Half-Million Expected To Flock To French Quarter Festival For 30th Anniversary

The Vieux Carré will become ground zero this week as the French Quarter Festival — the largest free music festival in the southeast — kicks off its 30th anniversary celebration with four days of music. We sat down with Marci Schramm, the festival’s executive director, to learn more about what’s on tap for this year’s festivities. Highlights from the interview: On reaching the 30-year milestone: There’s something just about an anniversary — it causes people to reflect on the past and how far it’s come and how much it’s changed, yet stayed the same. It just forces people to talk about the past a little bit more, which is nice. The festival started the same year as the 1984 World’s Fair, under former Mayor Dutch Morial’s administration. There were extensive street and sidewalk repairs throughout the French Quarter that year. Business owners were very unhappy because the construction was causing them to lose business. And so the business owners of the Quarter complained to Dutch and said