Bourbon Street is the most famous street in New Orleans, a name that conjures the city's reputation for pleasure and excess in the American imagination. Bourbon Street was named not for the whiskey but for the French royal House of Bourbon — the French colonial grid was laid out in 1721 and its streets named for members of the ruling dynasty. The street runs thirteen blocks through the French Quarter, and its lower stretch near the river has been the entertainment corridor of the city since the nineteenth century when saloons, brothels, gambling houses, and music venues packed its length.
What you see today — the neon signs, the daiquiri bars with open storefronts, the beads hanging from balconies, the brass bands playing for tips — is an intensified version of something that has existed here for more than a century. Jazz musicians played these clubs in the early twentieth century; Louis Armstrong came of age in the musical ecosystem of which Bourbon Street was one part. The street is pedestrianized most evenings.
The smell of beer on hot asphalt, the competing sounds of different bands bleeding into each other, the balconies crowded with people above the street — these are the sensory signature of a city that has always understood that the purpose of life includes joy.