NEW ORLEANS ‒ At first glance, Bourbon Street remains as it always was: Tourists clutch cocktails as they totter down the uneven sidewalks in high heels. The shoeshine guys make their bad dad jokes. The brass bands draw crowds, cell phone cameras in hand. The beignets are still piping hot, the frozen margaritas still frosty.
But in the quieter areas, things are, well, quieter. On a cool December evening as raindrops polka-dotted the pavement, longtime street performer Onunze Ubaka, 72, crooned Motown classics to a virtually empty corner off the usually busy Jackson Square in the French Quarter. Few tourists passed by. Even fewer stopped to drop dollar bills into his white tip bucket.
“You can feel the change,” Ubaka said in between songs from Lou Rawls and The Temptations. Inside his tip bucket, a small pile of greenbacks barely covered the 15-pound dumbbell he started putting in after a young man tried to run off with it…