It became clear to Wayne Porter in 2002 that if he wanted to keep his New Orleans bed-and-breakfast alive, he would have to appeal to a different clientele.
In the eight years he had owned and operated The Dive Inn, a 10-room lodging house on a quiet residential block in Uptown, Porter had hosted thousands of tourists from around the world, who relished the inn's quirky charm and heated indoor swimming pool.
But after Sept. 11, 2001, tourism had slowed in New Orleans, and local innkeepers struggled to fill beds. Porter, who was accustomed to earning $2,500 a week in reservations, suddenly found himself making less than $1,000 per month.
"I was desperate," he said. "We were going broke just trying to pay the mortgage."
In striving to rebrand The Dive Inn, Porter took a cunningly practical approach. For years he had watched as guests, returning from a long night in the French Quarter, shed their clothing at the door and flopped into the pool. European tourists, especially Germans and Scandinavians, went naked half the time anyway.
And so, in the summer of 2002, Porter built a website and started marketing the inn to nudists. Within six months, the place was booked every weekend with nudist couples, mostly from the Gulf Coast. And it remained that way, more or less, until August of this year, when Porter and his wife sold the building, closing the books on one of the city's more unique counter-cultural landmarks.
The new owners have discontinued the clothing-optional policy.
The sale of The Dive Inn, located at 4417 Dryades St., near the corner of Napoleon Ave., roughly coincided with the last days of the clothing-optional policy at The Country Club. The Bywater bar and restaurant changed its policy after a woman said she was drugged and sexually assaulted there last summer.
"What's happened to The Dive Inn and The Country Club are two more examples that the funkiness of New Orleans is starting to wane," said Bob Hannaford, who produces the annual adults-only Naughty N' Nawlins convention. Though local clothing-optional venues still exist--The Green House Inn on Magazine St., for example, features a clothing-optional pool--Hannaford worries they will all soon disappear, sapping the city's offbeat identity.
Porter, 65, is less aggrieved. Whereas the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board pressured The Country Club to either end its clothing optional policy or surrender its liquor license, Porter said he closed The Dive Inn simply because he was too old to run it. In recent years, he said, he turned away far more business than he accepted.
"I could write 10 books about the stuff I've seen here," Porter, a bearded, heavyset man with lively blue eyes, said on a recent visit to the inn, his first since selling the property. "Man, if these walls could talk...."
As unique as it was, The Dive Inn was only the latest in a string of unusual endeavors at 4417 Dryades. In the early 20th century, the Mexican Consul to New Orleans bought the property, razing the pre-existing Victorian double-shotgun and half of a Creole cottage. In their place the consul erected a large gymnasium equipped with a 20-foot barrel-vaulted ceiling and a ceramic-tile pool.
The consul's daughter lived in the building until 1972, when it was sold and reconceived as a scuba diving school offering professional certifications.
By the early 1990s, though, the school had fallen into disrepair. Porter said that when he first stepped into the building he nearly tripped over a pile of extension cords running to a single overloaded outlet. Still, he liked the layout and the proximity to the St. Charles Streetcar line. He and his wife Nora bought the rundown 8,500-square-foot property for $120,000 in 1993, with the intent of fixing it up and selling it for a profit, he said.
But the space grew on them. To offset the mortgage, Porter began renting rooms to friends, and then tourists, charging between $95 and $150 a night--rates that never changed over the next 20 years. In homage to the defunct scuba center, he named it The Dive Inn. "The whole thing just evolved from there," he said.
Early photographs of the inn project an eccentric Caribbean vibe, accented with Asian-themed artwork, Mardi Gras flags and pink flamingo motifs. Porter and his wife lived in a 3,000-square-foot apartment in the back, and filled the pool area and bedrooms with furniture and knick-knacks they found at local estate sales. Among the prized pieces was a wooden phone booth featured in the 1986 Richard Gere film "No Mercy," which Porter repurposed as a bathroom wall in a suite he dubbed Neptune's Lair.
In dozens of postcards and thank-you notes Porter collected, guests repeatedly praise the "eclectic" nature of the inn and the warmth of the owners. Notable guests in the 1990s included actor Dennis Quaid and Eric Burdon, lead singer for the band The Animals, who appreciated the laid-back feel and remoteness from French Quarter crowds, Porter said.
In targeting nudists, Porter showed a talent for subtle online advertising. On the Dive Inn's homepage, he uploaded a photo of himself and his wife standing in the pool in a way that only suggests they are unclothed. Under Frequently Asked Questions, he included a list of things The Dive Inn is not, such as "A place for 'high maintenance' people."
A spokesman for the mayor's office said the city has no specific ordinances related to clothing-optional hotels. But Porter said he never knew if running a nude guesthouse was legal or not--he just tried not to attract unwanted attention.
He did so by prohibiting children (and single men on weekends), and personally screening every guest on the phone before booking a room. To prevent the inn from devolving into a party house, he said, he accepted mostly middle-aged couples and insisted on running everything himself.
"Inviting young, single people to get naked and drink alcohol together is a recipe for disaster," Porter said. "That's what happened to The Country Club, and I didn't want it to happen to us."
In the early 2000s, Hannaford of Naughty N' Nawlins was organizing clothing optional excursions to Jamaica and Mexico and hosting what he called "erotic parties" in hotels around New Orleans. When he learned The Dive Inn had become clothing optional, he added it to his erotic party circuit.
"Half the guests would be swimming naked, the other half would be dancing on the pool deck," said Hannaford, who stayed at the inn with his wife several times. "It was a very funky, fun, left-of-center kind of place."
Online testimonials convey similar sentiments. "We had more fun here than is probably legal," a reviewer wrote on the travel website Tripadvisor.com. "This place is an exhibitionists dream and we will be back!!!" wrote another. Still another noted: "Even the pizza boy who delivered us a pie stated that he loved this place (though he was clearly embarrassed)."
Frank Danner, who moved into the house next door after Hurricane Katrina, said sounds of revelry lasted deep into the night. And though he never stepped inside, the guests he saw walk in were, as he put it, "not necessarily the sort of people you'd want to see naked."
As the inn's reputation grew, mainly through word-of-mouth, it attracted its share of swingers, or couples interested in physical intimacy with other couples. After determining swingers did not clash with his existing nudist clientele, Porter took to setting up swinger couples if he thought they would get along.
"For me, that was the best part of the job," Porter said. "Some people that met here went on to travel together and formed long-term bonds. It was beautiful to see."
The Dive Inn was never a four-star hotel. In 1997, AAA declined to list the inn in its travel publications after an inspector found a host of safety and maintenance problems, among them a lack of smoke detectors in most rooms and "no wrapped bar soap in baths."
As time went on, the inn slipped further into decline. In 2005, Hannaford started holding parties at The Country Club instead of The Dive Inn. Recent reviews on TripAdvisor.com complain of cobwebs, mildew, peeling wallpaper and lack of air-conditioning. One review is titled simply "Yuck."
In March 2014, with upkeep becoming a problem, Porter and his wife agreed to sell the property. They listed it for $880,000 and drew immediate interest, according to Corporate Realty agent Ben Jacobson, who represented the sellers. Potential buyers proposed converting the inn into condominiums, a youth hostel, even a retail outlet with a parking lot in back, Jacobson said.
In August, The Dive Inn sold for $817,000 to 4417 Dryades St. LLC, whose members include Todd David Grove of New Orleans. Lorna Taylor, Grove's girlfriend and the acting manager of the property, said the new owners are targeting groups in town for weddings, birthdays and festivals.
While the back of the building is under renovation, the space's eight bedrooms are available for rent through the vacation rental website VRBO. Group rates range from $1,595 to $2,495 per night for a minimum of three nights.
On a recent afternoon, the sound of electric saws echoed beneath the pool area's domed ceiling. The hand-painted palm fronds on the walls had been replaced by a soothing Art Deco palette of pale greens and oranges.
Taylor, a former French Quarter carriage driver, said a construction crew had removed six dumpsters worth of stuff from the old inn, prompting curious neighbors to sift through it. Aside from the antique furniture, few items remained from the building's previous incarnation. There was the sign reading "Clothing Unacceptable In Pool After 10 PM," and a guestbook full of gratitude and dirty jokes. There were also some irons Porter once kept in every room.
"I thought those irons were funny, since nobody here wore clothes," Taylor said. "We decided to keep a few of them."
