There are countless Bourbon Streets.
There’s residential Bourbon. There is gay Bourbon — whatever of its remains can be glimpsed beneath the screeching flocks of bachelorette vultures. There are subjective Bourbons: beggar’s Bourbon, burlesque Bourbon, barker’s Bourbon, busker’s Bourbon. There is tender, poignant, instructively Hogarthian dawn Bourbon, morning Bourbon’s busy trucks cleaning and restocking, the fetid siesta of afternoon Bourbon. There is the intriguingly liminal demographic overlap of dusk Bourbon, followed, of course, by evening Bourbon, night Bourbon and the unpredictable, paranoid but exhilaratingly raw Real Bourbon Hours Bourbon, where the lone stroller experiences relentless evaluation of their potential role in a binary of predator and prey.
It would be hard to do justice to any of these without outrageous generalization — one could go block by block, hour by hour, forever. There is, however, a coherent shorthand Bourbon of the collective imagination: Bourbon Street’s upriver blocks, at night, lit by dream-like neon and crowded with revelers.