Resolve and Recreation Still Strong on Bourbon Street

NEW ORLEANS — Somebody forgot to tell the French Quarter that this town is dead. Because the regulars at Johnny White's Sports Bar & Grill on Bourbon Street were having none of the talk about their city being the new Chernobyl, a ghost metropolis never to rise again. Even if the bureaucrats in Washington and Baton Rouge want to shut the place down and move everybody out.

"It's my property. I have a right to die in my property," bartender Larry Hirst said as he served up a pair of Heinekens to two female patrons Thursday night. The politicians and disaster planners, Hirst added, were "too damn distant to realize that people in the French Quarter, since we're high and dry, we have a right to be here."

The French Quarter always has been a world apart, even in a city famous for its contrarian ways. Spared the worst effects when the hurricane roared across the coast nearly two weeks ago, the Quarter has become something of a holdout for free spirits who refuse to abandon the flood-ravaged city.

Johnny White's, a 24-hour bar that serves a loyal constituency of late-shift workers and locals, boasts of having never closed throughout the crisis. Hirst said the bar had become a kind of "community center," distributing free water, Army-issued Meals Ready to Eat, clothes and other emergency provisions. "We provide a place for people to go and relax and forget about their ruined homes, their dead neighbors, whatever," he said.

By the end of the week, most of the residents had fled the picturesque wrought-iron-balconied and wood-shuttered houses. Patrolling Army and police units had replaced the usual mobs of inebriated tourists, and a pregnant calm hung over the streets. But in isolated spots, the Quarter seemed to be its usual independent-minded self, and the stragglers made it clear they had no intention of being anywhere else on Earth.

"You can't kick all the queers out of the Quarter," said Denny Huppert, who was drinking with his friend Shawn Queen at Johnny White's. For Huppert, Queen and other gay men, the Quarter is a separate village within the city, a bastion of tolerance in the belly of the Deep South. "The French Quarter has always been unique people," Huppert said. "You can walk down the street holding another guy's hand in the middle of the night." The men said that although they had resolved to stay put, some of their friends had left the city only because they were running out of HIV-related drugs and needed to refill their prescriptions.