The Twelve Yats of Christmas - Combined

On the First day of Christmas, my maw-maw gave to me:

a crawfish they caught in Arabi.

The Arabi photo is an Alexander Allison photo of homes along River Road in that neighborhood from the 1920s. Arabi is the first neighborhood you come to as you drive through the Ninth Ward of New Orleans and reach the parish line between Orleans and St. Bernard. In the storm, Arabi got 6' of water and up, catching the water from both the Industrial Canal breach and the storm surge from the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. To add insult to injury, the neighborhood was flooded a second time durng Rita.

And if you don't get what I'm up to here, see www.benygrunch.com.

In da Christmas Picayune, I saw right dere in section "E"

Tujague's recipe

Tujague's (pronounced locally, "TOO-jaks") is one of the city's oldest restaurants, opened in 1856. It's funky little place with great food. You don't need a reservation, so it's a great place for a spur-of-the-moment dinner in the Quarter. Tujague's is moderately priced (meaning it's not as expensive as, say, Galatoire's), but it's not a bargain place, either. The most popular menu choice is the daily Table d'Hote menu, which is a fixed-price dinner including an appetizer, soup du jour, boiled beef brisket as a transition to the entree, the entree (usually a choice of 3 or 4), coffee and dessert.

The restaurant has three main areas. When you enter the door on the corner, you walk into the bar. There's a huge mirror that was imported from Europe in the 1850s that is a single 10'+ piece of glass, remarkably expensive for the time. As you wak to the back of the bar, you come to a hallway where the matire d's station is located. You'll be seated either around the corner to the right in the front dining room (which is the second door, to the background of the photo, or the back dining room, further into the building. The atmosphere is very laid-back, but still that all-business attitude of an old-school Creole restaurant. It's all about putting a good meal in front of the diner.

The photo of the restaurant was shot in January of 2006, just after Tujague's re-opened. That's why the big banner on the second floor. New Orleans' restaurants have been in the lead of the city's recovery. Restaurants employ a wide range of folks, from management to dishwashers. The post-storm period has been problematic for restaurants, however, since gutting houses and hanging drywall pays a lot better than washing dishes. Given how many people have been displaced by the storm, skilled cooks and chefs are also in demand. These increased labor costs have seriously cut into the profit margins of restaurants, as there's only so much of the cost increases that can be passed on to diners.

Business owners in the restaurant/tourism/hospitality industries know all too well the importance of making sure affordable housing stays a high priority for the city leaders as we continue to rebuild.

On da third day of Christmas, we stopped at

McKenzie's, for

three french breads

McKenzie's (prounounced MUH-ken-zees) Pastry Shoppes was a New Orleans institution for several generations. People used to say they were going to "McKenzie's Bakery," but the stores themselves weren't bakeries. They were retail storefronts, literally "pastry shoppes." The main bakery was down on Desire Street. All the goodies were baked down there, then trucked to the 30+ retail stores throughout the metro area. To this day, you'll have people tell you that they miss McKenzie's donuts or turtles, or petit fours, or blackout cake, or...well, you get the idea. Even my 19-year old misses their chocolate whip-top pie.

The McKenzie's chain closed in 2001. This is, to my knowledge, the only McKenzie's sign left (If you know of another, please let me know). "Chicken in a Box" was a feature of the McKenzies on the corner of Frenchmen and Foy in Gentilly:

The entrance for the pastry shoppe was right on the corner, or you could go around to the side entrance and get fried chicken. After the storm, someone took over the entire location and it's now a take-out chicken-and-sandwiches place.

There was only one "Chicken in a Box." There was one other variation on the typical McKenzie's store, the "McKenzie's Ice Cream Parlor, on Harrison Avenue in Lakeview. That also closed years ago. The location, a bay in a strip mall, was slated to become a Tastee Donuts prior to the storm, but it never materialized.

On the fourth day, I said OK, let's get a Christmas tree...

WWL-TV, Channel 4 on broadcast, Channel 3 on the local cable (Cox), isn't the oldest TV station in town; that distinction goes to WDSU-TV, but WWL was the station that "discovered" Benny Grunch. Back when Benny first did the "12 Yats" song, Channel 4 did a video of Benny and the Bunch, and several times the "fourth day" came by, you'd see shots of the WWL logo.

This particular version comes from the 1950s. WWL was owned by Loyola University at the time. Kind of an interesting notion, a part of the Catholic church owning the local CBS affiliate (assuming you consider the Society of Jesus part of the Catholic Church, of course--that's a debatable issue in New Orleans). While the other stations in town had signature programming and such, WWL was Da News. We're talking Walter Cronkite here. I grew up on Da News--my parents didn't want to watch Huntly and Brinkley, even though I always wanted to see the "editorial cartoon" by John Churchill Chase on WDSU (Channel 6).

Cable has changed the way we watch the news in so many ways, but WWL-TV keeps up. They re-broadcast Da News on Cox Channel 15, repeating whatever the latest newscast was, then going live when the next one comes on, so you can always keep up with local news.

The Jesuits sold WWL to an employee-owned corporation in the 1980s, which in turn sold it to Belo, the current owners.

On the fifth day of Christmas, we stopped at

A&G, for

FRIED onion rings.

Ah, A&G, what an institution! There was one at both Lakeside and Clearview malls, over on the West Bank Expressway near Barataria Blvd., one out at Gentilly Woods, and the one in this photo, at Canal and N. Broad. If you remember others, let me know. A&G was a classic cafeteria. The food was OK, nothing to write home about.

I don't ever remember getting onion rings at A&G, though. When I think of onion rings, Liuzza's and Mandina's come to mind. And Popeye's, of course.

On the sixth day of Christmas, we stopped at

K&B's, for a

Six Pack o' Dixie.

Katz & Besthoff Drug Stores were local new Orleans chain that expanded into Southeast Louisiana, up to Baton Rouge, and over into Mississippi and Alabama before being bought out by RiteAid in the 1990s. At its peak, K&B had over 160 stores, but they hit one of those points where they had to either go national or get pulled into someone who already was national, and New Orleans lost one of its local traditions.

K&B was in every neighborhood in town. When I was at UNO, I worked at the MB in Clearview mall and often ate dinner at the K&B soda fountain there, the last one to close in town. Remember the McKenzie's sign from Frenchmen and Foy? That photo was shot in the parking lot of a K&B (well, it's a RiteAid now, but you get the idea). This K&B was at the corner of N. Broad and Esplanade Avenue, just a short ride on the Broad bus from the A&G cafeteria at Broad and Canal.

And Dixie! The Dixie Brewing Company, located on Tulane Avenue, was the last of the local breweries. Dixie made a crisp, American-style lager, that was on tap at most bars in the city. Some considered it low-rent when compared to a national brew like Bud or Miller. My dad was a big Dixie drinker, and someone gave him a neat Dixie-logo thermal mug. I used to bring that mug to parties when I was in college. Several of my fraternity brothers would get annoyed with me for using the Dixie mug. They were worried that people would think the keg was Dixie rather than Bud, implying that we were low-rent in some way. :-)

Cemetery traffic got backed up to Metairie, at the:

SEVENteenth Street Canal

The cemetery shot is a 1967 aerial photo of Greenwood Cemetery, City Park Avenue at the head of Canal Street, right next to I-10. The shot is from the back of the cemetery looking towards City Park Avenue. It really gives you the feel for why we call our cemeteries "Cities of the Dead." The traffic going into the cemeteries would get the most backed up on November 1st, All Saints' Day. The reason is that New Orleanians made use of the holiday (the overwhelming majority of New Orleans businesses used to close on All Saints' as well as schools, because it's a "holy day of obligation" for the Catholic Church. Good Catholics would go to Mass, then go out to the cemeteries to spruce up the family tomb for the next day. November 2nd is All Souls' Day, which was more important for Yat Catholics. They knew their loved ones weren't Saints, and need extra praying for before they got into heaven. :-)

The 17th Street Canal. Sigh. I've crossed that canal for one reason or another so many times in my life. It's one of the north-south drainage canals in the metro area, and runs along the line between Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. Since most of New Orleans is below sea level, we drain rain water from catch basins in the streets into these drainage canals. Huge pumps then force the water in the canals into Lake Pontchartrain, and that's how we keep ourselves dry.

The drainage canals are not protected by the same high levees that we have running around the perimeter of the metro area. The easement needed to build a 30' levee takes up another 50'-75' of land, and there were already homes whose backyards bump right up to the drainage canals. The public outcry would have been way too strong if city and parish government would have exercised eminent domain to just uproot those homes. So, the Corps proposed an alternative, steel and concrete floodwalls. Their designs were flawed and the floodwalls of several canals, including 17th Street, breached on 29-August-2005.

The bridge you see here is the old "Bucktown Bridge" that connected the Jefferson Parish neighborhood of Bucktown to West End, on the other side of the canal. Originally the bridge permitted auto traffic, but in the 1980s, the city converted the parking lot in front of the row of West End restaurants to a pay lot, so they closed the bridge to vehicles, since it would have been a back-door into the pay lot. It was a foolish thing for the city to do, since it hurt all the businesses at West End. The pay parking scheme was shortly abandoned, but the Bucktown Bridge remained pedestrian-only.

Since the storm, a massive pump and floodgate system has been installed on the lake end of the canal.

On da eighth day of Christmas, me and Rosalie,

ATE by ya mama's.

Yats don't go to someone's house, they go "by" someone's house. Or they "go by da grocery to get some shwimps." It threw me for a loop when I first started to study German in high school and learned the preposition, "bei." The usage is often quite similar in both Deutsch and Yat.

This is a little double at 919 Orleans Avenue. It doesn't have any historic merit that I know of, but a LiveJournal friend thought their mother-in-law's family might have owned it at some point, so I took a photo for them. It's a classic "shotgun" style, where you enter into the living room, then have to walk through the bedrooms to get to the kitchen, which is usually at the back of the house. If you open all the doors and shoot a shotgun, the blast will go right through and out the back door.

New Orleanians are big on family. Unless you're not speaking to your family, or obligations keep you away, we celebrate holidays with family. But the definition of "family" sometimes gets extended beyond blood relatives. Sometimes you become part of your friend's family as much as your friend is. So, it wouldn't be a big shock for a yat to call one of his friends who lives on, say, Planet Hooston, and tell them, "Yeah, we ate by your mama's last Sunday."

This strong sense of family has really messed up a lot of people post-storm, because the diaspora has made it all the more difficult for some families to re-unite. With the original family house standing gutted and unrepaired in Gentilly or Da Nint', and the family scattered from California to Florida, it's tough to get everyone together in some families. Still, we chug along. Even when there's someone missing from the celebration, we always talk about next time. Your cousins may still be stuck in Texas, but they'll be back for the big barbecue on the lakefront for the Fourth of July. We never give up hope.

On da Ninth day of Christmas, we drove down

Delery, in the

Lower Ninth Ward

Ah, the Ninth Ward. First, if you don't mind, a bit of New Orleans geography:

Above is a map of the Lower Ninth Ward. (Delery Street is the dark blue line on the right.) The "Ninth Ward" as a political region encompasses Bywater, which is the "Upper Ninth," on the upriver side of the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal (better known as the "Industrial Canal"), and the Holy Cross District, which is the area between the river and St. Claude Avenue, below the canal. The Ninth Ward has been considered to be a "bad" neighborhood for decades, as white flight took place and the white folks found what they considered to be greener pastures in St. Bernard and Jefferson Parishes. The upper portion of the Ninth Ward dropped all mention of the political ward, becoming "Bywater." The Holy Cross District gets its name from the school that dominated the neighborhood. This part of the Lower Ninth took the school's name to try to escape the perceived stigma of the Ninth Ward. (Holy Cross has moved to Gentilly post-storm, and the school's board has no clear plans for the original location as of now.)

The Ninth Ward is a blue-collar neighborhood. There's lots of industry in the area, along the canal and the river, the sugar refinery, lots of rail operations, and all the port- and marine-related businesses. Before white flight, Catholic boys from Da Nint' went to St. Aloysius, on Esplanade and N. Rampart (until it closed and merged with Cor Jesu in Gentilly in 1969), or Holy Cross. The girls went to Holy Angels, on St. Claude Ave. The public high school was F. T. Nicholls, on St. Claude in Bywater. Nicholls' name was changed to Frederick Douglass in the 1990s.

The upper photo of the street sign is from the New York Times. The Ninth Ward was flooded out by the breach in the east levee/floodwall of the Industrial Canal. The lower photo is Fats Domino's house, before the storm. Fats evacuated with family, but was out of touch for so long that the rumor went around he was dead. After the storm, someone wrote "RIP FATS" on the front of the house. Fats is indeed alive and well, currently living in Algiers.

Post-storm, Da Nint is the focus of a lot of the rebuilding efforts. There are several green-housing experiments going on in the neighborhood, most notably Brad Pitt's "Make It Right" project. (The much-publicized "Musicians Village" project, sponsored by Habitat for Humanity and Harry Connick, Jr., is actually in Bywater, the Upper Ninth.) The biggest problem with rebuilding the Lower Ninth is that so many of the houses there are either rental property or belonged to somebody's mama. In the case of rental property, the landlords have little incentive to rebuild right now. It's back to the chicken-and-egg issues of getting the black working class of New Orleans back home. In the case of houses owned by older folks, a lot of those people are now living with family members elsewhere. They're of an age where it would be a real struggle to be pioneers in their own homes, not to mention that the burden of rebuilding now falls on their children. Problem is, the children are grown up and have families and issues of their own they're dealing with. Mama's house just isn't a high priority when you're trying to rebuild your own life on the West Bank, Jefferson Parish, or (goddess forbid), Planet Hooston.

The Lower Ninth is also where many of the city-authorized house demolitions mentioned by Matt McBride at ThinkNola.com. Matt and Alan are doing some of the best work on the entire housing issue. ThinkNola should be considered primary source material for those not on the ground in New Orleans.

I used ta be at

Kaiser, now I'm workin' down the street at the

Tenneco Chalmette Refinery.

Kaiser's alumininum smelter is on the river, just up the road from the Chalmette National Battlefield. It opened in 1950, and closed in 1983, employing three generations of blue-collar workers from the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. This article is an interesting history of the plant and why Kaiser decided to close it. The big smoke stack still is the plant's main landmark (that and the fact that it's right across the St. Bernard Highway from Rocky and Carlo's). Next to the plant is a huge slip that is the main property of the Port of St. Bernard. Kaiser owns/operates half, and the parish the other side. Prior to the storm, the slip and the warehouses supporting it were a thriving component of Da Parish's economy.

Just down da street, a bit past the Battlefield, is the Chalmette Refinery. It was owned by Tenneco when Benny wrote the song. Tenneco sold it to an employee group, who then leased the facility to Mobil Oil, and Exxon-Mobil continues to operate the facility.

Facilities like the Chalmette Refinery and the Folger's Coffee plant are why many of us from the area laugh at the "New Orleans Shouldn't Be Rebuilt" crowd. When you look at the oil/gas/chemical industry in the area and combine that with other port activities such as coffee imports, it's clear that New Orleans is still a significant port and important to this nation's economy and national defense.

St. Bernard Parish's relationship with the industry along the river is a love-hate one. The plants provide jobs, but they can be a mess as well. Tanks that ruptured at Murphy Oil in Mereaux spread all sorts of oil-based funk throughout Chalmette and Mereaux, creating a huge environmental mess after the waters retreated. Lucky for Da Parish, they've got a strong and vocal advocate for their issues in Rep. Charlie Melancon. The fact that Da Parish regularly goes Republican in both state and national elections but LA-03 is represented by a Democrat sort of stands karma on its head, but what the heck.

These two photos were shot from the deck of the Steamboat Natchez. My son's in the Brother Martin High School Jazz Band, and they played a gig on the boat on Black Friday. The Natchez does a twice-daily river tour that goes down past Chalmette, turns around, heads upriver past the bridge, then returns to its dock by Jax Brewery.

On the eleventh day, on Veterans Highway, tryin' to cross the street...with

Eleven Schwegmann bags...

At it's peak, Schwegmann's Giant Supermarkets was the fifth largest employer in metro New Orleans. The first Schwegmann's grocery was located on Burgundy and Piety in Bywater. That's where John G. Schwegmann was born. We used to refer to John G. as "Old Man Schwegmann" to distinguish him from his son, John F. The old man expanded the family grocery by opening a supermarket at the corner of Elysian Fields and St. Claude. By the time the company was sold in 1997, there were 18 stores in the chain.

Benny's song refers to "crossing Veterans Highway with eleven Schwegmann's bags." That's a reference to the largest of the stores, located on Veterans, between Division and Edenborn, in Metairie. The location is now a Lowes store. This was the store my daddy used to "make groceries" at all the time. He was never a fan of Dorignac's, also on Vets, closer to town, and he thought Schwegmann's was cheaper overall than the Breaux Mart on Severn. When we lived in Gentilly, the closest Schwegmann's to us was on Gentilly Road. Since that meant passing Ferrera's on Elysian Fields and Pap's on Mirabeau, we didn't go out there all that much, but then Schwegmann's bought the supermarket at Franklin and Leon C. Simon. Still, when I was at UNO and we needed stuff for fraternity parties at our house on Elysian Fields, we'd still make an excursion to Schwegmann's.

I'm glad that we still have good local supermarkets in the area, such as Langenstein's, Robert's, Dorignac's and Zuppardo's. I'm also glad that the Rouse brothers are expanding more into Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. They may be from down da bayou, but that's better than nameless, faceless, big-box stores headquartered in Arkansas.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:

A dozen Manuel's Tamales

Manuel's Tamales have been part of New Orleans since the 1930s. The store was on S. Carrollton, in the first block off Canal Street. It was really just a take-out window. My parents weren't big on Mexican food, so I didn't really discover these little gems until high school. When I would take the Carrollton bus home from Brother Martin, I'd go from Gentilly Blvd. to Carrollton and Canal, then transfer to the Canal bus there. At the corner, Manuel's would have a guy out with a push-cart so you could just pull over and pick up a dozen or two on the way home from work. That push cart would be so busy that I figured the guy had to be selling weed in addition to the tamales. Those push carts were all over town, and trucks would re-supply them during the evening with more tamales from the restaurant.

When I had some with a couple of buddies later that year, I finally understood. Those were the best bloody tamales I've ever had. Just the right amount of meat, spice, and grease. As we got older and beer became part of the experience, a dozen Manuel's tamales was a late-night staple.

Manuel's didn't come back after the storm. The taco truck invasion from Planet Hooston is still strong in the city proper, even though Jefferson Parish cracked down on the mobile taquerias a few months back. A more upscale Tex-Mex place, Juan's Flying Burrito, is across the street on Carrollton if you get a craving for tamales and tacos in Mid City.

We've come to Twelfth Night! Benny ends the song on a Mexican note, but the big theme of the day is, of course, King Cake. King's Day, the Feast of the Epiphany, Twelfth Night, "Little Christmas." The day has many names, and different cultures have their take on how to celebrate the day, but in New Orleans, we do it in classic Yat style, a mixture of the Catholic and the Pagan.

The Phunny Porty Phellows will do their traditional streetcar ride tonight, and it's a long one this year. The original PPP would ride through the streets in wagons and on horses, announcing the start of Carnival. This tradition was renewed in the 1980s by a group of folks led by writer/publisher Errol Laborde and his wife Peggy. They charter a couple of streetcars and would party from the Carrollton barn to Lee Circle and back. This year, the PPP will ride from Beauregard Circle by City Park, down Canal Street to St. Charles Avenue, then up St. Charles, so they'll announce the start of Carnival to an even wider section of the city.

While the PPP are partying on the rails, the society folk of the Twelfth Night Revelers will hold their traditional bal masque tonight. This event marks not only the official opening of the Carnival season, but also the start of the debutante season in New Orleans. The TNR, the second oldest Carnival organization in the city (Comus is the oldest), will wheel out a huge wooden "king cake" that has several small drawers in it. Each drawer has a small bean. Young ladies (debutantes) will be invited to pull open those drawers and get the beans. The debs that get the silver beans are maids of the court, and the gold bean goes to the queen. Lots of dancing and drinking into the wee hours will ensue from there.

This year, Twelfth Night takes on a collegiate air, as thousands of LSU and Ohio State fans fill Da Quarter in preparation for tomorrow's BCS Championship Game in Da Dome. Several of the bakeries in town left off the green decorations on some of their king cakes, making them LSU-style purple and gold.

And yeah, we'll be partying from now until Midnight on Mardi Gras. It's what we do here.