New Orleans Cleanup: Mint in Sewers : ‘Big Easy’ Sees Convention as Solution to Hard Times

Here in the city known as the Big Easy, delegates to the Republican National Convention will catch the scent of mint as they stroll the French Quarter.

The source: sewers that have been given a dose of mint-scented pine oil to mask the smell of stale beer, which is most pungent in these steamy dog days of August.

The streets have been steam-cleaned and hosed down. The litter has been picked up, including the seedy mattresses and other junk under freeways near the Superdome, where the convention is being held next week.

Flowers and plants now decorate Poydras Street, which runs in front of the Superdome, and Jackson Square is brilliant with its red, white and blue petunias. About 1,000 volunteers signed on to help with the planting.

A huge portrait of Vice President George Bush smiles down on motorists driving into the city, compliments of Orleans Parish’s prisoners. New litter cans have been installed in the French Quarter. Barriers that block off streets in the Quarter to automobile traffic have been freshly painted.

And, when the Republicans are here, the city’s sanitation workers will be on duty almost 24 hours a day.

The city of New Orleans is putting on its best face, for, unlike prosperous Atlanta, the convention is a desperately needed economic boost.

Never mind that the Big Easy--as in easy living, easy anything you want--is about as un-Republican in attitude and voter preference as any city in the nation. Times have been so hard here, what with the oil bust and decline in shipping, that the convention is viewed as the best chance for New Orleans to begin a turnaround, to show off a little and to market itself as something more than what it is often called: “the city that care forgot.”

“There’s a lot more to this city than Bourbon Street and sin,” said Peggy Wilson, the only Republican member of the seven-member New Orleans City Council.

Nevertheless, partying is a dominant theme here and sin is as close as the strip joints of the Quarter. An out-of-town madam actually called the Republican headquarters here to offer the services of her best ladies of the evening during the Republican spectacle. She was politely discouraged.

Restaurants Staying Open

Many of the city’s best-known restaurants will stay open into the wee hours to accommodate convention-goers, even though eateries in Atlanta had disappointingly few diners during the Democratic convention.

“This is New Orleans, not Atlanta,” said Ralph Brennan, owner of the well-known Mr. B’s restaurant, one of the city’s 1,314 restaurants. It has 666 bars also.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, whose posters about town proclaim “Welcome to the party,” is throwing a whopper of its own, for an estimated 7,000 guests. Thirty-five New Orleans chefs will prepare their signature dishes and 10 of the city’s best-known bands will play. The newspaper’s grand finale will be a Mardi Gras parade, complete with masks and floats.

How much will all this cost? “Enough to make it a memorable party,” said Linda Dennery, the paper’s general manager. In addition to the bash, the Times-Picayune is distributing 35,000 slick guidebooks to the city. The book isn’t all glitz: It admits to crummy August weather and lots of cockroaches.

Heat and Tropical Storms

Sweltering tropical heat is the norm, but it can be enlivened by fearsome tropical storms.

Tropical Storm Beryl visited New Orleans exactly one week before the opening convention gavel, forcing postponement of some last-minute city sprucing up because of heavy rains and winds. And it put officials on edge about the possibility of more storms over the horizon now that the hurricane season has commenced.

But it is hard if not impossible to drown out the enthusiasm.

“There’s a good spirit in town,” said Councilman Mike Early, whose district includes the French Quarter. “It’s been a long time since we saw this kind of working together.”

Oddly, all this enthusiasm is coming from a city that has very little in common with button-down, conservative Republicans. There hasn’t been a Republican mayor of New Orleans since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, and he was appointed to the job. Ditto for the governor’s office, except for the election of Republican David C. Treen in 1979.

City Is 55% Black

According to 1980 census figures, blacks--who traditionally vote Democratic--make up 55% of the population of New Orleans, a city of 536,904 residents.

In addition, during the Reagan years, unemployment here, as in the rest of the oil patch, shot into double digits and now hovers at just under 10%, almost double the national average. So meager were the city’s resources last year that, at one point, New Orleans’ city employees were put on four-day workweeks and City Hall closed on Fridays.

Yet the Republicans chose New Orleans because it could provide 19,000 first-class hotel rooms and 17,000 seats in the Superdome. Unlike the Atlanta convention, space will not be a problem.

Mary Mead, a spokeswoman for the Republicans, said New Orleans officials fairly tripped over themselves in wooing the convention, even promising to raise $5.5 million for the event--no easy feat in these tough times. And, she said, the Republicans wanted to have a convention in the South.

“The Republican Party in the past few years has been making some inroads in the South,” she said. “It’s not so solid a Democratic South anymore.”

Not that the wedding of Republicans and New Orleans has been without its difficulties. Local party workers complain privately of high-handedness by Republican regulars.

Vendors Again Complaining

Vendors, who complained bitterly about their treatment by the Democrats in Atlanta, are having problems in New Orleans, too.

In Atlanta, the vendors were relegated to the outer reaches of the action. “Siberia,” as one put it. In New Orleans, they were not told until a few days ago that electronic equipment could not be used for displays inside the Superdome.

“It’s crazy,” said Nick Cariotis, the official licensor. “Everything over there (at the Superdome) is electronic.”

As the Democrats did at their convention, the Republicans will try to keep organized protest groups and the like in a designated area, situated about five blocks from the Superdome in tree-shaded Lafayette Square--opposite the federal courthouse.

“They didn’t want people standing in the blistering sun,” Lt. Max Gagnard of the New Orleans police said. About 15 groups have signed up so far to speak, representing organizations ranging from the homeless to anarchists, he said.

Gagnard said also that the police had been given no special instructions about how to treat the conventioneers.

“This is a tourist city,” he said. “So, with all the Sugar Bowls and Super Bowls and the Pope’s visit under our belts, the men know how to act with outsiders.”

Clings to Creole Roots

In choosing New Orleans, the Republicans have picked perhaps the most unusual city in the United States. It is one that clings to its Creole and Cajun roots, and there is something about it that gives off a whiff of danger and corruption.

Novelist Walker Percy, a New Orleans native, characterized the city as having the “ideological flavor of a Latin enclave on a Southern Scotch-Irish mainland.”

“This is an enjoyment culture,” said Lawrence Powell, a Tulane University historian. “If you run out of things to talk about, you can always talk about food or parties. It is the glue of the culture.”

And, he said, it is a city where most anything goes.

“We’re just very tolerant of things, including things we shouldn’t be tolerant of, like dirt and corruption,” he said.

Some don’t see the bon vivant attitude as especially good for the well-being of the city. One notion is that the gentry of New Orleans often cared more for their Carnival floats than making sure the city was on solid economic footing--what is known here as the Mardi Gras syndrome.

Other cities in the nation may have British Puritanism in their background, but New Orleans certainly does not. It reflects more the French, the Spanish and blacks who settled here after the founding of the city in 1718. By the time the Yankees got here almost 100 years later, it was a city set in its ways.

Louisiana remains the only state in the country in which the legal system is based on the Napoleonic code rather than British common law.

One of Bawdiest Cities

New Orleans is one of the bawdiest cities in America, but it was an outpost of civilization when the rest of the South was still being tamed. It was once a city famed for its bordellos, which, in turn, were where aspiring musicians practiced and perfected their craft. The music that came to be known as jazz was born in the Storyville red light district.

New Orleans had the first permanent opera company in the United States and was, legend has it, the birthplace of the cocktail. It is famous for the wild Mardi Gras streetfest and a streetcar named Desire and, more recently, blackened redfish and, in fact, blackened foods of all kinds. Voodoo is still part of the culture.

Tabasco sauce was invented here and so was a potent, fruity drink known, appropriately, as the Hurricane. Drinking one, or several, has been a rite of passage for thousands of college students who have made their way to Pat O’Brien’s in the French Quarter. Walking down the street with a drink in hand is de rigueur, and just as common is the drink for the drive home, known here as a “geaux cup.”

Most of New Orleans is below sea level, and a series of levees protects it from the Mississippi River, which flows in a great crescent through the city.

And it is a place where the dead are buried in crypts above ground because the water table is so high. The cemeteries are labyrinthine, somewhat spooky monuments to the old Creole families of New Orleans.

New Orleans is many things: the tacky T-shirt shops on Bourbon Street, gumbo, sultry nights, Cajun accents, weary clapboard neighborhoods, wrought iron balconies and stately homes in the Garden District. The city wants to show it all off, to prove that it can be better than Atlanta without even raising a sweat.

“Is there a soul so dull as would prefer a spick-and-span Atlanta to the earthier environs of New Orleans?” wrote Times-Picayune columnist James Gill. Brennan, of Mr. B’s, talked of how making money now is not the point. The point, he said, is to use the convention as a marketing tool for the city.

“We want to be a part of the whole experience,” he said.

Councilwoman Wilson was giving a pep talk to volunteers the other day, getting them psyched up to handle the crises sure to arise with the crush of delegates and media. She said it was time to put on a show but also made it clear there was something more to New Orleans than guzzling Hurricanes or eating blackened redfish.

“We know people know this is a good-time town, a historic town,” she said. “What they haven’t been told is that this is a city ready to move into the future.”