Category Archives: activism

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Same old sad shed story

In my old city is an old shed market that is constantly undergoing trials and tribulations. It is in the very heart of our city, being the spot that Native Americans traded their wares and the French built the city around. However, in my lifetime it has become a set of buildings without a plan.
The link below leads to a letter in our local paper and it and the ensuing comments are important to note as many of them come from some of the vendors at that market. I am not sure the entire story is being told in this letter- well, let’s say it is not, nor did the letter writer expect to cover 250 years of history in it. The letter writer is instead pointing out the economic impact of their work. I wonder if the management has an answer to that argument; they might, but it is not clear to me if they do.

I will add that as a farmers market organizer I ran a weekday open-air market in this place (while working as a market organizer for a well-respected local market organization) as a favor to this corporation and its history as our city’s market heritage. One of the only things I was glad of post-September 2005 was that my organization could delay the decision to reopen that location. We did not reopen that market. It was the only one of our 4 weekly markets that we ultimately did not reopen and had more to do with resources and new management unknown to us, then the potential of the place. But it was a difficult place to run an entrepreneurial market, and this is from someone who happily ran those other 3 as well as a multi-day holiday market every December.

There are many ideas that could work here, but none of them (in my mind) start with pissing off the existing vendors without a strong, appropriate plan to reinvent the base. I still am not sure the management knows who their target audience is and how to reach them. I am not sure they even know how to find their target vendors or how to work with existing vendors to maximize their hard work and the market’s investment. I am not even sure that the management understands the difference between festivals and markets or between the needs of storefront businesses and itinerate tradespeople and artisans.
In short, even though I study markets daily, I am not sure of anything when it comes to the French Market.

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Group Collects Used Mardi Gras Beads For Recycling

As those who braved the Quarter on Ash Wednesday noticed, the Quarter is amazingly clean after Mardi Gras. The amount of throws that pass through hands and end up on the ground is quite staggering. For locals skilled at catching, how to catch the things and then give away most of them so the beads and stuffed animals don’t weigh down our houses is a deeply admired talent. For tourists, I am sure they don’t know what to do with the majority of their catches, as all of them cannot fit into their luggage! I wish the city would have areas (like the police station on Royal) for people to leave their beads to be later recycled. I am also sure (as an ex-hotel manager) that if the ARC contacted the hotels they could get a truckful on Thursday morning. There is no doubt that my friends at UP/Unique Products
would set something up since they have found many inventive ways to reuse beads in their art. In any case, let’s try to make our Carnival a bit greener.

Group Collects Used Mardi Gras Beads For Recycling.

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Curfew for the few?

One of the city’s most original writers, CW Cannon takes on the curfew in this piece from non-profit journalism site The Lens and I think, nails it.
Here is the piece I’ll quote to those who argue for keeping kids out:
“This law isn’t about protecting them, it’s about protecting tourists from seeing them. If the price for getting people to come to New Orleans is hiding my actual New Orleanian family (or moving to a family-approved residential zone), whatever is left of New Orleanian “authenticity” will finally be dead.”
For anyone who wants to maintain the Quarter as the vibrant middle of the city, rather than as a genteel police state for visiting consumers, this curfew is a warning shot. I’d also add that the assault from the NOPD on informal gathering and cultural camps throughout the Quarter and the larger city has done little to nothing to reduce the heavy crime in the Quarter and beyond.
As someone who grew up in the Quarter and would walk to see my hard-working mom while she was still at her office at 8 or 9 pm, or walk to the schoolyard and play basketball at Royal and St. Phillip after dark (since we didn’t have a TV or even a yard), I would hope that those few kids being raised in the area could feel that the city center is as theirs as their own residential block when needed. To limit the Quarter to less hours for youth is to limit future residents and workers from becoming acquainted with their own town square, which could be its demise.
The Lens

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Group Wants Main Gates To Armstrong Park To Open

The closed park gates (and city hall’s response in this story) is a perfect example of the bureaucracy misusing the city’s assets rather than encouraging the use and care of them by allowing citizens to feel ownership.

Group Wants Main Gates To Armstrong Park To Open.

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Revolution in a Can

Spoiling walls and doors and windows is shocking and difficult to understand, but for some, it is their choice of activism. I have never raised a can to a wall and probably never will, but it doesn’t mean I don’t notice the anger and get the point when I see it used as a tactic.

(you’ll need to register to read it, but then can delete your account.)
Revolution In A Can

See my interview with the Grand Duchess on her take on graffiti in an earlier post by searching categories for “graffiti” or “Grand Duchess

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Lucky break that it wasn’t broken down and carted away…

Turns out the owners of this property could have demolished the whole thing. Uh, oops City Hall.
I guess there is no substitute for knowledge, even at City Hall. I agree with Councilperson Palmer’s acknowledgement of the problem, but do not believe that one-stop permitting would entirely alleviate bad clerical work.
Best to beef up signage and posting so that savvy neighbors (of which there are many in the old city) can catch the mistakes. And maybe, have someone they can call over the weekend when they see illegal demo or repair activity.

WDSU story

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Southern Decadence is here.

The Labor Day weekend is the time to escape from most cities, heading to crowded beaches or gnat-filled cabins. In New Orleans, we will instead have costumes and parading with all of the attached pageantry, courtesy of our rainbow people. Since the early 1970s, this event has been on calendars of the chosen fey, and since the explosion of the gay rights movement in the 1980s, it has become one of the most anticipated gay community series of events for any New Orleanian. From the history page:

And so it was, on a sultry August afternoon in 1972, that this band of friends decided to plan an amusement. According to author James T. Spears, writing in Rebels, Rubyfruit and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South, this “motley crew of outcasts” began Southern Decadence as a going away party for a friend named Michael Evers, and to shut up a new “Belle Reve” tenant (from New York) who kept complaining about the New Orleans heat. As a riff on the “Belle Reve” theme, the group named the event a “Southern Decadence Party: Come As Your Favorite Southern Decadent,” requiring all participants to dress in costume as their favorite “decadent Southern” character. According to Spears, “The party began late that Sunday afternoon, with the expectation that the next day (Labor Day) would allow for recovery. Forty or fifty people drank, smoked, and carried on near the big fig tree … even though Maureen (the New Yorker) still complained about the heat.”

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