Will the Tourists Come Back To New Orleans?

NEW ORLEANS -- On Bourbon Street, Red Cross workers are taking a break with a night out. There are firefighters, police officers, National Guard troops, construction workers and contractors of every stripe. But there aren't any tourists or conventioneers, the twin engines that make this city, home to just one Fortune 500 company, economically viable.

And many of the Hurricane Katrina rescue and relief workers are heading home. Bars and restaurants that were full a week ago are often close to empty. This is making local business owners wonder whether early stirrings of life in the French Quarter were real -- or a heartbreaking mirage.

"The first two weeks back, I was standing room only," said Brent Ardeneaux, manager of Déjà Vu Showgirls, one of several Bourbon Street strip clubs that have reopened since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. "Now we've lost a lot of the military and police. And all the conventions are canceled until at least March. That's the biggest part of my business. If we don't have conventions, that doesn't make me feel real comfortable."

Leisure travel, business conventions and major events such as Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest and the Sugar Bowl are by far the dominant drivers of the New Orleans economy. They account for $5 billion to $8 billion in revenue per year, according to the city's Convention and Visitors Bureau. Before the storm, tourism employed 85,000 workers in the city.

But the Convention Center, a fetid refuge from the flood, is wrecked and not expected to reopen till the end of March. The Nokia Sugar Bowl has decamped to Atlanta, at least for next year. The traditional Thanksgiving week football game between rivals Grambling State and Southern, known as the Bayou Classic, has moved to Houston this year. Halloween, typically a big draw for voodoo lovers, will be significantly scaled down. This city has already lost $3 billion worth of anticipated revenue from events canceled from Sept. 1 through March 31, according to the visitors bureau.

Jacques Chrysochoos, owner of Howl at the Moon and Hustler bars on Bourbon Street, said his clubs need about $1.5 million a month in revenue to remain profitable. That means about a million visitors a month. "We're ready. We can reopen. But who is going to come?" Chrysochoos said.

Such worries -- as well as the loss of visitors who once frequented the region's now-damaged riverboat casinos -- led Mayor C. Ray Nagin last week to suggest that gambling be allowed in large hotels in the central business district.

Restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate to hire workers, offering big wage increases and bonuses. But even prospective employees who want to come home -- and many do not -- have nowhere to live. Right now, hotel workers are living in hotel rooms. Strippers are sleeping on couches in clubs. But everyone knows this cannot last long.

To make matters worse, the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, the city's crucial marketing arm, is virtually shut down. The bureau runs in part on hotel room taxes. Federal workers who have booked up many hotels for the next several months often pay no tax. There has even been talk of the city airport going broke, something that would certainly choke New Orleans to death. Business leaders say, though, that there is no way the federal government would let that happen.

Perhaps not, but the calculus for getting this city's staggered tourism economy back on its feet is daunting and riddled with Catch-22s. And time is limited. Even ardent city promoters acknowledge that New Orleans, lacking any other major industry, will fall into despair and bankruptcy unless tourists start coming back soon. If they do not, the 3,000 government layoffs recently announced by Nagin will be just the start.

"We are not a major corporate city. We don't have the big oil and gas industry anymore. We are a textural, historical and cultural economy," said J. Stephen Perry, president of the visitors bureau. "It's very, very important that tourism get back up and running and do it pretty quickly."

The case for a resurgent New Orleans tourism market goes roughly this way: For the next few months, the city limps along as hotels, bars and restaurants try to reopen and survive on business from construction workers, contractors and government employees who will undoubtedly stick around, though they probably will not run up big tabs at New Orleans flagship restaurants such as Emeril's and Commander's Palace.