Tag: Rampart Street

Every Time I Think of You

It’s very cold in New Orleans this morning–in the low forties–and I am slowly waking up from a very deep and restful sleep due to going to the gym yesterday for the first time in months. I also realized something yesterday as I went through my physical therapy exercises and added a few to get the rest of my body involved; I’ve always been a bit afraid of a re-injury, and my workouts would always taper off and end whenever I would reach the point of getting to a full body, normal workout. I realized it yesterday as I was doing one of my exercises and could feel the old charley-horse thing that meant the repaired muscle was getting fatigued. You can’t overcome a fear without admitting that you have one, you know. My legs feel fatigued this morning, but overall I feel pretty good. I think the real muscle soreness generally kicks in on the second day after the workout, but it’s been a while so I could be very wrong on that score.

Yesterday was very weird. How do you deal with the aftermath of a terrorist attack on your home city? I resisted the urge to lift my embargo on legacy media yesterday (hey, we were attacked!) and doom watch them report on rumors, conjecture, and cover it non-stop with endless talk and nothing substantial. I thought it wiser to wait out the day and then consult nola.com today, once more information has been released. It’s infuriating, of course; how could someone do this to New Orleans, of all places? New Orleans, the most hospitable and welcoming place in the country? But New Orleans makes a good target specifically for that very reason; it’s very welcoming, without question and there are always crowds somewhere to target. I dread the thought of what this is going to mean for the Super Bowl and Carnival, but I imagine it will be very similar to the 2002 Super Bowl, when the military was here in force. I also was remembering what it was like when I came back home from Katrina and there was no police, only the National Guard, and it was surreal seeing a military camouflaged all-terrain truck with machine guns mounted on the hood patrolling the neighborhood. I touched on this very briefly in Murder in the Rue Chartres all those years ago, but then got into the heart of the story and forgot about the Guard being here.

I spent most of yesterday scrolling through social media1 while watching football games on television. The Texas-Arizona State was the best game of the post-season so far; maybe this next round will have better games. I don’t feel vested in it, other than just being idly curious. The Sugar Bowl was postponed for a day–and I imagine that when it does air, alot of the coverage will be about the attack. What a way to start the new year, right? New Orleans has been through a lot over the last five years or so; the Hard Rock Hotel construction site collapsed in January of 2020, and since then we’ve been hit by a major hurricane, and other buildings have collapsed. I was also thinking last night that the last few Super Bowls here have been a bit jinxed; the last one was when there was a power outage in the Superdome after Beyonce performed for about a half an hour, and the one before that was the post 9/11 one. I don’t think there had been one here between 2002 and the Beyonce bowl–Katrina had a lot to do with that–but it’s why the entire city seems to have been under construction this past year. Claiborne Avenue uptown has been torn up for at least two or three years at this point; I never use it anymore to go downtown and it used to be my go-to to get downtown from uptown…but it’s not nearly as bad as the years Rampart was torn up. Yikes, that was miserable.

New Orleans always endures, though, this improbable city that literally makes no sense. No matter how much the Right and MAGA hates Orleans Parish (84% of the vote for Harris/Walz), no matter how much they hate having to rebuild and/or protect the city–letting New Orleans sink or abandoning it–would have an enormous economic impact on the country, as boy-rapist Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert finally had to admit and sign off on the reconstruction after Katrina. The port here has always been–and always will be–vitally important to the economy. New Orleans was so vital that when Jefferson offered to buy it, Napoleon threw in the rest of the Louisiana Territory as lagniappe because all that land had no value without New Orleans...which MAGA Louisiana really hates knowing. So all you mouth-breathers from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and so forth–keep New Orleans negativity out of your fucking mouths. Sorry you’re stupid and didn’t pay attention in your underfunded schools, but that’s the reality. The economy could take the hit of losing one of your states–but not the loss of New Orleans.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Keep New Orleans in your thoughts, whenever you can spare one, and I may be back later. You never know, and it’s a whole spanking brand new year, after all.

  1. Another reason I was able to avoid legacy media–I was getting my fill of rumors, lies, and horrible MAGA reactions to what happened so I didn’t need to give them eyes or clicks. As always, another two middle fingers raised to the complicit legacy media, may they decline into financial bankruptcy to join with their moral one. ↩︎

Causing a Commotion

Last Saturday, as you may know, the Hard Rock Hotel, currently under construction at the corner of Rampart and Canal Street in the French Quarter, collapsed. Today, they are going to set off some controlled explosions to bring down the damaged cranes, which are no longer attached to the construction and present a clear and present danger to the area. Many of the businesses in a very large radius from the construction site are closed until further notice, causing the businesses and their employees financial hardship.

Several people were also killed as a result of the collapse.

I no longer drive to and from work on Rampart Street–we moved into new offices for the day job last November; it’s much easier for me to get on the Interstate coming and going to work now–but I pretty much made that drive every day from 2005 through last November, other than the years the street was torn up in order to resurface it as well as put in the Rampart/St. Claude streetcar line. The construction site was where the Canal Street Woolworth’s was for decades; the very Woolworth’s whose lunch counter was protested during the Civil Rights era because it was segregated. I always hated that the Woolworth’s closed and was torn down, because I felt that it was of no little historic significance; particularly at a time when the Confederate monuments still polluted the city.  But Woolworth’s is no longer in existence, and what else to do with a prime real estate lot that wasn’t being used? There’s already a Hard Rock Hotel on Bourbon Street, but this complex was going to be much larger and was, I think, going to house a Hard Rock nightclub, if I’m not mistaken–because a nightclub at that corner is precisely what the city needed (eye roll).

The construction collapse also exposed some typical New Orleans corruption; the contractor is allegedly shady and has an apparently well-earned bad reputation on every level. There was also some bribery going on, and someone at City Hall, who was signing off on permits, and safety inspections that weren’t being done, was also arrested this week. I am very curious as to what that is going to mean for the future of the Hard Rock Hotel; even if they hire a reputable contractor, I would imagine everything already built will need to come down and be rebuilt; and how do you recover your reputation from that?

It will be interesting, and of course, I am thinking there’s a book or a story in this somewhere. I’ve already created a shady contractor in New Orleans, by the name of Sam Dreher, in Royal Street Reveillon; I can certainly use that character again, and who knows? French Quarter Flambeaux just might make a terrific Scotty novel.

It’s hard to imagine, though, at this point how the Hard Rock Hotel can continue to be built–I would imagine it would have to be torn down completely and started over, but what do I know? I am neither an engineer nor an architect. But I would also think it would be hard to get past the fact that several people died in a construction disaster while it was being built; here is the perfect set up for a French Quarter horror novel about a haunted hotel, don’t you think? One that is cursed with death and tragedy; similar to the Overlook in The Shining.

Interesting.

This also reminds me that Arthur Hailey’s bestselling novel Hotel, which was adapted into a television series in the 1980’s (it came on after Dynasty), was also set in New Orleans; the St. Gregory Hotel in the novel was on Common Street in the CBD, one block from the French Quarter–a grand old hotel of the city (the television show moved the setting to San Francisco; which I still think was a mistake. An anthology television series along the lines of a more serious The Love Boat, set in a hotel with guest stars every week playing out individual stories as they visit the hotel, to me, would work better in New Orleans than San Francisco; then again, I may be biased heavily) in desperate need of some financial investment.  Hailey, who is not so remembered today, was a huge bestseller of his time, and he wrote sprawling novels about industries, and the people who worked in them, and the people who got involved with said industry somehow; with the stories all intermingled. He also wrote Airport, which became one of the first disaster movies, and eventually a series of sequels about plane disasters; he also co-wrote the novel Runway Zero-Eight, also filmed–and that film was what Airplane! spoofed. He wrote about banks (The Moneychangers), hospitals (The Final Diagnosis), power companies (Overload), drug companies (Strong Medicine), car companies (Wheels), and news broadcasts (The Evening News). He also wrote a political thriller, In High Places, which was one of the most thoughtful cold war thrillers; it was written from the perspective of the Canadian government, negotiating desperately with the United States since the skies over Canada were going to be the battleground between the US and the Soviet Union.

I reread Airport after I actually went to work at an airport, and have to say, Hailey’s research was excellent; he really captured the behind-the-scenes activity of an airport impacted by a blizzard perfectly. Likewise, I read The Moneychangers when I was working at a bank–he actually researched Bank of America for the book, which is where I worked–and again, spot on.

Now I’m thinking about rereading Hotel, if only to see how it was done, and how he depicted New Orleans in the 1960’s.

Anyway. I’ll continue to follow the story of the Hard Rock Hotel collapse, and see where it goes, and maybe–just maybe–it could be the basis for something. As you can see, I’ve already had any number of ideas spring from the incident…as always.

And now back to the spice mines.

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The Way I Feel About You

Well, my plans on how to stay calm during an LSU game most emphatically did not work yesterday.

I do, however, have a very clean apartment.

It was, on the whole, a most exciting game–if you’re an LSU fan, but it also had a lot of stressful moments, momentum swings, and tension. And yet, when the smoke cleared and the game clock ran down, LSU upset the second ranked team in the country and the national championship runners-up from last year decisively, 36-16. Hardly anyone gave LSU a chance, and even those who only made Georgia a seven-point favorite were doing so half-heartedly; as I watched the pre-game show it was so clear no one really thought LSU had a chance, or would even meet that seven-point margin; they were trying to hype up the ratings–if they said what they really believed, that Georgia was going to humiliate LSU–only die-hard fans would watch.

Which would have been a pity. LSU was dominant in retrospect–at the time it didn’t feel that way. We went up 3-0, stopped a fake field goal attempt on fourth down by the Bulldogs, and then drove down the field to go up 10-0. Two more field goals followed, along with some lights-out, tenacious defense, and the score at half-time was 16-0, LSU. Georgia had never trailed this season for more than fifteen seconds, and had not been held scoreless in a half in God knows how long. But it was really only a two-score game, and I was concerned about having to kick three field goals instead of touchdowns…then again, LSU had four scoring drives in the first half; it could have been 28-0. I worried those field goals might come back to haunt us in the second half. And I was wrong. LSU scored twenty more points in the second half to put the game away–although Georgia scored 16 points of their own–but the final score was 36-16, and the biggest win for LSU since the Alabama game in 2011; certainly one for the history books, and one that will go down in LSU lore as one of the great Death Valley wins.

Suddenly, after the Florida loss, with LSU looking slow and lackadaisical and almost mediocre, now LSU looks like a championship team who can compete with anyone. And while I don’t want to get my hopes up–Alabama looks completely unbeatable–how exciting would it be if we got to play Florida again for the SEC championship game? Florida has already lost to Kentucky; Georgia already has a conference loss with both Florida and Kentucky yet to play; all the contenders in the East have a loss already (Kentucky to Texas A&M; Georgia to LSU; Florida to Kentucky) so the stakes for the Florida-Georgia game are really, really high in two weeks.

Yes, it was a very exciting day around the Lost Apartment yesterday. GEAUX TIGERS!

I also watched another two episodes of The Haunting of Hill House, which is probably one of the best horror television shows I’ve seen in a while. I am quite frankly loving this television horror renaissance, which is producing such amazing programs. The Haunting of Hill House, of course, still can–and might–go off the rails, but so far it is terrifying, eerie, and mesmerizing; the call-backs to the original source material are enormously satisfying, and yet it could stand entirely on its own with a different title; it’s almost like a revisitation of the Lutz family twenty or so years after the original story of The Amityville Horror–how do you experience something supernatural and terrifying, particularly if you’re not really sure what it was you were experiencing, and deal with that trauma for the rest of your life? The Crain children, now adults, have dealt with this in varying ways, but they are definitely all suffering from PTSD and trauma. The first four episodes told the same story from different points of view of the adult Crains, their present reality juxtaposed with their memories of their stay at Hill House. All the characters are compelling, well-written and defined, and the acting is absolutely stellar. I said in a previous entry it’s reminiscent of the best of Stephen King’s It and Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts; I am also going to throw in the first season of the television adaptation of The Exorcist as well–an excellent show that only lasted two seasons but I wish it could have gone on for longer. This is some excellent story-telling, and it is astonishing how true to the mood of the novel this show is.

I won’t deny it–at first I thought, when I heard of this and how it was going to be done, I rolled my eyes. You can’t do this better than Shirley Jackson, I thought dismissively, remembering the horrible 1999 film version (the original film version, in black and white, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Harris–who should have at least gotten an Oscar nomination–was superb and terrifying). But I was absolutely, positively, completely wrong. The show is amazing and fantastic, and I can’t wait to watch more; I might even do so today before getting started on writing–since there’s no Saints game today, and of course being sick last week put me desperately behind.

I also read some more in Empire of Sin yesterday–Storyville is now up and operational. I’ve always avoided reading about Storyville, or even considering writing about it; for me, I was thinking it was almost cliche to do so. David Fulmer has already done a series set in that time–Chasing the Devil’s Tail, Jass, Rampart Street, Lost River–with his detective, Valentin St. Cyr; he also had a story in New Orleans Noir, and since he has done so well with the period and the area I didn’t really see any need to cover that same ground. But now….now I am thinking I could, and differently. “The Blues Before Dawn” might actually turn into a novel rather than a short story, and it’s a great title, if I do say so myself. But once I get this revision under control, I’ll have some more time to play around with the story and see where it goes.

I’m particularly interested in Tom Anderson, the unofficial mayor of Storyville.

I’m also thinking I should watch Pretty Baby again; it’s been decades.

And on that note, I think I am going to take my coffee into the living room, ensconce myself in my easy chair, and watch the next episode of The Haunting of Hill House preparatory to heading into the spice mines.

Have a lovely Sunday, everyone.

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