Things were looking good for Sammie “Big Sam” Williams as he looked at the year ahead in February. The veteran horn player had a standing weekly gig at the Jazz Playhouse on Bourbon Street and his five-piece band, Big Sam’s Funky Nation, was booked for months.

Then the coronavirus hit and a gangbusters spring schedule — multiple shows a day through two weeks of Jazz Fest, out-of-state tours, special events — evaporated.

His agent still calls regularly, but it’s with news of cancellations and postponements, not new bookings. He’s kept a trickle of tips coming in with twice-weekly live-streamed shows from his Gentilly driveway. But it’s come nowhere close to what he’d planned on banking — even before splitting it with four bandmates.

“We were looking forward to having another great year, and now we’re at a standstill,” said Williams. “To have all of our shows cancelled, just like every other artist in the world — man, from March to June we really lost out on a lot of money.”

The cataclysm of the coronavirus has upended livelihoods across the world and sent unemployment in the U.S. rocketing up to levels not seen since the Great Depression. People everywhere are feeling the pinch, but in New Orleans — where the post-Katrina economy has been fueled by booming tourism — the future for many now seems particularly precarious.

Much remains unknown about the coronavirus, and hopes remain that a sooner-than-expected cure could let the economy ramp right back up to where it was after a surreal, unprecedented two-month near-shutdown.

But there’s also the looming possibility that the crisis could be prolonged. Even if the danger of the coronavirus diminishes, analysts fear that tourism and travel may be among the slowest sectors of the economy to rebound, with would-be travelers reluctant to climb into airplanes or cruise ships and battered corporations, still nursing deep losses, axing conventions.

Tens of thousands of New Orleanians — from big-time hoteliers who’ve built fortunes to dishwashers scraping out a living by the hour in the back of French Quarter restaurants — rely at least in part on the millions of travelers who flock to the Crescent City each year.

For now, that business is virtually dead. Bars and once-raucous night clubs are shuttered. The balconies along Bourbon Street, once teeming with bachelor parties from New York and red-faced football fans from Alabama, are now empty perches for the birds. Whole hotels house just a handful of guests, and the glittering new $1 billion airport in Kenner now sees just 3% of its scheduled flights, its ballyhooed food court completely closed.

Clearly, the short-term economic pain has been immense. But restaurant workers, business owners, musicians, tour guides, hoteliers and politicians all warn that damage could easily get worse as the months drag on.

Improved unemployment benefits — which more than tripled the maximum weekly payouts in Louisiana from $247 to $847 — are set to expire at the end of July. Other forms of federal aid, such as the Paycheck Protection Program, which offers forgivable loans to small businesses, were designed as short-term relief and will mostly run out by mid-summer.

Exacerbating the pain is the pandemic’s timing, which wiped out almost all of the lucrative spring festival season when many in New Orleans — musicians, bartenders, cabbies, Uber drivers, etc. — earn much of their cash for the whole year.

If the city’s dominant industry is still moribund when that happens, and into the fall, when business traditionally picks up, things could get ugly.

“As difficult as these last few weeks have been, it pales in comparison to what is coming,” said Stephen Perry, the CEO and president of New Orleans & Co., the tax-supported tourism marketing and sales group. “We think we have a three- to four-year recovery ahead, which is going to mean a long time getting employees back to work and creating revenue for the city.”

“It’s very scary,” said Heywood Sanders, an expert on the tourism and convention industries and professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio, when asked to sum up the outlook for tourism in New Orleans. “My suspicion is that travel demand in the aggregate will be very slow returning.”

Perry said visitor counts hit record levels in New Orleans in 2019, pointing to newly released numbers from D.K. Schifflet & Associates that put total visitors to the city at 19.75 million people and estimated visitor spending at $10 billion, both upticks from the year before. Even if things go well, Perry said he doesn’t expect business to get close to that level until late 2022 at the earliest.

“It will be years; it will definitely be years,” said John Williams, dean of the business school at the University of New Orleans and a longtime hospitality industry analyst. He noted that it took a decade for hotel bookings in New Orleans to fully rebound after Katrina. “It’s going to be along those lines of slow, steady growth.”

Some industry leaders think it’s important to get that started by allowing restaurants and other businesses can begin partially reopening under new protocols — including limited tables in dining rooms — in the coming weeks. Perry, along with a handful of prominent business owners in the hospitality industry, has urged New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and Gov. John Bel Edwards to press ahead with limited reopenings that’d allow at least a trickle of visitors from the surrounding region to start driving in for weekend visits soon.

But, Perry added, if “we have a big recurrence that requires entities to be closed again, I think you’re going to permanently and irreparably damage the fabric of New Orleans and the hospitality business. I think it’ll take years and years to get back again.”

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Among the hardest-hit sectors could be restaurants, which even in the best of times struggle with narrow margins and changing tastes — something that will be badly dented by limits on how closely they can pack tables — and don’t tend to have deep reserves of cash. Even restaurants outside tourist enclaves like the French Quarter often rely on out-of-towners for a substantial chunk of their business.

Restaurants also employ more people — many at low hourly wages that leave little ability to stash savings for hard times — than any other sector in New Orleans.

“Despite our community’s love of food and drink, there’s simply not enough people [in New Orleans] to support all our restaurants, bars, po-boy shops, music clubs and neighborhood joints,” said restaurateur Bill Hammack, who part-owns a number of prominent New Orleans restaurants with chef Donald Link.

Hammack said he’s grown increasingly worried as the crisis has deepened and now fears that huge numbers of restaurant workers in the city could end up in dire straits.

Hammack said his restaurant group — which includes Herbsaint, Cochon, Peche and La Boulangerie — had to lay off most of its 500 employees in March, many of them long-time workers that Hammack likened to family. Hammack said they’ve kept 65 people on payroll — mostly senior staffers like chefs, sous chefs and managers — to be ready to quickly open back up and rehire the rest.

At the time, Hammack said, he was “buoyed by the optimistic news” that festivals and conventions were rescheduling and hoped for “a busier-than-usual summer and a great fall.”

But as deaths began to mount in New Orleans and big events started cancelling, Hammack said, it became clear that it’d be a much longer crisis — and that restaurants would only be able to reopen at a fraction of their occupancy. For most restaurants, Hammack said, “the math just doesn’t work” when opening at 25% capacity.

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If the city can’t safely begin reopening restaurants and other businesses at something closer to full capacity — or if a spike in new coronavirus cases forces another shutdown — then Hammack said many businesses might not make it and “all bets are off.”

“Imagine our city with 25,000, 30,000 or more hospitality workers who, 90 days from now, don’t have a job, have exhausted unemployment benefits, have no health insurance, don’t have money to feed their families or pay the rent,” said Hammack. “That will be another health crisis all its own.”

Many musicians in New Orleans were struggling with precarious employment and no health insurance before the pandemic, said Ethan Ellestad, executive director of the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans, which has launched a number of grant programs to help musicians. Losing festival season was a huge blow, Ellestad said, while many of those with side jobs worked in businesses like bars that have also been shut down.

Ellestad said this crisis has only further illustrated deep inequalities in the tourism business, where big business owners have grown wealthy while the folks who create the culture the city so successfully markets — musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, parading groups — have struggled to earn a living.

“Musician pay has been abysmally low for a lot of folks for a long time. That’s part of the challenge here and that’s part of the inequity built into the tourism industry,” said Ellestad, who criticized groups like New Orleans & Co. for not directing more aid to workers. “We really need to be rethinking how tourism in New Orleans is structured. We saw the industry essentially collapse within a week.”

City Councilmember Kristin Gisleson Palmer, whose district includes some of the city’s biggest tourism hotspots, said the collapse has exposed what she sees as long-standing fissures in an industry that “just went nuts” over the past 15 years.

Wages in much of the industry are “poverty level” and left too many people in precarious situations before the crisis hit, Palmer said. As the city now looks to craft a recovery, Palmer, like Ellestad, said the city needs to try to promote higher wages and a better living for people toiling in the city’s biggest industry.

“We’ve kind of gotten away from that because we only judge success for the industry by how many people came and that’s not how you measure success,” Palmer said. “It should be based on the livelihood of the people who live here and the quality of life of the people who live here.”

Bookings were looking brisk back in February for “Hottest Hell Tours,” a small boutique true-crime New Orleans tour agency co-owned and operated by Kimberly Kaye. Guides were fully booked around the French Quarter Fest and the rest of the peak spring season looking promising.

Restrictions on tour group sizes in early March took a big bite out of profits, Kaye said, and then everything stopped altogether.

“You’re talking about people who literally fell off the wire with no safety net,” said Kaye. Almost all tour guides work as freelance subcontractors, so they were initially ineligible for unemployment insurance. The federal relief package changed that, but the extra boost is set to expire at the end of July.

Kaye said her company has kept paying guides a modest stipend to tide them over and she’s raised relief funds for out-of-work guides from other companies by selling T-shirts.

“If we don’t reopen, if we don’t start being able to do tours again, we’re not going to have enough money in the bank to do that after another 8 to 12 weeks, max,” said Kaye.

They’ve toyed with offering online video tours of New Orleans to cater to home-bound folks in other cities in hopes of staying connected to customers and drawing in some revenue. But Kaye said she’s unsure whether that’ll prove viable at all — and she thinks it takes a totally different skill set plus expensive equipment to produce slick web content.

“Right now it feels pretty bleak,” said Kaye. “I think we’re going to see a lot more companies close permanently.”

Williams, the trombonist and bandleader, said he’s been doing everything he can — staying home except to get groceries, wearing a mask — in hopes that the coronavirus will be brought under control to the point he can get back to playing gigs. If not, Williams said, “that’s when things are going to get kinda crazy” and “people won’t be able to pay their bills.”

But “I feel like musicians are natural hustlers, you dig? So we’re going to find a way to make some money,” said Williams.

He also struck an optimistic note, hoping that the recovery might in some ways mirror a post-Katrina surge in interest in New Orleans music and culture from people forced to contemplate its loss.

“I think cats are going to make more money than they’ve made in their lives because people are going to be so excited just to get back out and enjoy the things they’d possibly taken for granted before, you know?” Williams said. “That’s where I’m at with it.”