[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.15 The wooden steps of the Moon Walk are a favorite roost, andbear carved insignia and names of gutter punks who have passed time there.16The gutter punks can be more aggressive, in begging and defense of their turf, than traditional panhandlers; some violence between themselves andothers flares.17 Out of media scrutiny, they also lost violent collisions withthe working poor of New Orleans, who resent them mightily.The hippies ofthe sixties and seventies had a collective musk of marijuana and incense; thedownwind of current street people can be a gut-wrenching miasma of oldsecretions, unwashed bodies, and metabolized alcohol and drugs.The gutterpunks made the beret-wearing, bongo-banging Beats and the NOLA Expressselling, pot-smelling hippies seem, almost, well, quaint and distinctive.The gutter punks joined, and then outnumbered, the usual cast of hang-ers-on in Jackson Square and surrounding streets.Most of the latter are older,unemployed, alcoholic men, who, in another day, were simply called bums or winos. As the civic boosters and real estate agents promoted expensiveproperties to out-of-towners, these people became an eyesore and a liability.In homeless people, the new reformers found their demons, and, in anew city councilwoman, found their champion.Councilwoman Jackie Clark-son s support for cleaning up the Quarter might be dismissed as just anotherupswing in the three-century cycle of crackdown and laissez-faire.However,this reform effort took a new twist.The artists who painted and displayedtheir wares in Jackson Square were pitted against street people and fortune-tellers.Clarkson had benches removed and returned with dividers installed toprohibit sleeping.After the legal fumes cleared, the fortune-tellers remainedin a specific area and the painters also retained their turf.Street people of allkinds are still being officially discouraged.18 Although an ordinance againstsleeping in public was eventually enacted,19 it was later ruled unconstitutionalby a federal court.20 Even if they were visually displeasing to some, street peo-ple did not cause trouble when they slept, and many could find shelter out ofpublic view.In all this, there was some measure of clear thinking.No one wantedthe Vieux Carré to suffer the massive encampments of street people as seenin San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere.Discouraging the relatively small Interlude: odd folks 131groups of gutter punks now, the theory went, would prevent a mass migra-tion of their ilk.21 Moving on and growing up, the gutter punks would, it washoped, simply vanish into the American population like other groups beforethem.The gutter punks, and those who provided social services for them,pointed out that New Orleans has always had street people.Being visuallydifferent and nonconformist, they maintain, should not be reserved for thosewith money.After all, it was not so long ago that people simply perceived tobe gay were being hassled and arrested in the Quarter.The gutter punks hadsome advocates who tried to provide services in a cash-strapped and hostilecity.22 However, they had no prominent champion as the hippies had had inMike Stark, who died in 1998.23In 2003, Rolling Stone profiled gutter punk life in New Orleans as drugridden, desperate, and much harassed by cops.24 This last impression wasconfirmed when, after the article, many gutter punks were arrested.25 TheNOPD was no more sympathetic to gutter punks than it had been thirty-fiveyears earlier towards hippie encampments.However, after over a decade ofcomplaints about the gutter punks,26 and cycles of police roundups and has-sling, there has been only a modest impact on their visible numbers in thearea between Jackson Square and the Frenchman Triangle.The propensity of some gutter punks to violently guard their spacecame to the fore in 2005.The building at the corner of Esplanade and Deca-tur had housed many clubs over the years.In the 1980s and 1990s, it had beenhome to the Mint, a gay and lesbian bar named after the old U.S.Mint acrossthe street.Then it became El Matador, an eclectic nightclub that attractedmany gutter punks and became the pivot of their neighborhood.In 2004,the building was sold by the El Matador s operator s father.27The new owner was actor and prestidigitator Harry Anderson.Afterstruggling with the typical bureaucratic obstacles, he opened Oswald s night-club in the summer of 2005.The gutter punks, ignorant of the facts, blamedAnderson for the demise of El Matador, and he was verbally and then physi-cally assaulted by former patrons of the club.28 After Hurricane Katrina inAugust of 2005, Anderson opened the club for town hall meetings of resi-dents and government officials.Besides the loss of customers and ruinousutility bills, in May of 2006, Anderson suffered a virtual replay of the earlierassault.In August of 2006, the Andersons had had enough, sold their prop-erty, and moved away
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]