysterious puddle street so not quite in line with the kind of things you tend to drink here bourbon gets thought of as a classy drink bourbon is not such a classy street most of the time what we have always had in new orleans though is a red light district kind of thing somewhere a vice district and it hasn't always been here but it has always existed and actually for a while it was right here on the cross street iberville street is one of the few streets in the quarter that has been renamed used to be called custom house street and there was a time in the 19th century when that word custom house would have sent a shiver up the spine of any respectable person in new orleans nowadays it's one of the easiest streets just to miss you just tend to cross it but it used to be the place where all the people passing through town would have gravitated towards it's the thing about port towns just like tourists sailors have this kind of what happens here stays here attitude and so there's always been a part of the city that was dedicated to doing whatever you feel like for the night so nowadays along here used to be right back there we also used to have a neighborhood called storyville which was a semi-legal red light district for a while this was actually pretty classy back in that time galatoire's right here famous french quarter creole restaurant creole restaurant having this kind of connotation of upscale french food suited to louisiana galatoire's has been here since 1909 before most of the bars on the street their bar is named galatoire's 33. that's honoring a different year the year that prohibition ended the 14 years when we banned alcohol in the united states which you can imagine definitely overlaps a lot with louisiana's especially new orleans is history now galatoire's is a place where you'd probably go for turtle soup for example classic mix of upscale french and uh what's available in the swamp and if you were to come to town on a friday afternoon you'd see a crazy line out that building friday lunch there is an institution think like law firm types from new orleans tend to go to that restaurant on fridays the line is so daunting that they will hire people to wait in line for them and once you're inside it's assumed that there's going to be a round of sazerac cocktails for everybody a very strong whiskey drink that's the official cocktail of the city and so you can imagine that also leads to a tradition of long weekends in new orleans coming up on another institution too right across the way is the old absinthe house currently called jean lafitte's old absent house but the name is something that's changed with time the history of this place is a little bit ambiguous so there's been a building here since around 1800 a bar here since around 1840 and the name jean lafitte belongs to a famous pirate here john lafitte and andrew jackson who was going to be the president of the united states met somewhere in new orleans to figure out strategy for a battle the battle of new orleans that they were going to lead together and this is one of the places that claims that legend not the only one but in a place with so much ambiguity it's one thing that can't be too hard disputed but we'll see other spots that have to do with these folks as we go further along also just like it's closed now this place got shut down for a little bit during prohibition so this is actually the oldest bar on bourbon street if you don't count that closure hasn't operated continuously the entire time but if you ever get the chance to go inside it's famous for having business cards plastered all over the walls visitors for many many years have been leaving their little mark behind and they do still serve absence which was a hard thing to find here for a long time because of the law and is now a hard thing to find because it's just not super conventional american tastes but you can get it and absinthe cocktails made here and a few other spots in the neighborhood too [Music] got another classic creole restaurant here y'all our nose this is a little bit younger but it's another one of these fancy dress places famous for a jazz brunch jazz also a bit of a presence here on the street further down we're gonna pass by the royal sonesta hotel right over here and they're actually the home to the jazz playhouse which is one of the most local sounding venues for music on bourbon street especially and really in the french quarter not always a jazz venue necessarily but it's really young uh that's so one of the best jazz places on bourbon street is something that's come around in just the last few years you actually don't hear as much jazz as you might expect on bourbon street we have a little spot called musical legends park so this is a public park with monuments to folks like fats domino pete fountain this is the guys on the left and right here who famously worked on or around bourbon street and played jazz and styles derived from jazz you've also got over here on the right a monument to chris owens and we will see the venue that she is famous for a little bit further along this spot could be useful to y'all if you end up coming in the business in the back is a cafe beignet which is a little bit like a cafe du monde if you get people into conversations about the best place to get beignets in new orleans there are some pretty strong partisans on either side of that line but uh it is a public park you can sit down freely in the space that they offer here and their restroom is public too which can be very very useful on bourbon street a little further down we'll pass by the jazz playhouse also passing by one of the first of our daiquiri joints y'all so all up and down the street i mentioned daiquiris as one of the drinks that we're known for you'll see these places that either just say daiquiris or say frozen cocktails stuff like that so one of those things that makes us super famous is that you can drink outside here and what you tend to drink outside is these massive blends of shaved ice five kinds of liquor and a lot of sugar so not exactly the cuban daiquiri that they're named after but these are drinks which not only is it legal to drink outside pretty much everywhere in new orleans but with these drinks these big frozen daiquiris it is legal everywhere in louisiana to buy one of these drinks at a drive-through from inside your car as long as the drink is frozen there's a lid on it and there's not a straw that protrudes there from so some strange laws in louisiana you also could drink as a passenger in a vehicle any vehicle until 2004 you can still drink as a passenger in a for hire vehicle in new orleans today so freedoms you could indulge in while you're here all the work of a particular person i'll tell you more about later [Music] looking off of bourbon street a bit y'all we have here aaron rose right next to a daiquiri shop this is more the bourbon street atmosphere that's more the french quarter atmosphere as a whole aaron rose is an irish-style bar famous for selling spiked iced coffees and also great bloody mary's got a po boy shop in the back of that there's a lot of cool stuff to be found just off of bourbon street so as you're walking even though all the noises along the street here it's good to keep looking in either direction you'll spot some great stuff bar is like the 21st amendment which is a great little music club spots like the starlight lounge also just off the street a lot of the best music in the neighborhood is there so i said you don't get a whole lot of jazz actually most of the music here is going to tend to be classic rock cover bands and this street actually had a lot to do with how jazz came to be it really came to be a mainstream american genre so go back to the origins of jazz beginning of the 20th century thereabouts it really wasn't here very much it was over in other neighborhoods a little further in this direction not nearly as well preserved as this area is and then the big moment for this was world war ii before world war ii mostly what you would see along bourbon was houses and shops and for the first couple blocks there would have been a few bars places where you might hear a solo piano player and see a can-can dancer a little bit of jazz by the time you get to the 40s and that's a key moment because world war ii brings a huge number of americans to new orleans for the first time prior to that mostly the spread of jazz around the country had happened by way of the great migration so black southerners leaving southern cities going elsewhere looking for safety and opportunity and they bring their music with them and in each city it goes to it evolves into something new so it gets popular in major cities among certain crowds anyway but for the general population and especially for white americans jazz doesn't really catch on until world war ii when about a third of the u.s military passes through new orleans either on leave shipping out since we're one of the five points of embarkation so it's their last impression of safety and hospitality they're hanging out in these bars on bourbon street the few that there were and it creates this memory it creates a soundtrack it creates escape that they want to come back to and vacations for those folks for the next couple decades to come are all about coming to bourbon street so that's really where the legend comes in and where the bars proliferate to the number that they are now this y'all is the chris owens club so you saw the statue of her back there she comes from that chapter after world war ii when a lot of people started coming here for vacations and what you get exploding onto this scene then in the 50s especially is burlesque and various other kinds of dance as the main form of entertainment chris owens this venue and her name actually has been here since the late 50s and the most remarkable thing about her is she is still there this is a woman in her 80s still performing albeit not during the quarantine twice a week and i had a great birthday here it's hard to imagine her show but based on experience i can say like imagine dolly parton at like 87 with black hair doing kind of a low budget community theater understaffed whimsical affectionate homage to 1950s burlesque with a latin twist that's her show and very much depends on audience involvement to work i think i went uh very early in the show usually gets going about nine o'clock and sat down at a table very close to the stage they're all close to the stage the doorman as you come in turns out to also be the bartender and the sound tech and the backup singer and that for shadows the audience has a lot to do so sat down chris came over and extended her hand down and i thought we were shaking hands and so i grabbed her hand and she is very strong she pulled me up on the stage and somehow got me into a giant foam cowboy hat and onto a toy horse in seconds and i got the message and i made a fool of myself for a few minutes to entertain the crowd while she caught her breath and drank some water so definitely come ready pre-game a little bit perhaps but it is one of the most uh historic in a way places on bourbon street and definitely one to have a one-of-a-kind good time so as you come back hopefully soon because chris is probably close to retirement this is one of the places not to miss at least to pass by and see the photos here's the lady herself she also does an easter parade every year and that is something to see the lighting in here is a bit more delicate than the sunlight during the easter parade so if you get the chance in the month of april come and see her out of doors that whole burlesque era y'all gives this street so much color so you'll find a few burlesque shows still in new orleans today but back in the 50s into the early 60s it was the main thing and because there was so much every place had to kind of stand out whatever way it could so you got dancers who had this like special thing that only they could do so you'd get a a performer like rita alexander the champagne girl and you'd see the sign you'd know she was gonna do something with champagne but you didn't know what and if you went to watch the show what you learned is she could toast you with glasses of champagne without using her hands and then there were people like uh evangeline the oyster girl who would do an act coming out of a big oyster shell with a giant pearl based on a henry wadsworth longfellow poem and she had a famous rivalry with divina the sensational aquatis who did an underwater act so there's a famous moment when evangeline the oyster girl is losing audience to davina the sensational aquities and evangeline goes to davina's show watches part of it sees her doing the act underwater holding her breath whether she's impressed or mad or whatever she goes up on the stage and attacks the aquarium with an axe and like sends glass and water exploding through the rest of the venue memorable night wish i could tell you you could see that if you came to bourbon street today it's a little bit more uh not so choreographed as it used to be a lot of spontaneous moments but more of the uh sliding down the pole variety anyway across the way y'all we got one of our many hotels this is the former site of an opera house so when i said earlier based on the restaurants that bourbon used to be a pretty upscale street you had opera happening on this street up until 1909 when the place burned down during a rehearsal of carmen so we lose that then there are some places that pay tribute to it right in the area another little thing that we have a tiny vestige of so we used to have a small china town in this area just a couple of blocks you'll see reference to it if you ever read or watch the movie of streetcar named desire and the only rec little vestige of it you can see is the chinese characters and the name added up here which of course has been vandalized to uh just represent the bourbon street mindset but a little touch of something that used to be around there was another chinatown on the other side of canal street nearby too [Music] passing by our second tropical isle establishment y'all if we talk about giant drinks you can't miss tropical isle there's one on the right over here the drink they sell is the hand grenade which is named after the container it's in which looks a little bit like a hand grenade massive super sweet but they advertise really really well by getting everybody to carry their containers around see how many tropical aisle locations you can spot as we walk actually got another one right next to it this place the bayou club is your best bet if you want to get a zydeco soundtrack while you're here zydeco is the traditional music of the cajun part of the state southwest louisiana real fun dancy accordion and fiddling and these place this place actually is one of the ones that does it almost every single day so real reliable spot for a more of a local sound than most of the street is going to have passing by a few other pretty famous spots what's up y'all this is a piece of the quarter two sisters restaurant that opens up onto the other side of the block another famous creole establishment and then you've got pat os pat o'brien's it's a prohibition era spot rather just a little bit after prohibition the guy who opens main entrance is right around the corner opens this place up and creates the hurricane another famous cocktail which was basically made to get rid of as much of this sort of excess supply of rum that we had here as possible so it's a sweet drink but it's a fruity one that's a little less cloying than some depending on where you get it if you get it here it's made from mix nowadays but there are like upscale bars in the quarter where you can get the original one made with fruit juice passionfruit juice few different rums and it's a bit more of a more of a delicacy when you get it done that way depending on your taste that one will get you there fast the other one is a good sipping drink mentioned these frozen daiquiris y'all that and all of these other weird laws that we have in louisiana is mostly the work of this guy named george brown he's a beer and liquor lobbyist who started in the industry in 1949 and the last time taxes on beer went up in louisiana was 1948 so this guy was a solid wall against anything and everything related to uh regulating the beer and liquor industry quick sec y'all couple famous places right by us cat's meow one of the better known karaoke joints in the neighborhood they've got like a page worth of songs but something for everybody and then just over here the dingy looking building right between pat o'brien's and pizza dante is going to be preservation hall it's just far enough off of bourbon street that you're not necessarily going to notice it during a walk but it is the traditional jazz establishment other good ones besides including one on bourbon just a little bit further down but that place for talking music absolutely needs a little bit of attention [Music] so this guy george brown y'all almost nobody in louisiana has heard of him but he is very much affected all of our lives when he was working as a lobbyist one of the pieces of legislation he got taken care of involved him conveying a bribe from a beer company to a state legislator and even when he was caught he refused to give the legislator's name away even though it required him to go to prison for six months in order to keep the secret and after that he had the absolute trust of all the politicians that he worked with so he ends up being pretty much untouchable and he's the reason why there was so little regulation on alcohol here for such a long time his biggest loss was when we finally ended up bringing the drinking age to 21 which was the result of the federal government tying highway funding to that we prefer smooth roads at the very least but back in the 70s when this drive-through daiquiri business first got started it was still legal to drink when you were 18 and they got started in a college town so you can imagine just old enough to be interested in liquor still young enough to be interested in sugar get that overlap going and a frozen daiquiri is basically uh an alcoholic snowball as we'd call them you grow up somewhere hot you're getting used to those things just spike it and you have a business model for life one other oddity that we have here this is another hotel built into a building that used to be a convent and this content was here into the mid-1960s when bourbon was going strong so you can imagine nuns trying to raise orphans right next to bourbon street that is a thing that happened got st louis cathedral the back of it right over there and by the time you get to royal street just a block away things are night and day different that's the antique shop an art gallery corridor very different atmosphere from all of this promise you a great jazz joint as well right across the way is fritzl's jazz pub so if you did go inside of there you'd hear some of the city's best traditional jazz players they've got a courtyard behind a vampire themed speakeasy in the upstairs so a lot of your different new orleans stereotypes true and less true all piled in the same place speaking of new orleans stereotypes down here at the end of the block we've got marilla vo's house of voodoo marilavo's our famous voodoo priestess the most famous face of this religion that a lot of people understand more as a kind of black magic thing but her actual home the spot where she lived is just around the corner a couple blocks away this spot is more selling the souvenir version of voodoo we actually do have a insider operated member of the religion operated voodoo shop on the next block down got a lot of enhanced facades right now y'all been seeing different pieces of uh street art let's call it added on to the pieces of plywood out here as the weeks go by they come and go they get covered up something new shows up but it keeps the place looking a little less stark under the quarantine conditions just look back a little bit so normally if you were walking out here under more you know happening conditions you'd see some rainbow flags flying out here we're on the section of bourbon street that actually transitions from being zoned for entertainment to being zoned for residences so things get a lot quieter down here the exception is some bars that are grandfathered into the zoning like the bourbon pub and oz right here this is a cluster of mostly early 20th century gay bars mid-20th century that are grandfathered into the way things are right now and uh it makes for a fun people watching spot and hang out by the intersection and watch as the frat boys make their way down the street spot the rainbow flags and as they start to think should we turn back or have a few more drinks and try something new so definitely gets to be quieter down in this direction more of a local crowd hanging out here especially the next block down we're gonna run into what is possibly the oldest gay bar in the united states goes back to about 1933. so you also can see through here that there are residences on bourbon street at this point people live on bourbon street and it's actually possible to get a peaceful night's sleep the fact that this was a middle-class corridor before it became a bar strip means the houses here aren't massive but they're big enough to fit businesses and a bit of a crowd of patrons inside of so it was really well suited besides the other things that brought the bar corridor to be to turning from residences to businesses some of these would have been businesses in the first place a lot of classic french quarter buildings are designed in a way you see lots of other places business in the downstairs residents in the upstairs and you still actually get that in a little bit of the french quarter now so this is the same architecture that you see further up amongst the bars just without the neon and the signs and everything it stands out the history stands out a little bit more there's two more bars on bourbon y'all both pretty historical ones and they're actually pretty related so right up here we have cafe lafitte in exile this is that possibly oldest gay bar in the country goes back to 1933 in terms of being an institution it wasn't at this location at the time it was a block further down and some kind of misunderstanding around the ownership of the place led to that bar being exiled hence it ending up here this building doesn't have any connection with the lafitte brothers the pirates that we mentioned earlier but the other one does possibly so if you came by here on normal circumstances you'd find karaoke going on you'd find possibly tons of napkins littered into the street from a little tradition that they have of hurling cocktail napkins all over the place definitely a beloved local spot even though fewer people live in the quarter than used to this is where a lot of them are going to hang out this two is where we got a one of the locally run voodoo shops moving in pretty soon got our pride shop open and operating and on this side we got classic po boy joint and the clover grill which is the ultimate hangover food they make hamburgers under hub caps and all kinds of other stuff that'll either cure a hangover or prevent it and by the time you bar hop this far down definitely you're ready for that kind of thing so that's a small hours of the morning kind of place stays open nice and late one last thing to see y'all is at the end of the block we've got lafitte's blacksmith shop and this is a place that's pretty famous for claiming to be the oldest building operating as a bar in the country saying it's the oldest bar on bourbon street it's all pretty fuzzy the building is definitely one of the oldest in the city though we don't know exactly where it comes from the later part of the 18th century somewhere and it may or may not have been a blacksmith shop but definitely you get to get some classic new orleans historic ambiance more so on the inside than the outside it's a little played up on the outside but you do get a single piano player who knows every song in the world who's gonna be a classic source of like the kind of entertainment that you would have gotten here before this place was putting on quite as much of a show as it does these days can get super crowded definitely you can lose that ambiance sometimes but be here on a weeknight and it can definitely give you a sense of like a bourbon street that's bygone anyway this is the probably the extent of the walk you do if you kept going down this way you run into some residential area and then you'd eventually find the street peter's out when you get into the next neighborhood the marigny most of these french quarter streets keep going and have a lot more personality further down but bourbon sweet is pretty much just a french quarter phenomenon so you could walk the whole thing in not too much time if you're bar hopping save yourself so y'all if you come and visit us in the next little bit i can promise you this street will be here i can promise you a lot of these bars will be here and i can promise you it will look not much like what you saw this time around even on a morning in normal times this is a place that's still pretty hopping so you'll probably have a lot more company at the very least it's a great street for people watching whether you want to do the full on bar experience or not and there's a lot of little hidden treasures along the way which hopefully i've helped you find whether this is going to be the whole of your trip or whether it's going to be a tiny part of your trip it definitely deserves at least a little bit of attention so thanks for watching be tuned in for the next one

Channel: Free Tours by Foot

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Keywords: bourbon street, bourbon street walk, new orleans virtual tour, virtual tours, new orleans tours, tours of bourbon street, bourbon street new orleans, guided walk bourbon street, walking tours in new orleans, french quarter tours, bourbon street tours, a walk down bourbon street, bourbon street history, History of bourbon street, new orleans bourbon street, New Orleans

Id: IYZUO_3dqjg

Length: 29min 1sec (1741 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020