The New York Post magazine, Page Six, ran a gushy travel story about New Orleans, this weekend, titled The Big Easy Is Back. The inch-deep story oozed praise for the luxury hotels, Emeril Lagasse’s empire of restaurants, and the hipster lifestyle of the Faubourg Marigny. Needless to say, it didn’t mention anything about the out-of-control murder rate in the Crescent City, a theme reported on in a multi-package series in the Sunday Times Picayune.
One of the five headlines reports yet another murder, this time parricide in a wealthy uptown enclave. Music writer Keith Spera, a native New Orleanian, ponders his deep concerns raising a child in the wonderful old neighborhood of Esplanade Ridge in Mid City, a neighborhood now becoming inured to the sound of gunfire. Artist Willy Birch struggles to rally his 7th Ward neighbors to confront the generation of young men who are destroying their own lives with gang and drug wars. A forth story reports that half of last year’s 179 murders were committed in broad daylight. Click here for a map of the city’s murders by neighborhood.
Taken in one terrible serving with the morning’s coffee, this package is a chilling reminder of what’s not back in New Orleans — safety. With all the work done and projected to rebuild the city’s reputation for tourism, it is beyond baffling that there is not more money and focus on building a police department that is competent to take on the amount of crime in the city. As the murder rate continues to climb, even publications that just skim the surface, as the Post story did, won’t be able to gloss over that it’s dangerous to walk even in the city’s tourism mecca, the French Quarter. And without tourism, the economic engine that drives the city, how will New Orleans’s continue to rebuild?
I was talking to a friend, a 5th generation resident of New Orleans, about living in the city with its rising crime. His smile was rueful. “It’s still a beautiful place,” he said. “If you like witnessing the end of empire.”
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
Philip deMahy Sr., a once respected New Iberia ad exec, was sentenced May 2 to spend the next two years (he faced up to 100 years) in a state penitentiary after state and federal investigators found dozens of images depicting children engaged in lewd sexual acts on his personal computer.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
Subscribe to this comment's feed