Be there, or be square, un-hip, clueless, etc.
A curtsey to the Traveling Mermaid
May 18, 2007
May 2, 2007
A Park vs. A Shopping Mall
I enjoy reading the New Yorker’s “New Orleans Journal”. Yesterday’s entry concerned a trip down the Lafitte Corridor which many of us here in the City would like to reclaim as a walking park as opposed to it’s current use: a three-mile long junkyard. As I read further into the piece a sickening thought hit me: the Victory development group wants to build their retail center right through the heart of the Corridor!
Sure enough, as I read on, this conversation pops up in the article:
“A Georgia developer called Victory Real Estate Investments is trying to get permission from the City Council to hollow out twenty acres of mid-city in order to build a suburban-style shopping mall, which would bisect the Lafitte Corridor. As currently proposed, the site would include a hundred-ninety-thousand-square-foot Target, an eighty-thousand-square-foot Dick’s Sporting Goods, an eighty-thousand-square-foot Bed Bath & Beyond, a fifty-thousand-square-foot book superstore, and more than a hundred and thirty thousand square feet of other shops, surrounded by twenty-five hundred sun-baked surface parking spaces. For a city as pedestrian-friendly as New Orleans, it is a stunningly wrongheaded idea. What’s more, it might end the dream of the Lafitte Corridor. But, as Geoff put it, “This is a hard time for the City Council to say no to anyone who wants to drop tens of millions of dollars.â€Â
Now, I knew that Victory was planning retail development in Mid-City, but I didn’t realize that they wanted to build one massive project as described above. This is NOT what we need here in the City, especially in the Mid-City area. This will become a blight on the landscape, an ugly paw of the suburban mindset clawing it’s way into our quaint little landscape. The traffic alone cannot be handled by our small streets, and Carrollton with the trolley line, will become a nightmare. Our infrastructure is not set up for this kind of development.
I say that Phase One of the Corridor project should start today, and that all concerned citizens of the City stay on the asses down at City Hall to force Victory to change it’s plans and come up with a more decentralized shopping scenario.
March 16, 2007
S&WB Fun and Games
Today I woke up, looked out the front door, and noticed that one of the four water meters just off my porch was spewing lots of fresh water. Turns out it wasn’t our rental, but the shotgun behind us. I did my duty and called the emergency line for the S&WB to report the breakage.
Hours later I return home to find no leaking water, but that my home and others on this block have no public water at all. I guess our repair folks just don’t work after 5 PM and they just shut down the entire area. Yes, I have a call in on this poop too.
We have elderly and children here. I’m permanently disabled, and now none of us can bathe, run water for cooking and our toilets won’t flush, just cause the Emergency Repair boys can have a weekend at the rates they are being paid. ( I do have distilled water for cooking and drinking)
The S&WB is losing over $200,000+ a month for the unknown leaks in our water systems, and when citizens clue them in to obvious, fixable leaks, this is how the response goes down? Shut the block down and we’ll get to it when we want to?
Fuck this kind of shit!We pay handsomely for the services of the S&WB, even if my doc says NOT TO DRINK THE WATER, and this is how they deal with doing their J.O.B.s. and what they think of their charges.
UPDATE-Â Hey! the thing about my water being cut off? It turns out that my landlord doesn’t pay for water in the rent, and he hadn’t told me this over the last year of renting here. I tried to connect this rental to our account in Gentilly, but no go until Monday on that one, which means, judging from the pace at which the water folks move, I might have water come Thursday. I can’t wait to get back into our own home, a place where WE take care of everything, and we don’t have to deal with idiots who lack a first grade education for our existence.