Billy Lee "Billy Lee Harman" H.'s Profile

Any initial visit to the French Quarter might well begin here.  Sit outside and relax over beignets and coffee with chicory and watch the people in the setting of Jackson Square and St. Louis Cathedral.  The setting is the center of the beginning of New Orleans.

The top of the bar is copper.  Every French Quarter bar with a copper top claims antiquity while catering to people who care about neither the difference nor the similarity between Jean Lafitte and Tom Benson.  The only use I have for this place is walking past it for a notion of how many tourists are in town.  Its customers are nearly all tourists stopping before heading back up Bourbon Street.  People who love the Quarter dodge Bourbon Street.

This newspaper's two-part name signifies the merger of a black newspaper with a white newspaper, and it doesn't actively suck up to the Landrieu money-mongering and Pillsbury doughboy racism and other political corruption that's turning the French Quarter into one big sports bar with poker machines and calling replacing Bourbon Street's strip joints with Las Vegas "gentlemen's clubs" cleaning up the Quarter.  But neither does it publish the most significant details of all that, such as that the Vieux Carré Commission the neighborhood formed to prevent such sanctions it, presumably similarly to suck.  And WGNO is leading local television "journalism" into similar twisted sucking.  So we need the Times-Picayune to step up.

This bar's former owners called it the border of the Quarter.  Actually, it's on the Marigny side of Esplanade Avenue and not on the French Quarter side, and it's one block from where Esplanade leaves both neighborhoods and separates Tremé from the rest of the Seventh Ward.  And it's the nearest thing to a blue collar bar in any of those neighborhoods, with few of its regulars the musicians or food and beverage servers who frequent bars in Marigny and the Quarter, and nearly none the African Americans who mainly populate the neighborhoods on the other side of the Rampart Street border of the Quarter.  But I like its barmaids, partly because its African American one referred to its goateed white male bartender as "the tattle tale," maybe because he sucks up to the new owners by pedantically prattling about food and ignored the accent ague in "paté" on a sign behind the bar to pronounce it "pate."  And, despite his pedantic prattle, the young woman who mainly guides most of the food preparation there does it very well.  The place offers fine food and beverage 24 hours a day.

I fell in love with the French Quarter nearly a quarter of a century ago, and one thing I love about living here is hearing the calliope concert from the Natchez, the only steam-driven paddle-wheeler remaining on this crescent of the river.

Why has New Orleans native Tom Benson joined Edwin Edwards and the Vieux Carré Commission in selling out his hometown's heritage?  Why are his neighbors buying that, calling Texan Drew Brees Mr. New Orleans and trying to defend Californian Sean Payton, and calling the Saints their home team?  Why are we the people of New Orleans paying assassins and calling them saints?

This chain of bars is where it belongs.  Pam and Earl, the couple owning these tourist traps, took to Bourbon Street the Hand Grenade drink they patented at the Déjà Vu.  The Déjà Vu is a neighborhood bar one block from Bourbon Street, but Pam and Earl sold it presumably to suck up more money on Bourbon, where more people suck up Jell-O shots with their higher profit margin.  So the Tropical Isles' customer base is the same as that of ABC's New Orleans affiliate WGNO, whose News with a Twist anchors recently demonstrated the twisted mentality that calls football players saints by showing and laughing at a mother kicking a soccer ball into the face of her young child, the mentality that calls gentlemen's clubs the Las Vegas franchise strip joints New Orleans' Vieux Carre Commission has invited since it fell in with the Edwin Edwards corruption that brought New Orleans Harrah's.  The guy who calls himself Bad Man, and calls someone he says has suffered his O. J. Simpson mentality for 21 years girlie and called me a hater for expressing my disgust at such on my review of WGNO, belongs at the Tropical Isles.  Earl once told me at the Déjà Vu that he was thinking of trying to get the Porta Potty contract for Mardi Gras for the money he might monger from it.  His Tropical Isles help other cheap money mongers turn the French Quarter into a toilet..

Great is seeing Dorothy again standing out for us.  Dorothy is an aluminum windmill that stands in front of this store as it stood in front of its predecessor.  My second job in New Orleans was helping customers of Mary's True Value hardware store in the quiet end of Bourbon Street.  The Vieux Carré Commission, which claims to support the best of the French Quarter, ran it off to make room for such as the Las Vegas franchise strip joints in the noisy end.  And, despite the neighborhood's requests and needs, it obstructed Mary's efforts to reopen as an Ace on Rampart Street for more than a year.  The Vieux Carré Commission has morphed into an arm of New Orleans political corruption.  Mary's has supported the Vieux Carré Commission's ostensible mission for decades.  Thanks to Mary's for persevering against that corruption.  Congratulations to Mary's neighborhood.

I'm the only white person I've seen in this bar three blocks behind my Esplanade Avenue home, in New Orleans' mostly African-American Seventh Ward, but I always feel welcome there.  The last time I was there, I talked with Kermit Ruffins as he sat at the bar, checking out his Facebook page.  He agreed with me that it ain't easy being green.

Mattassa's is one of the few full service neighborhood grocery stores remaining in the United States.  John and Louis Matassa still often stand at the entrance to their store welcoming their customers as their mother did as they still offer delivery into their French Quarter neighborhood by bicycle.  And, if you live in the Quarter and find that they don't stock something you ordinarily buy, all you have to do to get them to stock it is to tell them.