Get Your Butt Off Bourbon Street, and Cross Over To
Rip up your tourist brochures! Get your butt off Bourbon Street, and cross over to the “other side.” Our no-holds-barred insider’s guide only is the thing you’ll ever need to experience New Orleans—and Mardi Gras—the way the coolest locals do. “NEW ORLEANS WAS a place to hide,” wrote Charles Bukowski, the dive sweeping up the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. That means fresh hell if bard and Barfly author. “I could piss away my life there.” you are in the French Quarter, where mounted police are just waiting for Which is what this most infamous city is for most visitors, especially the opportunity to pounce. during Mardi Gras season: a place to get hammered and stay that way, Why get laid over in Obvious Land, when you could be imbibing and lose your shirt, then your shit, hit the strip clubs and tourist traps of inhaling the spookiest, sexiest, tastiest, most haunted and hedonistic Bourbon Street, spend your cash on countless $9 Hurricane drinks and metropolis in the U.S., perhaps the world? “slippery nipple” shooters, all the while screaming, “Show us your tits!” Hide your wallet in your tighty-whities and follow our A-team of ex- at boozy, floozy coeds gone wild. perts—all seasoned veterans of crawling and brawling through every But is that what you really want to do when you’re in this “strange, dec- inch of the city—taking you, among many other best-kept secrets, to adent city,” as vampire novelist Anne Rice called it, for a long (read: lost) the extended block party of the Faubourg weekend? The entire time? BY STEVE GARBARINO Marigny’s Frenchmen Street, as well as a Mardi Gras this year falls on February 24—Fat Tuesday, as it’s called— PHOTOGRAPHS BY rollicking bar run down Magazine Street.
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