[This section is still a work in progress This is ongoing work, and I am looking forward to continuing to figure out, protect and grow the cultural economy that exists in New Orleans.]
My (Hannah’s) work with MaCCNO has centered on cultural economy for the last few years (including our 2020-2021 Microgrant program that provided direct aid to cultural practitioners during the pandemic). It’s been clear for years that Frenchmen St. gigs are a major source of income for many musicians and many other folks who work in the venues and businesses there, but there are many unknowns, guesses, and pieces to be filled in. This section has some previous pieces I have written and other ways of trying to capture Frenchmen St. in numbers.
Article: Cultural Economy of Frenchmen Street
This following piece is a report that I wrote in 2019 after doing a round of interviews with musicians. [Thanks to the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South for their Monroe Fellowship grant!] I conducted them on the basis of maintaining subjects’ anonymity, which allowed the conversations to delve deep into the economic realities and shine light onto a subject which is usually unexplored.
Article: Tipping on Frenchmen Street
Article: Musicians Wages Stagnated as Housing Costs Rose 1980-2020
Huge thanks to Antigravity Magazine for providing a monthly column space for MaCCNO, the two pieces above are from that series.
In 2016, on a whim, I decided to try and count all the gigs that happened on Frenchmen in a single month. After compiling photos of venue calendars, Offbeat and Livewire listings, and other sources in May 2016, the answer was: 1,047, played by 424 bands. (And that is an undercount based on missing data. For example, most of the gigs at Yuki were not listed anywhere I could find.)
That many gigs on less than 3 blocks in one month—admittedly a heavy month given that it’s during festival season—shows the importance of Frenchmen as a cultural-economy engine. Looking at the bottom of the table (rows 33-35), it’s interesting to see how some venues have a more regular weekly, schedule/fewer bands in the month.
Table: 2018 Quarterly Gig Count
In 2018, I revisited the idea of counting Frenchmen gigs, and did it quarterly — March, June, September and December. There were similar challenges with finding gig listings, but with the available information this table shows between 884 and 1,061 gigs each month (as much as 3,340 hours of music played on the strip in one month!)
One night in 2019, I had the idea to manually count vehicles coming down the street. This came from a discussion around how the crowds had become too dense over the years, and possible traffic and safety hazards, including the idea of limiting ride-sharing services to a specific drop-off point on Esplanade. While it never happened (ride-sharing company lobbyists in Baton Rouge were able to prevent their drop-offs being limited), it illustrates the difficulty of creating legal parameters for something as complicated, dense and ever-changing as Frenchmen St.