In his evocative, heartfelt Katrina memoir, A Season of Night, local food critic Ian McNulty writes of a pivotal emotional moment in November 2005, less than three months after the storm. While out with his dog during their routine evening walk, McNulty came across a dim flicker in his otherwise still blacked-out section of Mid-City.

Moving closer, he found the Banks Street Bar, a corner pub, had re-opened with only a cooler of ice, a radio and a few candles. People, mostly men, had gathered inside the moonlit, moldy walls, pulling stools around a flood-wrecked pool table. “... it seemed like a miracle,” McNulty writes of hearing the din of voices and seeing the shadowy figures inside. “Instantly, the bar had resumed its role as a neighborhood gathering place.”

Indeed, the Banks Street Bar was the first business McNulty witnessed reopen in his area. “In the months that followed,” McNulty would later conclude, “through all the darkness and fear, the best moments of encouragement and happiness came more often from bars and restaurants than anywhere else. They ... were the fires around which we circled for reminders of the city’s life and culture before the storm, for company and sometimes literally for warmth.”

We are a city of drinkers, albeit at times to excess. A city of strolling drinkers, of roaming drinkers, of dog walking drinkers, of festival and parade drinkers, of lazy day in the park drinkers, of porch and balcony and courtyard drinkers, of morning and happy hour and late night drinkers, of occasional drinkers, of daily drinkers, of pocket flask drinkers, of costumed and wigged drinkers, of marathon-running and bowling drinkers, of drive-thru drinkers, of bicycling drinkers, of horse- and rickshaw-riding drinkers.

More than anything else, we are among the last holdouts of a vanishing breed in America: a city of neighborly drinkers.

A couple of years ago, my co-authors Elizabeth Pearce and Richard Read and I wrote The French Quarter Drinking Companion, an anecdotal guide to 100 bars in America’s most eccentric neighborhood. Even before our first round, we understood that drinking in the Vieux Carré would prove a decidedly different beast. And not just because there were so many bars (far more than 100 packed into less than one square mile) or because of our right to meander with a 42-ounce daiquiri in hand. These were just the overt signs of something less tangible and more important we came to see about the longstanding spaces, both physical and psychic, drinking occupies in New Orleans.

Eventually we came to articulate what we’d instinctively known all along: Bars here are about a lot more than just getting blotto. Certainly there are those establishments, as well as those meant to impress or those where the patrons sip to jazz standards or those where they down day-glo shots before belting out the words to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”. However, even among the roving conventioneers and tiara-wearing bachelorettes, we found that off-the-beaten-track hangouts not only exist but thrive.

We came to remember that although only a small number of this city’s population lives in the Quarter full-time, others spend the bulk of their days or nights working there. In others words, some 300 years after its founding, the Quarter remains foremost a neighborhood. It remains our city’s foremost neighborhood. And ultimately, it was the bars with a steadfast and loyal clientele of the likes of Erin Rose, Fahy’s or the Golden Lantern, where we most liked to imagine our Vieux Carré doppelgangers sitting on their regular stools come 6 o’clock.

In New Orleans, neighborhoods don’t exist in spite of bars but in conjunction with them, and in some cases, owe much of their identity to them. For locals or long-time residents, this statement may be obvious. However, it’s important to remind ourselves that our fondness for these neighborhood spots doesn’t exist many other places, if anywhere in the United States, to the same extent. In fact, most cities prohibit bars in the center of neighborhoods. Seen as social threats or tolerated vices, bars are often relegated to heavily commercialized streets or the flinty edges of towns and sometimes (Handkerchiefs, please) outlawed entirely.