NOLA

NOPSI 442, a Perley A. Thomas arched roof streetcar, entering Carrollton Station, January 9, 1947.

This Charles Franck Studios photo shows one of the original arched roof streetcars returning to the barn. To replace some of their existing Brill double-truck streetcars, the New Orleans & Carrollton Railroad Company chose this design by Mr. Perley A. Thomas, who was then working for the Southern Car Company of St. Louis, MO. The design proved to be popular among riders in New Orleans. By 1923, Mr. Thomas had left Southern, setting up his own shop in High Point, NC. The newly-formed New Orleans Public Service, Incorporated (NOPSI) ordered additional streetcars from Thomas, and the legacy of the arched roof streetcars began.

NOPSI 442 is coming into the barn after running on the St. Charles line. Streetcars enter Carrollton Station from the Jeannette Street side and exit out the front, on Willow. Note the ad at the bottom right "1947up" - an imaginative way to promote the New Year.

Unfortunately, none of the 400-series streetcars have survived. NOPSI scrapped them, operating the 800, 900, and 1000-series cars around the city.

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Yes, I know I'm behind. Don't judge, life before teevee, much less blogging about teevee.

Well and truly into the Second Movement here. Character development and extension as well as build-up to the end. It's clear that the storyline of Daymo isn't going to end well by now, particularly with Toni going all the way to Texas to find the ex-NOPD officer that arrested Daymo the day before the storm.

(click "read more" below - rest of post is behind split for spoilers)

In September of 2005, there were a lot of phone-cam photos going around of NOPD units cruising the streets of Planet Hooston. Like this guy in the show, a lot of cops just up and left, with their city-owned vehicle in NOPD livery. Most of them were written off as storm damaged and no doubt simply abandoned in various places. No stretch at all for Toni to find the ticket book she needed in the glovebox of one of those vehicles in the parking lot of a police station in Lake Charles. Those guys just quit. Quit and left. Forget about the property theft, the moral issue of quitting is what's important here. Toni is trying to look past that with this particular guy because he has information she needs. For someone like Toni who is busting her (quite-attractive) ass to get the city moving again, hearing from quitters comes later.

On Toni, the ADA, and sperm: Her concerns are correct that this is a small town and what she does will get back to people. If she participates in a parade featuring SeeRay jerking off, his people won't appreciate it. But there's a nit here to pick. Toni's dealings at this point are with the DA's office. That's Eddie Jordan, who decidedly NOT a Nagin man. He was set up as USA under Clinton by Jefferson and won DA election by putting Edwin Edwards in jail. I admire her caution, though, and her desire at the end to flip them all off. FYYFF, Dr. Morris would be proud--sperm wins!

Davis: Loved the campaign forum. The character is the court jester of the show. Further insight into Davis' obviously-wealthy family is interesting, as is his Aunt Mimi, clearly the black sheep of what could be a Comus family.

Antoine: Up to now, I've characterized Antoine Batiste as a "journeyman musician," but that's not quite fair to his talents. It's becoming clearer that Antoine is just as good as Shorty, but he just doesn't get the breaks. Or is it that he's self-destructive? Kermit gets him the gig at the carnival ball. The bit with Desiree washing his tux was hella funny, but then Antoine tosses out common sense. You'd think he'd want to just shrink into the background, play the gig, and get paid, but he just has to do an improv solo on "Take The A Train." Awesome teevee, but you just wanna smack the man upside the head. Just as Toni is worried about the small-town aspects of NOLA, so should Antoine.

The Carnival ball that features Antoine as part of the orchestra is patterned after an organization like the Original Illinois Club or Young Men Illinois Club. These are the Creole equivalents to Comus/Momus/Proteus-the city's white debutante organizations. Lots of money involved here, but old-school and entrenched. The bald-headed bassist probably has been playing those gigs for years. Maybe his improv got him noticed (and possibly might get him laid), but it's not good for Antoine's musical career in the long run.

Sonny/Annie: cook her! this is so going down that road.

Annie: I was amused to see all the outrage in forums on HBO.com about Annie being real-live fiddler Amanda Shaw. Honestly, I never made the connection. Amanda Shaw was 14 or so in 2005, and has a much richer career than being a street busker. Fanbois and fangirls are silly.

Creighton: Getting much more bipolar this episode. His anger over Davis' campaign is a bit out of place with the FYYFF attitude. The 2006 elections were pretty much a fucking joke to all too many people. Nagin with his "chocolate city" comments (alluded to by Morial when talking to Davis), and all the voting accomodations contributed to the surreal aspects of the race. At the same time, Creighton is good with the sperm.

Delmond: Copping the "modern jazz" attitude about NOLA.  Yes, you make more money away from here.  Yes, black musicians get more respect in some other cities.  I hope Delmond doesn't have some huge epiphany here, it would be too happy-ending.

Albert:  Workin on that new suit.  Politician knows he needs to kiss the Big Chief's ass and does so by lining up a FEMA trailer, but that's only a small drop in the bucket as far as Lambreaux's concerned.  The politician's attitude is typical, though.  It's like buying pastors.  Problem is, a lot of Indian chiefs have more principals than a lot of the revs.

Janette:  Closing a business is never pleasant.  Another "Top Chef" homage as she packs her knives and leaves.

LaDonna: not much on her this ep, because her story is carried by Toni.  Bringing her momma to the ER was a good moment to show how dysfunctional so much of the city was at the time.  No docs, no pharmacies, it was all about the ER.

KDV: The French float with the sign, "Buy us back, Chirac" and Davis' shout-out to Ashley Morris was nice.  Aunt Mimi is funny, too.  The sperm costumes looked great.  It's hard to tell if Toni is lashing out in basic anger, throwing caution to the wind, or if she actually evaluated the situation and decided that FYYFF in the form of being one of SeeRay's sperm was OK.  Given the dismal records of both SeeRay and Eddie Jordan, it certainly wouldn't hurt anybody's careers to disrespect them.

Allison photo of the Magnolia Housing Project, 1958 (NOPL)

One of the interesting story lines of the HBO series Treme deals with the issue of housing in post-storm New Orleans. The city shut down all of its housing projects in the wake of the storm, creating an uproar as thousands of New Orleanians had no home to which to return.

In the show, Albert Lambreaux (that's pronounced "Al-bear" for those of you not from NOLA) is a carpenter and skilled craftsman whose house in the Gentilly neighborhood of the city was totally submerged. He's living in a barroom in Treme owned by a friend/acquaintance, making his way through the post-storm landscape. Lambreaux (who is played by actor Clarke Peters) is also the Big Chief of the Guardians of the Flame, one of the city's Mardi Gras Indian tribes. The Guardians of the Flame are fictional, but the writers are very accurate in their depiction of the Indians. One of Albert's primary concerns is getting his people back home. He demands action from the city leaders on re-opening the projects and eventually stages a sit-in at the Calliope projects. That incident generates a number of plot complications that make Treme good television, but it also illustrates the frustration many folks feel to this day.

CJ Peete Project, June, 2006, appoximately 5 months after Lambreaux's fictional occupation of the Calliope

The Housing Authority of New Orleans administers the projects. Like all-too-many government or quasi-governmental agencies in NOLA, it was rife with corruption, corruption that was often ignored because there was so little profit in the first place. After the storm, with so many black folks literally packed up and shipped out of state, Karl Rove, the lead strategist for the Bush administration on Gulf Coast recovery, saw this as an opportunity to move Louisiana solidly in the red column. (David Vitter's likely re-election to the US Senate this year is testament to the success of Rove's work.)

Affordable housing units are being re-built at some of the project sites. Will they be enough? Experts say no, creating problems in the service-industry and skilled labor pools. People don't want to leave the metro area, but living in the suburbs while trying to work downtown is difficult on a low income.

Just ask Treme musician Antoine Batiste.

Last week, it was this tweet of genius, and this week, they're insulting the competition on Twitter:

Seriously, guys, there's "edgy" and then there's just juvenile. Put a grown-up in charge of your Twitter stream.  Whomever has it now is embarrassing the brand.

Von Dullen streetcar 2008, at the two-track terminal at Beauregard Circle.

This is the end of the "Carrollton Spur" of the Canal Street line.  On the outbound leg of the route, one of every four streetcars running on Canal turns right onto North Carrollton avenue and goes down to City Park.  This spur is a big boost to the New Orleans Museum of Art, City Park, and the various businesses along Carrollton.

This photo was shot from Lelong Drive, the main entrance to the New Orleans Museum of Art.  (The photo at the top of the NOMA home page is what you'd see from this vantage point if you turned around.)  The operator hasn't yet changed over the trolley poles for the inbound run.  The Von Dullen streetcars were originally built in 2002-2003 for the return of the Canal line.  They were flooded in the storm, and were stripped and re-built in 2006.  While they have the same basic arch-roof design of the 1923-vintage Perley A. Thomas cars that run on the St. Charles line (the city's classic green streetcars), these streetcars have modern controls and electronics, as well as wheelchair lifts on both sides. 

There's no better way to get off the beaten tourist path in New Orleans than to ride the Carrollton Spur out to City Park.  Enjoy Bayou St. John, Pitot House, the park itself, and NOMA.  Even on a hot summer afternoon, you can escape back into the air-conditioned red streetcar to get back downtown!

You've scored one of the best journalists in New Orleans by bringing in Angus Lind. After years with Da Paper and a great memoir of those experiences, Ang is one of the best storytellers around.

The story of the British Saints fans, just great stuff:

Then this week's segment on hot dogs, well, check them all out.

Here's the thing: Y'all need to push Ang to the next level. He's writing and talking, and that's the two things he does so well, but y'all to television, and it's time that Ang did television as well. Remember Jim Metcalf on WWL? Or Ronnie Virgets' vignettes? That format has Angus Lind written all over it. Take an Angus Lind column and "set it to video" as it were. The live segments are great, but they could be so much more than just chat. Ang is already in the NOLA writers' pantheon, and now y'all should hook him up with a creative producer and make some lasting video memories.

Push him. Please.

And those of you reading this, push him as well!

Drinking Liberally is a very-successful meetup-with-booze group that has chapters in several cities. Someone tried to start a NOLA chapter last year, but it fizzled for reasons unknown to me. I got an email earlier announcing that the group is re-starting:

I would like to begin by introducing myself, my name is Page Gleason and I have recently re-located to New Orleans. I am please to announce that my friend Nathan Morell and I have re-started the Drinking Liberally New Orleans chapter and I hope you'll be interesed in joining us!

We will be meeting on the First Thursday of every month (yes TONIGHT!!! sorry about the short notice) at 7:00 pm at Pravda, 1113 Decatur Street in the French Quarter. I know it's short notice, but if you're free, please come join us for a beer this evening. I promise to send out reminders in a more timely fashion in the coming months.

I also encourage you to join the Drinking Liberally New Orleans Facebook Group!

If you're like me, this is wayyyy short notice (and not a favorable first impression of organizational skills), but DL events in other cities are a lot of fun, so I'm going to flag the first Thursday of next month and hope they don't pick an Uptown place with no parking. If you can go tonight, let me know how it turns out.

A major player in the city's public education system claims the Orleans Parish's two-year old voucher program isn't working, putting Catholic schools in the area back into the overall education debate.

Leslie Jacobs (through her organization, Educate Now!), a former member of the state's Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and candidate for mayor of New Orleans, challenged the program of offering "vouchers" to students of low-performing public schools so they could attend Catholic and other private schools, saying test scores of those students are significantly lower than those attending public schools:

On the website for her nonprofit group, Educate Now, Jacobs said the standardized test results of third- and fourth-graders attending private and parochial schools with state-financed vouchers raise "serious concerns." But others, including State Superintendent Paul Pastorek, questioned Jacobs' use of LEAP tests to reach her conclusions.

The list of schools in the sidebar of Da Paper's article consists of a whole bunch of Catholic and Christian schools where students can use vouchers. The article explains the system:

The voucher program for low-income New Orleans elementary school children was approved by the state Legislature two years ago with strong backing from Gov. Bobby Jindal. About 1,200 students received vouchers worth about $7,400 apiece in the 2009-2010 school year, and enrollment will increase to almost 1,700 this fall.

The schools operated by the Archdiocese of New Orleans are the 800-pound gorilla in the room that often is not addressed when discussing public education in the city. Catholic education has a rich and successful history in New Orleans, but the schools have also been problematic for the public system. In a city which had (pre-storm) a population breakdown (roughly) 60/40 black/white, why was the breakdown of public school students 95/5? Where did all the white kids go to school? Simple, Catholic and other private schools.

The overwhelmingly Catholic population of New Orleans and its suburbs found a great way to avoid the issues of school desegregation and busing. Catholics institutionalized de facto segregation by building elementary schools in most of the church parishes in the archdiocese. These schools were true "neighborhood" schools in that a parish could simply refuse to accept "out of parish" students. That meant all-white neighborhoods in the city and suburbs could reject black families with a straight (and totally legal) face. "Oh, sorry, you don't live in Our Lady of the Swamp Parish, and we just don't have the room for your children." To give you an idea of how entrenched Catholic education is in New Orleans, compare it to other cities. In many cities, parents send their kids to Catholic schools because they need more motivation/discipline/attention than one can get in public school. In New Orleans, there are specialized Catholic schools for children who don't get enough motivation/discipline/attention in the "regular" Catholic schools!

One of the biggest complications in this alternative school system has been how public schools are financed. Families with kids in Catholic schools resented having to pay both tuition and property+sales taxes funding public schools. As a result, trying to get any sort of increase in millage is above and beyond the normal tax resistance one finds when trying to pay for schools. The combination of the storm and the election of a reactionary/religious-conservative governor, Piyush "Bobby" Jindal (R-Kenner), emboldened the already-conservative state legislature to approve a voucher system two years ago. Orleans Parish schools have become quite the petri dish of experimentation since the storm that vouchers in the mix isn't surprising. The main limiter on the voucher program is that students had to have attended one of twenty-one schools identified as poor-performing.

Two years later, however, the scores don't look good for the Catholic system. Naturally, proponents of vouchers say the existing data is premature, but Jacobs has decided to publicize the deficiencies of voucher students. An ardent supporter of the Recovery School District and its charter schools, Jacobs' opinion is well-respected. That she is willing to throw down with Jindal on the voucher issue is an interesting political development.

In terms of the role of Catholic education in the city, having any light shined on the performance of Catholic students is problematic for the archdiocese. Parents of today's elementary school students aren't of the same mindset as their parents. With real household income shrinking more often that growing, Catholic school tuition is more of a financial burden. The prospect of better public schools that are already paid for by tax dollars is offering a lot of food for thought for those parents. The skin color of the kid sitting next to theirs isn't even on their radar in many cases. Without significant increases in tuition, the local parish school won't be able to attract teachers of the level of today's charter and "magnet" schools. As more Catholic families discover this, the Catholic system will continue to shrink.

And that can only help the public system.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Hey, Vitty-cent, your stonewalling shtick is getting old. Time for you to explain a few things.

With all due respect to my friends who say they smell the #oilspill, I'm not sure that's what you're smelling.

Bear with me here, please. I'm not saying y'all are a bunch of psychosomatic wackos. Indeed, many of y'all are feckin nuts, but for a myriad of other reasons. I firmly believe you're smelling oil, but consider:

• "Oil awareness" is at an all-time high. Just going to the gas station and smelling the fumes from the pump bums me out. I can see the same thing happening to others when an oil-burning older car goes by, someone cuts their grass with a cheap lawnmower, you name it.
• Refineries. BP down at Jesuit Bend, Chalmette, Norco. We've been surrounded by oil smells all our lives here. Maybe "oil awareness" is heightening things you've smelled all along?
• Crude vs. Refined. Have any of you ever smelled unrefined/crude oil? It's not the same as the various petroleum products you live with daily.
• Chemical Plants. If you think the refineries are bad, the chemical plants like Cytec and Monsanto make some really nasty shit.
• Wind/weather patterns. NOLA has variable winds on a daily basis. The oil spill started 90 miles off the LA Coast, and that coast is 80-90 miles (as the crow flies) from the metro area. The reports of oil smells down the bayou aren't even consistent enough to conclude that fumes are making their way this far north in quantity.

There are two reasons I bring this topic up. First, some of you are making yourselves miserable over this. I firmly believe you're smelling something, but I don't think it's as serious as you make it out to be. I hate to see people I admire and respect worrying themselves to death.

Second, I don't see where this olfactory freak-out serves any common good. Air quality? Public health? C'mon, three refineries and Shell Polypropylene in the region, our air quality was shit before 22-April. Cancer issues? Anyone who is fighting lung cancer and lives in NOLA has made a lifestyle choice that this oil spill is not threatening any more than the existing problems.

Some of you may think the people complaining, like this McClelland woman, are doing the Lord's Work on the spill, but if they make New Orleans look like an eco-apocalypse, what little business and economic development we have left will be destroyed.