Treme Tuesday - Street Life in the Quarter

Lucky Dog cart on Rue Bourbon

An important plot of the HBO series Treme is the street life of the French Quarter, along with Faubourgs Marigny and Treme. Annie and Sonny, the street-musician couple, make their meager livings performing on street corners from Royal to Frenchmen. Davis Mcalary wanders all over Treme and the Quarter, offering comic relief.

Then there's Antoine. Antoine Batiste is not a "street musician," like Sonny and Annie, but he certainly is on the street more than he'd like to be. Like many New Orleanians, Antoine lost his car in the storm. Public transit was beyond dysfunctional in that first year post-k. NORTA got the streetcars running again on Canal Street by December of 2005, but still struggles to provide service to commuters even now. In the show, Antoine's stuck out in Metairie. Even before the storm, the public-transit links between city and suburbs were weak. That means Antoine is forced to rely on taxicabs to get around--not a cheap proposition. To minimize this, taxicab patrons often walk as much as they can, and that's Antoine. Of course, folks who work in the Quarter (as Antoine does when he works his strip-club gig), you've got to walk a bit anyway. That makes casual encounters between Annie/Sonny and Antoine perfectly logical.

Of course, Treme is not the first exploration of life on the streets of New Orleans. John Kennedy Toole's wonderful novel, A Confederacy of Dunces is the best-known tales in the genre.  Toole's iconic anti-hero, Ignatius J. Reilly worked for the fictional "Paradise Vendors," a not-so-veiled homage to Lucky Dogs.  The real-life story of Lucky Dogs, told by Jerry Strahan in his book, Managing Ignatius, is one of the most enjoyable memories of the French Quarter ever written. Both are highly recommended.