This is a paper written by Hannah in 2011, in a class on the urban history of New Orleans at Tulane, after realizing that the basic information (when, where and what) of Frenchmen St. had never been collected.
A couple of particularly interesting takeaways, in Laura’s opinion: 1) How very unlikely a spot Frenchmen was for this kind of cultural growth, and 2) How the laws on the books don’t always match up with the realities of venue ownership and cultural practices. For instance, Hannah explains how historic-Marigny zoning has always been quite restrictive, so many of the early venues were operating without music licenses. In 1992, a zoning overlay was proposed to retroactively allow venues that already existed there, and it passed, but not until 2004… by which time it was wildly outdated and in no way accounted for the enormous growth Frenchmen had seen in the intervening twelve-and-a-half years. What a world.
The Complicated Rise of an Accidental Entity
November 21, 2011
“Frenchmen Street” refers to a roughly 3-block-long area where residents and hip tourists go to spend evenings and nights hearing live music, drinking, eating and people-watching. Frenchmen, as it is known, is a relatively recent development– mainly the last 20 years– and the story of its emergence involves entrepreneurs, musicians, residents, city zoning and neighborhood associations, and a healthy dose of chance. There is no predictable reason why ‘Frenchmen Street’ should have arisen, but it has emerged as a key point on the map of live music in New Orleans today.
I set out to accumulate details about venues and important people, legal information and answers to the questions of how and why the live music corridor arose, and rapidly discovered there is not very much information to be found about “Frenchmen Street” as an entity. Because the area arose organically, there is not very much documentation about why decisions were made to open music venues there initially. There have been a number of legal battles over permits and zoning on Frenchmen, and in almost every case, it involves a venue which was already operating for some time with live music, and is a case of the infrastructure trying to catch up.
Frenchmen Street is part of the Faubourg Marigny, just outside the French Quarter. There was a resurgence of interest in the Marigny in the 1960s, and a recognition of its value as a historic area. This led to the creation of a special Zoning designation in 1971, an effort spear-headed by the research and work of Tulane University Architecture professor Eugene Cizek. The Historic Marigny district (sub-divided as Residential/Commercial, known as HMR and HMC) was passed in 1971 as a way of being able to oversee and regulate activity within the area, which is bordered by St. Claude (North), Franklin Avenue (East), Mississippi River (South) and Esplanade Avenue (West). Under Historic Marigny Commercial (HMC) Zoning, live music is a prohibited use. This fact underlies several of the legal issues relating to music through the years.
Frenchmen Street runs at an angle through the neighborhood, as part of what is known as the Marigny Triangle, where all the intersecting streets turn with the curve of the river. Paralleling Elysian Fields, Frenchmen runs nearly all the way up to the lake. However, the area referred to as “Frenchmen” or “Frenchmen Street” is just the first few blocks of the street, where it connects to Esplanade and crosses Decatur, Chartres and Royal. The rest of the street, past the intersection with Royal, is mainly quiet and residential, as are the streets that cross it.
“Frenchmen Street” has 13 bars which are live-music venues. It is also has several places which serve food and sometimes have (quieter) live background music, and several additional restaurants as well as a number of day-time businesses including a beauty salon, a bookstore and others. I chose to examine the places which are first and foremost venues for live music, not all of which have addresses technically listed on Frenchmen Street itself, but they are counted as part of the corridor. It is a vibrant strip which draws music-listeners every night of the week because of the variety and quality of music being played– much of it by local musicians. From one end of the strip to the other, there is:
- BMC 1331 Decatur St.
- Vaso 1407 Decatur St.
- Dragon’s Den 435 Esplanade Ave
- Checkpoint Charlie’s 501 Esplanade Ave
- Maison 508 Frenchmen St.
- Yuki Izakaya 525 Frenchmen St.
- Blue Nile 532 Frenchmen St.
- Three Muses 536 Frenchmen St.
- Café Negril 606 Frenchmen St.
- Apple Barrel 609 Frenchmen St.
- d.b.a. 618 Frenchmen St.
- Spotted Cat 623 Frenchmen St.
- Snug Harbor 626 Frenchmen St.
Certain venues play host to a particular genre or genres of music, and they have distinct characteristics and generally attract their own type of audiences. However, collectively they form a larger whole, and often-times patrons will move along the street when out for the night, taking in several different types of music at several different places along the way. Below I briefly the history of the street as it became a concentrated live-music area, along the way delving into several venues’ histories for the purpose of illustrating larger points.
One way of finding information on Frenchmen St. venues and businesses at a given time is to look up the buildings’ addresses in the New Orleans City Directory. This is far from fool-proof: in the 2011 listings, the Dragon’s Den is listed only as Café Bamboo, and the Spotted Cat and Three Muses are not listed at all. From these current errors, it is clear that the Directories are not an entirely accurate resource, however they do provide a way to see the rise in number of music venues over the years. Other resources from the Louisiana Research Collection included the ephemera from and vertical files about a number of clubs/bars. All of the above were cross-referenced with Times-Picayune, through their online databases.
The Frenchmen area declined in the 1950s, after it had been a vibrant commercial district. In 1976, the year the first venue opened on Frenchmen, the City Directory lists 4 of the current venue addresses as vacant, two addresses are not listed, and the rest are residences or other non-music uses. The number of vacancies gives a clue as to the character of the street in the mid-1970s, and quotes from newspaper articles back this up it. In the Times-Picayune the street is described as having been previously “marked by empty shop windows and crumbling facades” in the 1970s and 1980s (Cooper, and Scott Aiges B1) and even as late as 1990 a writer noted that “robberies are frequent” (Unknown B4)
The narrative about Frenchmen Street and live music begins with The Dream Palace. In 1976, Alan and Deborah Langhoff opened this pioneering venue at 534 Frenchmen St. The bar, in a building dating to 1832, was an incubator for some legendary and important New Orleans musicians—several weekend music listings from the 1980s have funk-rock band The Radiators on Friday and soul family group The Neville Brothers on Saturday. That lineup today would be almost unheard of, but for the Dream Palace it was just business as usual.
In April of 1980, Brumike Inc opened a jazz club called the Faubourg at 626 Frenchmen. They usually had music from 1 to 5 am, fitting with the gritty, late-night, somewhat underground nature of the street. George Brumat, the group president, bought it out in 1983, changed the name to Snug Harbor and focused on modern jazz. It is still a beloved venue of jazz aficionados, and has featured nearly every New Orleans jazz musician of note as well as unknown ones– George “encouraged and supported” students and young musicians honing their chops (Spera. 01). Snug Harbor was followed in the middle of 1981 by the Apple Barrel, which is also still in operation and features mainly blues in its small space at 609 Frenchmen Street. Café Brasil (world-beat, rock, indie, latin and more) opened in 1985, listed usually at 2100 Chartres, but occasionally at 527 or 531 Frenchmen St. This is the first example of a Frenchmen venue with a seemingly fluid address, but more would follow. There is a sense of looseness in the way that Frenchmen St. developed, and the un-fixed addresses are a perfect example. Another example is odd legal loopholes regarding live music permits for venues, although in the 1980s, those cases are many years in the future still.
In the meantime the entertainment area’s mere survival into the early 1990s, when it first began attracting widespread notice, was largely due to a few venue and business owners who took a chance, and a large amount of good fortune. Throughout the 1980s, only Snug Harbor and Dream Palace were listed in the Times-Picayune nightclub calendar listings, and there is overall very little information available about Frenchmen during this decade. A Times-Picayune database search for “Frenchmen Street” and “music” for 1979 through 1988 returns just 18 hits, as opposed to 222 in 2011 alone. Still, an entertainment area was already becoming well-defined toward the end of the 1980s, with the Dream Palace, Snug Harbor, Apple Barrel and Café Brasil operating within 2 blocks of each other.
In 1991, long-time residents and business-owners “appeared surprised at the rise of Frenchmen Street”. Many of them specifically say they chose to open a business in the area because the rent was cheap. They did not have high hopes for the area, at best they thought it would be a very poor alternative to the French Quarter, and they were genuinely puzzled at the fact that the street was generating positive notice. Larry Moecklin, who operated the Swiss Confectionary (today’s Cafe Negril), said “I can’t tell you why this is happening, to be honest, all I can tell you is that when I came here, this street was a slum” (Cooper. A1) A major cause for Frenchmen’s revival is stated in the title of the Times-Picayune article in which Moecklin was quoted: “Frenchmen’s Mystique is Rediscovered by Locals”. New Orleans residents were beginning to realize that there was a cluster of establishments offering live jazz, blues, funk, latin music, ‘world-beat’, soul, and more, and a cycle of positive publicity and name recognition for Frenchmen Street was becoming established.
Coming back to the The Dream Palace, the Langhoffs had leased the building of their pioneering music venue in 1988 and in July of 1990, Suleyman Aydin opened Café Istanbul at 534 Frenchmen St. Despite the fact that the Dream Palace had anchored the area for years, by the time all the positive buzz started to be generated in the early and mid 1990s, the Dream Palace was already referred to in the past tense, and Cafe Istanbul was listed among the cluster of music venues. Cafe Istanbul had a somewhat different atmosphere from the Dream Palace, with a majority of music acts falling into the ‘world-beat’ and Latin music categories rather than the old funk, rock and soul. However, the change was smooth, and Istanbul ran very successfully for nearly six years, riding the wave of Frenchmen Street’s rising popularity.
Maybe the surest sign that Frenchmen was becoming well-known was that in the last week of January, 1992, city regulators cited Cafe Istanbul and Cafe Brasil for offering live music without a permit. They had been music venues for at least 1 and at least 3 years, respectively (not to mention the Dream Palace’s years before that), but because the Historic Marigny Commercial zoning does not allow for live music, the owners could not get permits without a change in the zoning. Snug Harbor was able to secure a permit, allegedly because of the length of time it had been opened, and the Apple Barrel was never mentioned, presumably because it was listed as a restaurant, and didn’t offer stage acts, which is what the zoning prohibited.
City Councilwoman Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson expressed her support for allowing live music, saying “the street is definitely worth saving”. (Cooper and Scott Aiges. B1), although it was her office who had first reported Cafe Brasil a year prior for lack of permits. Clarkson announced a plan to introduce a zoning-variance which would make music permits legal on Frenchmen, if the Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association had no objections. She promised to try and secure immediate temporary permits for both Cafe Brasil and Cafe Istanbul with the hope that the new zoning would take effect within three months. (In reality, it would take until 2004, more than twelve and a half years later, for the zoning to change). Eight days after the initial shut-down, Clarkson was able, with the full support of the Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association, to secure a temporary permit for the two venues to offer live music again. It was an informal agreement among the clubs, Clarkson, and the office of Mayor Sidney Barthelemy, and let the clubs continue to function.
As the 1990s passed, the Frenchmen Street corridor continued to evolve. In 1994, Checkpoint Charlie’s (rock, pop, rockabilly, punk, singer-songwriter, blues) at 501 Esplanade on the corner of Frenchmen became the newest live-music venue*, and the Dragon’s Den (DJs, rock, brass bands, ska) at 435 Esplanade followed the next year. Returning again to the Dream Palace, it went through another transformation: In April of 1996, after Cafe Istanbul closed, the venue was briefly re-opened by another new lessee, under the name Dream Palace, but it only lasted a few months before being taken over again by the Langhoffs in August of that year. After renovating the building, the Langhoffs did not want to lease it again, and operated the Dream Palace themselves. The difference between this iteration of the venue, and the original opening 20 years earlier was striking to Alan Langhoff, who said “when we first started, it was ‘Where’s Frenchmen Street ? Is that in Gentilly?” (Spera. L7)
*1994 does not, in fact, seem to be when Checkpoint’s opened–it seems to have been a bit earlier but we are working on pinning down the exact date.
The Dream Palace operated until they sold it at the end of 1999 to a group of investors led by traditional jazz clarinetist Jack Maheu. The Langhoffs wanted to sell to Maheu in part because he was absolutely adamant about his plans to have live music in the building, and to continue the momentum which the Langhoffs themselves had been so instrumental in creating. In May of 2000 Maheu’s group opened the Tin Roof Café in the space, as a venue specializing in traditional jazz. Maheu was sure that the new club would be an important part of the “vibrant, still-developing scene”, and that Frenchmen would replace Bourbon as a jazz center. He said he had “[given] up all hope for Bourbon Street years ago. It’s all hype, there’s hardly any jazz to speak of….It’s time for another place to crop up”. (Spera. 11L). Unfortunately, things did not work out as Maheu predicted, and the Tin Roof Café closed in July of 2001, just over a year later.
While Maheu was not correct with regard to his particular venue, he touches on an important point, which is the idea of a change on Bourbon Street fueling the rise of Frenchmen Street. The evidence for this cause-and-effect is mainly anecdotal, and is difficult to document or trace. However, in nearly half the Times-Picayune articles that mention Frenchmen (from 1989 to 2011), there is a reference to how it stands in opposition to Bourbon Street. “Frenchmen represents the antithesis of Bourbon Street, where the ‘frat’ boys and businessmen gathered to carouse. By contrast, Frenchmen is avant-garde, the cutting edge of New Orleans music, especially when it came to jazz, funk and ‘world beat’” (McKinney, p. 108).
While the Tin Roof Cafe was unsuccessful, at the same time Frenchmen Street was still expanding. In 2000 d.b.a. (jazz, blues, funk, world) opened at 618 Frenchmen and then The Spotted Cat (traditional jazz) at 623 Frenchmen in 2001. These two new venues, plus Dragon’s Den, Cafe Brasil, Checkpoint Charlie’s, Snug Harbor, and the ever-under-the-radar Apple Barrel, meant that Blue Nile was the eighth venue in the area when it opened in the old Dream Palace/Cafe Istanbul/Dream Palace/Tin Roof Cafe space in February of 2002. It is now listed at 532 Frenchmen Street, rather than 534, yet another example of the sometimes-slippery details of the venues. The Blue Nile still operates today, offering a very wide range of music in its upstairs and downstairs spaces, from ska-pop-punk to brass band to bluegrass-gospel to jazz singers. At Satchmo Fest 2003, there were no less than sixteen music venues advertised in a 4-block stretch, including the regular venues as well as a number of non-traditional music spaces like the PJ’s Coffee Shop and the bicycle store next to d.b.a. This bounty of live music underscored just how established Frenchmen Street had now become.
As happened in the early 1990s, several new legal issues arose in the first years of the new millennium. The Dragon’s Den was shut down twice, once in 2000 and once 2002. In 2000, the Den was closed from March to November due to zoning and fire code violations. Because the Historic Marigny Commercial zoning was still in effect, an entertainment license was not obtainable, and so the Den found a creative solution. Keeping with the loose, organic Frenchmen growth pattern, the Dragon’s Den reopened as a nonprofit club: The Dragon’s Den Social Aid and Pleasure Club charged a $1 membership fee in addition to cover charges, and then donated 9% of the total to a different charity each month. This creative solution kept the Den in business until April of 2002, when city inspectors ordered the owner of the building to suspend live music indefinitely. The permitting issues, which were never specified publicly, were resolved within a year, and the venue re-opened in January of 2003 and operates till today. The solution of the Dragon’s Den operating as a ‘social aid and pleasure club’ rather than a live music venue is a perfect example of the looseness in the regulation of Frenchmen St.
In the fall of 2004, zoning case number ZD094-04 came before the City Council for a vote. Proposed by Councilwoman Jacquelyn Clarkson, the motion was to adopt Article 10.13 of the Zoning code, which would create an Arts and Cultural Overlay District along the live music corridor on Frenchmen Street. It would include Frenchmen in the 400, 500 and 600 blocks, The 400 and 500 blocks of Esplanade on the non-quarter side, and the short final block of Decatur where it crosses Frenchmen. This strip now had an almost-twenty-year history, but had never had any kind of system for permitting for live music, which had led to legal battles in years past, and made it very difficult for anyone wanting to open a new bar/venue on the street. The Overlay District allows for up to 20% of buildings in a block to be ‘cocktail lounges’, and to allow live entertainment as an accessory use for buildings permitted as bars and nightclubs. The underlying zoning was Historic Marigny Commercial, which did not allow for live entertainment, or as they are known, “amusement places”. Because the underlying HMC zoning is more stringent than some other types of zoning, the proposal of an Arts and Culture Overlay would effect real changes in the ways new and existing venues could navigate their zoning and permits.
The Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association, a very active neighborhood organization which keeps a close watch on everything which goes on in their area, insisted on certain clauses in the proposal to create an Arts and Culture Overlay District, before they’d give their approval. These stipulations included a size limitation on new venues to 4,000 sq. ft. or less and pre-existing venues could not expand past this size limit. In addition, doors and windows of venues needed to be closed. Restaurants could provide acoustic combinations of not more than three performers, for background music. Also, any business could get up to 10 special events per year, and have exemptions to some of the usual rules and regulations.
Councilwoman Clarkson had originally promised Frenchmen business owners that she would initiate the process of re-zoning Frenchmen to allow for live music in February 1992 after the first legal troubles over music permits arose, but it was not ever filed until September 10 of 2004. The City Planning Commission gave their recommendation on October 12th, and their approval on November 4th. City Council voted it into law on December 16th, 2004 and the Mayor signed the following week.
Now Frenchmen Street had official, legal infrastructure, but there are still some striking examples of how the processes involved in permitting music are not always straightforward. That old ‘loose’ feeling to Frenchmen was not gone. Two more examples stand out in the vein, and are worth noting. First is the venue known as Vaso, which is located where used to be the Hookah Cafe, at 1407 Decatur. Despite being in the same physical space, and Vaso today uses 500 Frenchmen St. as an address in its promotional materials. Newspaper listings for live music highlight the resulting confusion: April 9th, 2010 includes “Vaso 500 Frenchmen St.”, the listing on August 6th, 2010 has the club at 1407 Decatur Street, and a September 10th article lists the venue as Vaso at 1407 Frenchmen St.
The new owners clearly want to identify with Frenchmen St. address rather than the previous Decatur St designation, which makes sense given how Frenchmen Street’s popularity and name recognition has skyrocketed in the last few years. There is value in having an on-Frenchmen-Street address because it will make the venue more appealing to anyone looking it up on a website or planning a trip. It also means that the club appears when the internet is searched for ‘music venues’ and ‘Frenchmen’. However, while the venue uses 500 Frenchmen Street in their own publicity, the address change appears to be only unofficial– the City Directory, yellow pages and others still list the venue at the older 1407 Decatur Street address.
Even stranger than Dragon’s Den operating as an Aid and Pleasure club to get around zoning, is the regulation imposed on a restaurant on Frenchmen Street which wanted to get a live music permit after the re-zoning 2004 allowed it. Marigny Brasserie, a restaurant on the last corner of the Arts and Culture Overlay area, applied for a permit to be able to add live music to their shows. Just a few weeks before Katrina hit, the restaurant was granted a cocktail lounge license, with the odd-sounding provision that it not be a cocktail lounge for at least 10 years. As a practical measure it makes sense– the City Council wanted to ensure they weren’t creating a bar/loud music venue that might upset the 20/80 percentages allowed. However, because of the convoluted zoning, getting a cocktail license was the only way the Marigny Brasserie would be able to have the music they wanted and not be limited to three or fewer acoustic musicians. The owners had no intention or desire to change their business, but live music is just an accessory use for buildings zoned as cocktail lounges as opposed to a zoning violation for a standard restaurant.
After Katrina, more changes came to Frenchmen, and it became even more popular than before the storm. Cafe Brasil, one of the venues dating back to the 1980s, didn’t re-open, and today there are even more places for music, in the form of 3 Muses (traditional jazz, Texas swing, blues, gospel, jazz, jazz fusion) at 536 Frenchmen, Balcony Music Club (brass bands, rock, funk, soul, pop, swamp-pop, jazz, bluegrass, folk, R+B and jazz fusions) at 1337 Decatur, Maison (rock, funk, pop, ska, jazz, brass bands, bluegrass, soul, folk and R+B) at 508 Frenchmen and Yuki (instrumental, bluegrass, French) at 525 Frenchmen. Today, a gig on Frenchmen is considered prestigious among musicians of almost any genre.
The story of Frenchmen Street shows the intersections among business proprietors, working musicians, music-loving listeners, and the city regulation apparatus. It is a very vibrant few-block area, and is very much still alive, evolving and growing. The rise of a cluster of music venues outside the French Quarter, playing music of almost every imaginable kind, forever changed where people in New Orleans go to hear music. It was certainly not an inevitable outcome for a once-faded and grimy street, but it is certainly the best of luck that “Frenchmen Street” was able to transform from merely a street to a place with much greater significance.
Works Cited
McKinney, Louise. New Orleans: a cultural history. 1st. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.
Times-Picayune Online Index 1989-present AND Index up until 1988
Cooper, Chris, and Scott Aiges. “Stop the Music: Stage Acts Banned at 2 Clubs.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 31 January 1991, B1. Print.
Cooper, Christopher. “Frenchmen’s Mystique is Rediscovered by Locals.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 14 April 1991, A1. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.
Eggler, Bruce. “Marigny Spot Gains Lounge Permit But Restaurant Must Remain For 10 Years.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 11 August 2005, 17. Print.
Spera, Keith. “George Brumat, owner of popular jazz club.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 09 July 2007, 01. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.
Spera, Keith. “Dream Palace Site Becomes Dream Home for Trad Jazz.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 17 December 1999, 11L. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.
Spera, Keith. “Dream Palace: 3rd Time a Charm?.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 30 August 1996, L7. Web. 1 19 Nov. 2011.
Unknown “Calendar.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 27 June 1980, 23 (?). Web. 19 Nov. 2011.
Unknown “Den Again.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 10 November 2000, 31. Print.
Unknown “Den Closed Again.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 12 April 2002, 29. Print.
Unknown “Dragon’s Den Reopens.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 17 January 2003, 30. Print.
Unknown. “Virginia Man Shot During Holdup Near French Quarter.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 29 April 1990, B4. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.
New Orleans City Directory R.L. Polk and Co. City Directory Division and ephemera and vertical files on venues. Louisiana Research Collection Tulane University N.O. LA
City Planning Commission of New Orleans, Geoffrey N. Moen, City Planner
