New Orleans Bartenders Miss the Sweet Smell of Cigarettes

As Trace Atkins belted "Time Marches On" from the Brothers III Lounge's jukebox in New Orleans, the bartender rang a cowbell behind the counter and asked me to leave. He'd warned the rest of the crowd and me this was coming, starting the count to midnight and our ejection at 11:53 p.m.

"Go outside," he said. "Otherwise it'll be a $500 fine, and I don't want that."

The amenable group knocked the few remaining black, plastic ashtrays together in a sad "cheers" and dutifully clutched their cigarettes close as they stomped outside. It was a slow-moving, somber crew that met on the sidewalk, all strangers connected by their love of nicotine and smoke.

"What has New Orleans come to?" One woman asked, shaking her head as she crouched near the entrance.

"At least fix my potholes before you take my cigarettes," another said, nodding as she leaned against a dumpster.

"I guess we can still go to Jefferson Parish or North Texas," the crouching woman said. "They'll still have us."

At the stroke of midnight on April 22, it became illegal to smoke cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, vaporizers, or any other futuristic smoke-based technology in New Orleans' many bars, casinos, and restaurants. It was a real blow to a city that openly promotes its love of classic debauchery: booze, sex, and tobacco.

But while the city council and Mayor Mitch Landrieu celebrated Wednesday morning outside of the Superdome with speeches from council members and Miss Louisiana Lacey Sanchez, much of New Orleans' service industry groaned with the owners of the numerous Bourbon Street bars and Harrah's Casino.

At midnight, Harrah's also pulled their ashtrays from the floor and put lollipops in their customers' hands. But as they passed out sweets, the casino, New Orleans strip clubs, and French Quarter bars joined together to file a joint lawsuit against the city to bring back the freedom of an indoor-lit cigarette.

At the Superdome, councilmembers refused to give into criticism. The architect of the bill, councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, spent her speaking time celebrating the passage of the ban and thanking the bars for implementing the initiative, even offering gratitude to those suing the city for its removal by name—a classic political nod to the opposition. But it's hard to ignore the drastic cost this could toll on a city that already faces an incredible amount of financial hardship. A report by the Louisiana State Police showed New Orleans could lose $86.4 million from gaming revenue and $17.4 million in fees over the next two years because of the ban.

Still, councilmembers did not accept that as possible.

"Will we really cost our businesses?" asked councilwoman Susan Guidry on Wednesday outside the Superdome. "Will we really lose tax money? We need to give the answer loud and clear. We've seen this too many times. We know the answer to this question. We will not lose money. We will become a healthier New Orleans and in doing so will become a more lucrative New Orleans."

As for enforcement, the New Orleans Police Department won't have anything to do with it. Only agencies like the health department and safety and permits department can do anything about it. The city also offers the opportunity to report illegal smoking by calling 3-1-1, but you can only get a person on the line during normal business hours. Nights and weekends, or typical drinking hours for anyone who doesn't have a problem, don't apply. It seems it will be a while before the kinks are worked out, but hopes for a reversal of the ban aren't high.

"It's never going to go away," said Billy Nothnagle, a gregarious, barrel-chested bartender at Parasol's, a historic dive bar in New Orleans' Irish Channel neighborhood. "Because you look at any place that passed it, they never repealed it. Once they get it in the books, it's just going to be a matter of amending it to how it's going to work around here. But it's never going to go away."

Nothnagle is one of many local bartenders who doesn't smoke but misses its presence, and the bar he works at exemplifies the unfavorable changes of the smoking ban. It's a neuter job. Before you go to Parasol's, you know it's a smoky bar. The Tom Sawyer-esque loose, white wood-siding on which its name drips in bright green paint warns of the haze you're about to enter. Now as he spoke, the sun didn't catch anything in the air except the typical early afternoon clientele. It's a bar without teeth. But the real worry for bars like Parasol's isn't the loss of that clientele—they'll still come for the preposterous fried foods, po' boys, and cheap drinks. It's whether the neighborhood will put up with the patrons smoking on the stoop outside.

"We have a lot of new people in this neighborhood who just bought houses here and really aren't familiar with this neighborhood," Nothnagle said. "They think they're living Uptown. They don't really like us as a bar in their neighborhood already, so it's just going to create problems for us. We don't want that problem. We want to be part of the community as much as we can."

Uptown doesn't still carry the blue-collar heritage of the Irish Channel, as it now plays host to Tulane students and their ilk. Parasol's is an indisputable part of New Orleans history, remaining open since 1952 and rightfully claiming that it has one of the best roast beef po' boys in the city. To lose this dive bar to neighborhood complaints would be losing the very fabric of what makes New Orleans interesting. And this is the concern that all New Orleans dive bars, many with a less interesting story, now carry.

This isn't a fresh worry. As more cities pass smoking bans, neighborhood bars have tended to suffer. It's a matter of people having to go outside to smoke, talking with their buddies, while they are surrounded by homes filled with folks trying to sleep. A resentment that can't be helped grows where there wasn't one before because the perceived problem is immediately outside your window. There's no one to blame but the bar.

Heather Millstone once owned the eponymous bar Heathers in New York City's East Village and suffered multitudes of noise complaints because of that city's smoking ban. People had to go outside, which caused issues.

"One of the things that one of the smoking ban did was it basically took the party outside," she said. "Essentially half of anybody's bar would be outside without anyone realizing that there were people living above or next to the bar."

Because she was on a side street filled with residences, Millstone had to try and combat the issue as much as she could. "We wanted them down the street and near the corner where their noises would combine with everybody on a major cross street rather than on our side street," Millstone said. "We just tried to move everybody just enough so that it was on a noisier section of the street and their habits would blend with everything else while keeping them organized, so it didn't look like an unruly mob. Then we had door people who I called Shush Patrol, and that was their job. Every single night they'd be out there and go, 'Shhh!'"

Though undoubtedly there's nothing worse than to carry the title "shush patrolman," it's a necessity, and undoubtedly a select few will soon be required to carry that badge outside of New Orleans' bars. Smoking bans can help provide ammunition against the neighborhood bars that are deemed nuisances by irritated neighbors.

But beyond the neighborhood bars, there is Bourbon Street: New Orleans' most famous boulevard, synonymous with piss smells and syrupy, inebriating drinks. If smoking isn't allowed in the numerous bars on Bourbon Street, God only knows what will happen on that strip of adult Disney World when smokers have to keep five feet from any bars' windows and doors.

"There's a door every five feet on Bourbon Street," Nothnagle said. "What are you going to do? Stand in the middle of the street in the horseshit so you can smoke a cigarette?"

Without a doubt, the makeup of Bourbon Street will change. Drunken smokers toting Hand Grenades or Hurricanes will crowd nearby buskers as they suck down their nicotine fix, but whether it will cause problems remains to be seen. The first weekend, dotted with hellish storms from the Gulf, thinned the typical mobs.

"So far it's been more crowded around the door," said Thomas Westerfield, a bartender at Tropical Isle, the famous chain of barrooms that serve some of New Orleans most notorious booze-infused sugar drinks. "Now you have more people who wait outside. It hasn't hurt business yet because it's only been a week and the weather has been shitty, but we'll see."

Bourbon Street likely has less to worry about than the neighborhood bars that offer its patrons a safe, quiet space off the street, because the entire thoroughfare is part of the experience. Anyone who lives along Bourbon knows better than to complain about the tourists who stumble on their sidewalks.

"I don't think it'll affect us as much businesswise because people who come here are out of state and can't smoke where they're from," Westerfield said. "They're used to going outside."

I noticed my own smoking decreasing the night of the ban because I didn't want to have to pour my drink into a go cup, a luxury New Orleans smokers still have. Instead, I finished my evening inside Erin Rose, a dive bar in the French Quarter off Bourbon Street. The air seemed cooler than usual, the lights brighter, and the typical smoke smell started to dissipate. The ban had been in effect for three hours by then, and I asked the bartender Jeff Sentence, a thickly bearded nonsmoker, how it felt to be in a smokeless bar.

"It was part of my muscle memory, you know?" he said, "Moving ashtrays to people before they need them. Now I already don't know what to do with myself."

He looked around the room filled with an unfamiliar clear air.

"I don't like how it feels in here without it."