In New Orleans, a French Quarter Revolution

On a bustling French Quarter promenade, Stacey Norwood -- a professional psychic with a purple table, pink flip-flops and long hair dyed something in between -- has found her calling.

A former corporate accountant who said she discovered an unusual gift of foresight, Miss Stacey reports that she once saved an author’s career by urging him to dust off an old manuscript he’d forgotten about. Over the years, she has predicted sickness and pregnancy, adultery and true love.

But she didn’t see this coming.

One of the nation’s oldest neighborhoods and the famously bacchanalian face of this city, the French Quarter is in the grip of an identity crisis. A new regime in City Hall, convinced that the district has been allowed to degenerate from a fun-loving Utopia to a lawless den of hustlers and hooligans, has launched a crusade to make it cleaner, safer and more family-friendly -- and to recapture it as a residential community, not just a playground for visitors.

Authorities have begun herding street performers, such as the psychics, into particular quadrants and installing iron handrails to prevent the homeless from sleeping on park benches. Police are enforcing ordinances that were ignored for decades, resulting in citations and fines against unlicensed businesses, such as tour groups that have long mesmerized visitors with tales of the spirits that haunt the city.

Officials are weighing the future of some of the city’s classic architecture, such as the site where the pirate Jean Lafitte supposedly operated a blacksmith shop as a front while selling his loot out the back door, which has led to a heated debate over when a building is historic and when it is just dilapidated. Even leaky garbage trucks are getting ticketed.

The rules are changing quickly, as they are for many in the heart of New Orleans, for a small band of psychics that has long offered such services as past-life regressions in Jackson Square, a public commons in the heart of the quarter.

The psychics used to be able to set up their workstations wherever they wanted, and they have traditionally been paid through “donations,” meaning they have never quite operated real businesses and have never been required to get licenses.

That’s how things have always worked around here: in the margins and the gray areas, where it’s cheaper and more fun. Now the psychics are relegated to one side of Jackson Square, and they must keep their distance from merchants. There is talk of a permit system for Norwood and her colleagues and even talk of limiting their numbers and reserving specific pieces of sidewalk for individual psychics.

“Karma-wise, this is the thing I’m meant to be doing,” said Norwood, a 60-year-old mother of two grown children. “I’m not going to quit. Never. But this is getting crazy. Everything around here is up in the air.”

Indeed, the crackdown and the new regulations are beginning to split the French Quarter into factions.

Some believe the district can thrive only if it is cleaner and more family-friendly, a curious contention to those who note the liquor-to-go stands and the high number of strip clubs and show-me-your-breasts street fairs.

Others say some regulation is necessary to stave off carpetbaggers and developers who threaten to undermine preservation efforts, commercialize the district and chase away people who live there. And there are those who fear the regulation will go too far, turning the quarter into some sort of fake, Disneyfied creation, a caricature.

The tourists are pitted against the residents, the rich against the poor, the street performers against the cops, even the psychics against the painters.

American Civil Liberties Union leaders have taken notice, with some expressing concern that the campaign could violate artists’ and residents’ rights to free speech and expression. The voodoo bone-throwers and the palm readers have attempted to join forces by contributing to a legal defense fund.

Oddly, all sides have the same goal: keeping it real.

“What we have done is make our French Quarter cleaner and safer and more inviting, and allowed it to remain what it was always intended to be: the front door to the most interesting city in America,” said Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson, the councilwoman who has led the campaign this summer.

As few as 2,500 full-time residents live in the quarter, in the same six-by-13-block district believed to have been laid out in 1722 as the original city of New Orleans. However, as many as 20 million people visit each year. Do the tourists come in spite of the madness, or because of it?

Some street performers are sure it’s the latter.

The French Quarter will always draw more than its share of characters, from the Bourbon Street barkeep with a magnificently sculpted plume of hair rising a foot off his head -- and a 5-foot bust of himself and his hair on the stoop -- to the one-legged prostitute seen around from time to time. You can still drink alcohol in the middle of the street, right in front of the cops, and you can still get robbed walking back to your hotel.

The City Council has approved a series of new regulations in recent months designed to rein in the circus.

Police have begun issuing tickets for infractions that were historically written off as French Quarter follies, such as urinating in public. They also have conducted sweeps of unlicensed businesses that have operated with impunity for years, resulting in seven citations one recent afternoon issued to people who lead tours that block traffic.

Outsiders might be hard-pressed to understand the drawback of shoring up a building that looks as if it might topple at any moment or enforcing basic sanitation standards. But that’s precisely the problem, critics say: Regulation itself, they contend, is antithetical to the free-form, free enterprise spirit of the quarter, where marching bands have been known to pass through, for no particular reason, on a weekday afternoon.

Clean it up too much, they warn, and the lucrative masses may stop coming.

“Here’s the thing: We’re not normal. We know that,” said Jeri “Cissy” Stevens, 43, a heavily tattooed psychic who uses the name Silverwillow and wears an enormous amulet. “But if you live here, you’re not normal. It’s not a normal place to live. This is never going to be a place to bring your children. Never has been. They are taking away people’s livelihoods here.”

But even some of those swept up in the crackdown see the benefits of cleaning up the quarter.

Gray Line Tours of New Orleans is one of about 15 large companies that lead groups on tours of New Orleans’ history, architecture, cemeteries and gardens. One popular program gives visitors a tour of what many historians consider the birthplace of jazz. Another focuses on the “most haunted city in the United States,” allowing them to visit, for instance, the three ghosts who frequent O’Flaherty’s Pub and who still bicker when the right music is played.

The company has operated for 16 years under its current ownership. Recently, a municipal representative walked unannounced into its corporate offices and demanded to see its operating licenses. The company didn’t have most of them and figured it was exempt after all these years. Gray Line has since paid nearly $3,000 in fees, fines and interest charged by the city. And ordinances have been enacted limiting the size of tour groups and giving them new curfews.

Greg Hoffman, Gray Line’s general manager, conceded he was “quite disappointed in the way this was handled.” But, he said, “something had to be done.”

Some tour guides had begun leading as many as 100 people through the narrow streets of the French Quarter. The tours held up traffic, spilled into the streets and required some guides to bellow their lectures directly beneath residents’ bedroom windows. On a couple of occasions, from the other side of a brick wall, incensed residents sprayed tour groups with hoses.

Many of the changes have come at the behest of Clarkson, who returned to the City Council a year ago after spending eight years in the state Legislature, winning election in a district that includes the French Quarter. During her time in the Legislature, the quarter was allowed to fall into disrepair, she said. She contended City Hall had become a good-old-boys network. Zoning laws were ignored.

As a girl growing up in Algiers, a sector of New Orleans across the Mississippi River, Clarkson frequently visited her grandparents, European immigrants who lived in the quarter. There were street festivals, jazz shows and operas, she remembered, and a sense of civility that has been lost.

Now she is 68, and she says she wants her 10 grandchildren to grow up in the same New Orleans that she loved.

But her efforts at reform have been met with several street protests, one of which featured a performer holding a sign that compared her to a Nazi.

“I’m trying to save an artists colony. How much more bohemian can you get than that?” she said. “I want the multicultural capital of America. I want the art and the jazz and the theater. That’s all meant to be there. What’s not meant to be there are drunks loitering in the doorways of homes and accosting tourists, and tarot card readers smothering the artists. That’s not bohemian. That’s filthy.”