JF: Adé had this particular thing going with Café Brasil. Everything was always some sort of multicultural affair. The reason the whole thing took off was the guy had an incredible sense of aesthetics, in both the people that he hired and how he ran the place. How he kept changing it up—in ways that would totally drive you crazy, honestly—but it was his own personal art project.
That’s the difference, I think. Back then, the joints were a few people’s personal art projects, and now they’re bars. Now, bars are bar businesses, and everybody’s a business person, and everybody’s very serious about things. I think that’s the shift. It’s that dullness that takes over when you start approaching things with a business-first mentality. Things used to happen in a much more interesting way when people were inventing stuff, trying things out, creating something.
[Read Nita Ketner impressions of the world Adé created here.]
[…] I think that’s the other big alteration, that Frenchmen isn’t really a social scene anymore. It’s a place where people are gawking, and they’re looking for something. They’re perpetually looking for something. They’re on their phones, they have to go from this place to the next place to see what’s going on.
You didn’t have to do that back then. You’d go down there and you’d sit around, because you liked the other people that were sitting around. That was the scene. There was no “scene”. You kind of just were the scene.
What surprises me, though, is that there are hardly any places where anybody just goes to hang around anymore.
[Read Freilich’s full interview here.]
There were a lot of visual artists, at least two art galleries, businesses related to the arts and such in 70’s through part of 1980’s.
I was part of that scene.