New Orleans Stuff: January 2008 Archives

Walgreens on Gentilly Blvd. and Frenchman, in 1962. Gentilly Blvd. from Norman Mayer to Elysian Fields was the commercial district for the Gentilly Terrace neighborhood, anchored by Economical Supermarket on Elysian Fields and the Maison Blanche Budget Store down the street.

The strip malls that sustained Gentilly Terrace for years had already become "ghost malls" long before the storm. The MB Budget Store became a Chuck E. Cheese, then an auto parts store. Gus Mayer on Elysian Fields and Gentilly became a Blockbuster, as the higher-end retail outlets left the neighborhood, either to go to the malls or close outright. What time and the trend towards malls and big-box stores didn't kill, the Federal Flood did.

Did you know that one of the first Republican smear campaigns was conducted against Andrew Jackson in 1828? The "coffin broadsides" were flyers printed by John Binns and others in an attempt to discredit Jackson by accusing him of "murdering" six militiamen in 1815. You can view one of the handbills here.

Jackson confirmed the verdict of a court-martial that convicted and sentenced the men to death for desertion. In 1828, supporters of John Quincy Adams published handbills, known at the time as "broadsides" which asserted the six men executed were indeed innocent. The handbills challenged Jackson's morality and ethics. Most of the handbills printed prominently featured six drawings of coffins, so they became known as the "Coffin Broadsides."

A three-month campaign by the British Army and the Royal Navy along the US Gulf Coast concluded with a pitched battle between American forces commanded by then-Maj. Gen Andrew Jackson and Maj. Gen. Sir Edward Pakenham south of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. Because of that battle, the campaign accusations didn't stick, though, because Jackson's defense of New Orleans trumped any charges his opponents could craft.

The British campaign started in Florida. The Spanish in Pensacola purported to be neutral, but still allowed the British to land and occupy their forts. British forces moved from Pensacola to Mobile in September of 1814, but found it already occupied by Jackson. Jackson's troops vigorously defended Mobile, forcing the British back to Pensacola. On 11-November, Jackson received word from New Orleans that intelligence gained from Jean Lafitte indicated that city would be the next British target. He arrived in New Orleans on 2-December and began to organize the city's defense. Unable to move up the Mississippi by the Americans in Fort St. Philip at the mouth of the river, the British entered Lake Borgne, to the east of the city. They proceeded to march from their landing sites on the western shore of Lake Borgne inland to the Mississippi, which put them in modern-day St. Bernard Parish.

By 23-December, the British began to move upriver, occupying the Jumonville and Villerie Plantations. Patrols probed into the LaRonde plantation and found it defended by Jackson, two regiments of US Army soldiers, the Louisiana Militia, and a hodgepodge of local units from New Orleans. The British pulled back to the Villere plantation at this point, awaiting the arrival of a new commander-in-chief, Maj. General Sir Edward Pakenham, GCB. Pakenham was appointed C-in-C of British forces in America after the death of General Robert Ross in Baltimore in September of 1814.

Pakenham's plan was to assault the positions along the Rodriguez Canal on the LaRonde Plantation. Jackson's forces fortified the mile-and-a-half of the canal that ran from the river to swamps just north of the plantation. Pakenham ordered a very typical, Continental-style seige attack, with one column advancing along the river road and a line of infantry advancing to the center and right.

A lot has been made of the role of the "Caintock (Kentucky)" riflemen positioned along the ramparts. Kids are taught that these riflemen are responsible for killing thousands of British troops on 8-January-1815. This isn't quite accurate. Pakenham's assault was based on the assumption that casualties would be high. His seige troops were to bring ladders with them, to be placed over the ramparts so the succeeding troops would cross them and overwhelm the defenders.

The 44th Regiment of Foot was tasked with bringing the ladders, but they failed to advance with them. Thus, they and the 93rd Foot (Sutherland Highlanders) were unable to cross the canal and ramparts. In fact, no British troops crossed the Rodriguez Canal save as prisoners of war.

While leading the second wave of the British advance, Pakenham's horse was shot from underneath him. While mounting a second horse, he was struck twice and killed instantly. Unable to breach the ramparts, the British withdrew from the field.

New Orleanians still give thanks to Our Lady of Prompt Succor for the deliverance of the city from the British, even though Jackson was a Protestant.

except when UNO is playing LSU in basketball or baseball, of course. I mean, take my friend Paul. He's a banker, went to East Jefferson, then LSU. In his office, he's got one of those models of Tiger Stadium on his bookshelf. He's as proud of going to LSU as I am of going to UNO. Same goes for the guys I know who went to Tulane, Alabama, Georgia, Boston College, and a bunch of other schools.

It's the white trash that gets on my nerves, the people who are obnoxious purple and gold, even though many of them sing the "GED Fight Song." You know, the guys that look like they just got released from doing 14 days in the Terrebone Parish lockup, and the women who kept the trailer warm for them.

I guess every big school has the townie wannabees like the Tiger fans.

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

A dozen Manuel's Tamales

Eleven Schwegmann bags...

Tenneco Chalmette Refinery.

Lower Ninth Ward

ATE by ya mama's.

SEVENteenth Street Canal

Six Pack o' Dixie.

FRIED onion rings.

leave it alone, ya make me nuts!

three french breads

Tujague's recipe

for the crawfish they caught in Arabi.

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.

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

Eleven Schwegmann bags...

Tenneco Chalmette Refinery.

Lower Ninth Ward

ATE by ya mama's.

SEVENteenth Street Canal

Six Pack o' Dixie.

FRIED onion rings.

leave it alone, ya make me nuts!

three french breads

Tujague's recipe

for the crawfish they caught in Arabi.

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.

I used ta be at

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

Tenneco Chalmette Refinery.

Lower Ninth Ward

ATE by ya mama's.

SEVENteenth Street Canal

Six Pack o' Dixie.

FRIED onion rings.

leave it alone, ya make me nuts!

three french breads

Tujague's recipe

for the crawfish they caught in Arabi.

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 da Ninth day of Christmas, we drove down

Delery, in the

Lower Ninth Ward

ATE by ya mama's.

SEVENteenth Street Canal

Six Pack o' Dixie.

FRIED onion rings.

leave it alone, ya make me nuts!

three french breads

Tujague's recipe

for the crawfish they caught in Arabi.

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.

On da eighth day of Christmas, me and Rosalie,

ATE by ya mama's.

SEVENteenth Street Canal

Six Pack o' Dixie.

FRIED onion rings.

beFOUR you drive me nuts.

three french breads

Tujague's recipe

for the crawfish they caught in Arabi.

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.

Cemetery traffic got backed up to Metairie, at the:

SEVENteenth Street Canal

Six Pack o' Dixie.

FRIED onion rings.

beFOUR you drive me nuts.

three french breads

Tujague's recipe

for the crawfish they caught in Arabi.

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.