Headline: Big Easy shakes off big crime blues
Source: Euromoney
Date: March 2000
If perverse prizes were handed out each year for the city most likely to self-destruct, by the early 1990s New Orleans would have been a regular, hands-down winner. A decade or so ago it was as though the city had assembled all the trump cards it was arbitrarily dealt by geography and contemptuously chucked them into the Mississippi River or the Gulf of Mexico.
Students of oil-dependent economies the world over would be quick to sympathize with the Big Easy, and to recognize the root cause of the mess it had managed to cook up for itself.
Confident that oil prices were a one-way bet, New Orleans did not worry too much about what Miami was doing to establish itself as the transportation hub of choice linking the US with South America and as a banking centre. Nor did the city concern itself unduly about squandering its money on incidentals such as public education or law enforcement. This, after all, was the Big Easy; the place to eat crawfish pie and have big fun on the Bayou. In the bars of Bourbon and Decatur Streets they sat back and said let the good times roll.
Those who thought the good times would roll indefinitely were in for a brutal shock. When the oil price fell, the multinationals deserted the city in their droves and the banks wound down their international franchises, "decimated" - in the words of one downtown banker - by the impact the oil slump had on their business. The result was that the local economy was left hopelessly dependent on seasonal attractions such as Mardi Gras and the annual jazz festival. The transition to a service-based economy inevitably meant that average household wage levels nosedived. Airlines, meanwhile, were swift to see that backpacking jazz aficionados were unlikely to fill the premier cabins of their aircraft and axed their international flights to New Orleans accordingly. Hotel occupancy levels in all but a few weeks of the year collapsed.
Worse still, crime levels in the Big Easy spiralled out of control. By 1994, New Orleans had risen to the top of America's most infamous league table when it won the official designation of being the country's murder capital. The city owed this shameful ascent to a combustible cocktail of geographical influences and economic deprivation exacerbated by endemic corruption. The geography of the Big Easy is such that it is hemmed in on all sides by water, meaning that housing projects and other run-down areas are unable to radiate much beyond the city limits as they do in a number of other US urban areas. The result was that plush residential and business areas rubbed shoulders and even overlapped with streets in which you were more likely to have your throat cut or your brains blown out than in any other in the US.
The understaffed and underpaid police force decided it was easier - and safer - to join the criminal underclass than to beat it. Corruption spread unchallenged throughout the NOPD, as a by-product of which virtually no resident enjoyed a life untouched in some way by violent crime. Surely, this naïve journalist asked, the violence did not extend to the central business district of Poydras and Canal Streets? Don't you believe it. One local banker tells how she still has nightmares about a colleague who was kidnapped and subsequently murdered by a garage attendant at a downtown five-star hotel.
All in all, then, a place only a deranged planner with a warped sense of humour would choose as a location for this month's IDB meeting?
Well, no. Because to close the history book at 1994 is to do New Orleans and its affable mayor, Marc Morial, a gross injustice. When he was elected six years ago, the 35-year old Morial was the youngest mayor in the US, and he immediately set about tackling the twin evils of crime and economic hardship with uncompromising vigour. Among other things, he insisted on the appointment of Richard Pennington - architect of the reformed Washington DC police - as Chief of the NOPD. The mayor also increased cops' wages, almost doubled the force's head count, filed suits against gun manufacturers failing to incorporate acceptable safety designs, and clamped down on police corruption with an iron fist.
Mayor Morial also presided over the largest capital spending programme in New Orleans history - named "Rebuild New Orleans Now!" - and took more than a passing interest in making the Big Easy more welcoming for international visitors. Word has it that during an inspection of the misnamed New Orleans International Airport (it still has no more than a handful of international flights) he flew into a rage because the terminal's signs appeared only in English. Get these translated, he ordered, into Spanish and Japanese. And do it now.
The murder rate has fallen by 64% since Morial's election. Occupancy rates at the leading downtown hotels have leapt over the same period from around 60% to more than 80%.
Less quantifiably, New Orleans today feels safe. Hansjorg Maissen, managing director of the very swish Windsor Court Hotel - an all-suite establishment and the proud recent recipient of the Condé Nast award for best hotel in the world - claims that none of his hotel's guests have encountered any trouble wandering around the French Quarter, irrespective of the hour.
By day, the principal attractions of the Quarter are its architecture and its tax-free shopping, which is unique to the state of Louisiana.
After dark, the Quarter transforms itself into a vibrant nightspot that is one of the few places in the US where the consumption of alcohol in the street is positively encouraged. So too is indulgence in a range of other delights, from the most up-market steak houses to the dingiest girly bars. For a compromise, head for a restaurant like the Crescent City Brewhouse on Decatur, where you can sample six different beers for the price of one, nibble on Cajun cooking and listen to a passable jazz band.
The restoration of the Big Easy's credentials as a place where business and pleasure can once again be mixed securely leaves New Orleans confident that it can eclipse last year's IDB meeting in Paris, which attracted 6,000 visitors. "We feel that every mid-level bank which wouldn't have felt it could justify sending a delegate to Colombia or France will send one to New Orleans," says a spokesman. "We are expecting between 8,000 and 10,000 visitors."
The Big Easy's Mardi Gras Festival begins on March 7, with the IDB meeting starting on March 23. Why not, I asked the mayor, go the whole hog and combine the two events. He looked at me as though I were mad. "If we did that," he says, "nobody would get to any of their meetings."
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