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(More customer reviews)CREATING THE BIG EASY: NEW ORLEANS AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN TOURISM, 1918-45 is especially important today as the city struggles to rebuild and redefine itself. It's a survey of tourism-based development and the cultural and economic forces that transformed New Orleans from a port to a national tourist destination. Urban development, historic preservation and taxes along with the city's efforts to promote its cultural heritage to outsiders makes for an in-depth survey on how visitors are enticed by an image of an urban area's past and present. A 'must' for any who would understand the roots of modern New Orleans' development and the task at hand for rebuilding it.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
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Between the World Wars, New Orleans transformed its image from that of a corrupt and sullied port of call into that of a national tourist destination. Anthony J. Stanonis tells how boosters and politicians reinvented the city to build a modern mass tourism industry and, along the way, fundamentally changed the city's cultural, economic, racial, and gender structure.
Stanonis looks at the importance of urban development, historic preservation, taxation strategies, and convention marketing to New Orleans' makeover and chronicles the city's efforts to domesticate its jazz scene, "democratize" Mardi Gras, and stereotype local blacks into docile, servile roles. He also looks at depictions of the city in literature and film and gauges the impact on New Orleans of white middle-class America's growing prosperity, mobility, leisure time, and tolerance of women in public spaces once considered off-limits.
Visitors go to New Orleans with expectations rooted in the city's "past": to revel with Mardi Gras maskers, soak up the romance of the French Quarter, and indulge in rich cuisine and hot music. Such a past has a basis in history, says Stanonis, but it has been carefully excised from its gritty context and scrubbed clean for mass consumption.
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