It featured all the standard architectural tropes of the French Quarter topped off with a huge arch emblazoned LOUISIANA’S BOURBON STREET accompanied by towering Carnival royalty. Try doing that to The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Presented by Shell and you’d have a lawsuit on your hands.īourbon is also among the few streets to be replicated structurally-by the State of Louisiana, which sponsored a three-acre exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, New York.
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The name, phenomenon, and imagery are all in the public domain, a valuable vernacular brand free for anyone to appropriate.
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No licenses are needed in replicating Bourbon Street there are no copyrights, trademarks, or royalties due. In this spatial dissemination we see a trend: while local replication of the Bourbon Street phenomenon usually takes the form of competition tinged with contempt (witness the “anti-Bourbons”), external replicas of Bourbon Street view themselves as payers of homage to the “authentic” original, and modestly present themselves as the next best thing without the airfare. Three glass chandeliers hanging over the bar provide an incongruous dash of glamour to an otherwise low-key and comfortable scruffy décor. He jovial Bourbon Street Jazz and Blues Club…attracts a casual, jean-clad crowd of all ages cover bands with a pop flavor blues rhythms. How convincingly do these meta-Bourbons replicate the original? A review of one such venue in Amsterdam (“the New Orleans of Europe”) could easily apply to the actual street: Menus attempt to deliver the spice and zest deemed intrinsic to this perceptual package, as does the atmospheric music. These replicas enthusiastically embrace Bourbon Street imagery and material culture (lampposts, balconies, Mardi Gras jesters, beads) in their signage, décor, and Web sites. Grill” chain-including one on Yonge Street, which has been described as “the Bourbon Street of Toronto.” There are also Bourbon-named restaurants, bars, and clubs in London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Naples, Moscow, Tokyo, Shanghai, Dubai, and many other world cities. Greater Toronto has sixteen, most of them franchises of the Innovated Restaurant Group’s “Bourbon St. Greater New York has eleven, while Calgary has six, as does San Antonio (mostly near the River Walk, “the Bourbon Street of San Antonio”). They span coast to coast, from Key West to Edmonton and from San Diego to Montreal. 1 Today, at least 160 businesses throughout the United States and Canada have “Bourbon Street” in their names and themes 77 percent are restaurants, bars, and clubs 11 percent are retailers (mostly of party and novelty items) and the remainder are caterers, banquet halls, hotels, and casinos-more eating, drinking, and entertaining.
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As early as the 1950s, a nightclub named “Bourbon Street” operated in New York City, and apparently successfully, because in 1957 the Dupont family formed a corporation to purchase it with plans to bring “Mambo City” entertainment to clubs named Bourbon Street in Miami and Chicago.
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Perhaps the best evidence of Bourbon Street’s success is the fact that, like jazz, it has diffused worldwide. This chapter, titled “Replicating Bourbon Street: Spatial and Linguistic Diffusion” and drawn from a section called “Bourbon Street as a Social Artifact,” recounts how this brand has spread worldwide and become part of the language-to both the benefit and chagrin of New Orleans. Editor’s note: following is an excerpt from Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella’s new book, “ Bourbon Street: A History” (LSU Press, 2014), which traces New Orleans’ most famous and infamous space from its obscure colonial origins to its widespread reknown today.