[Patterson, Snug Harbor’s longtime director of music/talent buyer, discusses Frenchmen Street’s unique evolution as a music strip. This conversation took place in 2019, pre-pandemic, and is followed up by a brief note from July, 2020 addressing the current efforts to make Frenchmen pedestrian-only.]
JP: I’ve lived on Frenchmen Street since 1975, although I have to say we were kind of forced into getting a place out in the country about three years ago. Frenchmen Street just got too insane at night. No peace in the valley. But I still stay over here maybe half the time.
I originally had three properties right in the row here in the late ’70s and ’80s, and I developed businesses. I was the landlord, I was the developer; I’ve seen it over a long period of time. So, I’ll tell you this story. I guess you can call it “My Attitude About the History of Frenchmen Street.”
Phase One, for me, was late-’70s to late-’90s, when Frenchmen was a bookend to Oak Street, Uptown. Had a couple of popular clubs, a couple of popular restaurants, some daytime retail. It was like that for a couple of decades.
Then at the turn of the millennium, it went through this phenomenon that was quite interesting to see. The Spotted Cat opened up across the street—I think that was 1999—but they opened up as just a bar and had no ambition to be a music club. That actually came later, with Joe Braun [of The Jazz Vipers]. The Jazz Vipers were the first band that ever played there. They put a stage down, and the rest is history.
Right around that same time, DBA opened up over here, and all of a sudden there was this synergy of live music clubs happening. They were going strong there, we were going strong here. Café Brasil was open; it was going strong. And then there was a rotation of various entities where the Dream Palace had been.
Then things kind of snowballed, and outlets that wouldn’t have thought about doing live music started doing live music. Café Negril over here, and even places that had been around for a while like the Apple Barrel—and it was very small, like a walk-in closet—even they started doing live music. So over a short period of time, there were maybe 12 different outlets for live music. We became the strip that rivaled the early version of Bourbon Street.
But what was such a beautiful thing about it was that it actually stayed local for a long period of time. It was an interesting—very interesting—situation, where you had a lot of different outlets, but they were actually making it, with 90% of the people coming to Frenchmen Street being locals.
The tourist entities—concierges and stuff—did not tell people to come to Frenchmen Street. But we [Snug Harbor] had gotten a link; we did get a certain amount of tourists coming to Snug Harbor.
That was Phase Two, that you might say went until about 2012.
We’re now in Phase Three. Which is: The tourists have discovered us. Somehow overnight, the city promotion people said, “It’s okay to tell people to go to Frenchmen Street.” I saw it transition from 2012 to 2015. From 90% locals to 90% tourists.
And of course once the tourists happened, then you had all the hustlers come—the street hustlers—because they had fresh meat. They can sponge money off a tourist that a local wouldn’t… Well, locals are smart.
That’s my take on Frenchmen Street. Still a lot of great clubs and outlets, but it’s different now.
JP (via email), 7/27/2020: Given the latest effort to close Frenchmen Street to car traffic, I’d like to emphasize that Frenchmen became famous because of its density of great music clubs within three city blocks, not for the free show that happens on the sidewalks now that its filled with tourists. Closing the street will further diminish the profile of the music clubs as they will then have to compete with the street circus every night.
