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.The church schools educated genera-tions of girls in plaid skirts and boys in rumpled white shirts, Catholic andProtestant alike.Churches and church schools were neighborhood anchors.With few exceptions, the Catholic establishment had a long-standing modusvivendi with the lords temporal and carnal.To buy a beer from a nun, at abingo game, in a church school, in the middle of the Quarter, was no contra-diction at all.It was part of the New Orleans Order of Things.The out-migration of Catholics, and the falling away of some of theremaining flock, began to empty the churches.The buildings, some over 150years old and needing major repair, saw fewer parishioners each year.Thearchdiocese had to close and consolidate many churches, leaving the oldbasilicas empty and silent, like sealed tombs on lonely streets.2The loss of these touchstones, the slide of life quality, and the drumbeatof unfavorable publicity had aroused passionate defense of the city in the lateeighties and nineties, as things went from bad to worse in nearly all parts oftown.In the late eighties, bumper stickers proclaiming New Orleans, Proudto Call It Home appeared.They were quickly joined by a similar sticker,with a cockroach rampant New Orleans, Proud to Crawl Home. The city sdefenders rushed to contradict media that cast the city in a bad, which usu-ally meant a truthful, light, and New Orleans bashing became one of thefew civic cardinal sins.As the twentieth century staggered to its end, a new kind of CrescentCity civic patriot appeared.Not just focused on the Quarter, these looked toreviving the city and its traditional folkways, eroding from economics, out- 228 2000 and on: into the new centurymigration, and the tide of national culture.These revivalists are harder todefine than the preservationists. Indeed, many proudly claim both labelsand see no conflict between the agendas of each.For our purposes, we maydraw the distinction thus.A preservationist is one who desires to keep thecurrent order of physical things and their existing human interactions intact.Preservationists tend to reject changes in the use of a building, even if thephysical elements are maintained.A revivalist is not content with merely preserving a status quo, but seeksto revive the overall canopy of life that once covered the city, and still clings,over some neighborhoods, in tattered clouds.That some of this is the prod-uct of rose-colored nostalgia is not disputed, by observers nor adherents.Animportant component of revivalism is rolling back changes seen as tragic,intrusive, and un-N awlins.Revivalist vision includes the recoherence ofneighborhoods, the return of locally focused merchants, and those demo-cratic arteries, streetcars, re-knitting the inner city.Quarter revivalism focuses on upgrading the slipping quality of residen-tial life.Those arrivistes paying gated community prices often expected gatedcommunity norms of quietude, cleanliness, and behavior.Long-time resi-dents had more modest, but still usually unfulfilled, expectations.As tourismspread into the lower Quarter and its cross-Esplanade cousin, the MarignyTriangle, the noxious byproducts of tourism noise, vandalism, and revel-ers roosting on homeowners stoops grew worse in once-quiet residentialareas.Residents were angered that police presence seemed to be reserved fortourist areas.Mitigating the collision of tourist and residential cultures was not theonly aspect of Quarter revivalism.The desire to return the Quarter to a com-munity of long-term residents, bound by an interior life of little shops, neigh-borhood bars, salons, and services for the natives is very strong.It is, how-ever, much harder to re-create these vanishing pillars of the old life than it isto simply prevent new affronts from the tourism sphere.When I lived in theQuarter, an Englishwoman had a small business at 519 Dumaine called TheUseful Shop.An eclectic array of household goods, gadgets, sewing notions,and advice were dispensed, mainly to locals.Increasing real estate values andthe decline of full-time residents means opening a shop like this now wouldbe a tremendous gamble with lots of money riding on the bet.Revivalists care about the visitors experience and impressions of theVieux Carré as well.A couple should be able to hear Dixieland in the Quarter,unalloyed with disco; stroll down twilight streets without hearing booming 2000 and on: into the new century 229obscenities passing as free speech; and sniff air scented by tea olives, not punkpiss.The physical elements seemed assured by their now-extravagant finan-cial values.It is the social that must be mended.Revivalism went briefly intohigh gear just after the turn of the twenty-first century.Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson was the District C councilwoman from 1990to 1994 and again from 2002 to 2006.Between those terms, she was a staterepresentative from her home base of Algiers.Clarkson, a New Orleans native,was a real estate agent and Democratic Party mainstay [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]