In a part of the Lower 9^th Ward largely unrevived since flood waters filled the neighborhood, a lone two-story house stands on a block punctuated by overgown lots, piles of tiles and old concrete slabs.

Windows are broken. Graffiti covers the garage door. A kicked-in front door leads to a debris-filled interior. But what sets this property apart from other post-Katrina wrecks is both its high-profile owner and the substantial chunk of taxpayer dollars allocated to renovate it.

Click here for coverage of this story from our reporting partners at FOX8-TV.

City Councilman Jon Johnson owns the property on Deslonde Street, in District E, the area of the city he represents. According to conveyance records, Johnson has been awarded $166,000 under the state’s Small Rental Program. The money is called a loan but carries no interest and, according to the Small Rental Program website, the loan is forgiven “once the units are repaired and income-eligible tenants are indentified.”

Johnson signed the loan documents on July 26, 2011. The program allows an applicant nine months to complete the work, meaning that Johnson stood to forfeit the money as of three weeks ago.

The program uses federal Community Development Block Grant money administered by the state to create more affordable housing while mitigating blight and abandonment.

Christina Stephens, spokeswoman for the state Office of Community Development, said that if construction is not complete within nine months “we send a team member to meet with the applicant to determine the progress and to determine what happens next. An applicant found to be working toward completion will be granted an additional three months. If the property remains unimproved, the state can foreclose on it.”

Although the state does not release information about the details of specific property transactions, Stephens said that typically at closing on a loan under the Small Rental Program, the applicant will get half of the amount. Another 30 percent is made available during the renovation, and the remaining 20 percent after completion.

In a phone interview with our reporting partners at FOX8-TV, Johnson said he’s done some work at the property, such as putting on a new roof, but that he’s been delayed by personal issues. Johnson’s wife died of cancer in September.

Lower 9th Ward activist Vanessa Gueringer said it's unfair that other properties have been cited for code violations while Johnson's property has not. Photo by Karen Gadbois

The roof does appear to be new, but according to the city permitting database, the last building permit issued for that address was in 2007.

Johnson insisted the property is not blighted. The windows are not broken; they are left open during the day and then closed at night, he said. He said he makes a point of keeping the grass cut.

Though he’s used the Deslonde address for various business ventures he’s been involved with, Johnson does not live at that address. His home is in the gated Eastover subdivision, a property valued by the assessor at $686,000.

Lower 9th Ward resident and community activist Vanessa Gueringer contends that Johnson is the beneficiary of special treatment by city officials responsible for housing-code enforcement.

“Why are tax-paying citizens of this community – who are struggling with quality-of-life issues every day – being cited by code enforcement, in some cases $500 a day, and our councilperson is getting a free pass?”

The house sends a message, Gueringer said.

“It says our councilman has perks. …It says that the city looks the other way when our elected officials own blighted properties in our neighborhood.”

Other houses near the Johnson’s property have been cited and brought to adjudication in the past several month. But until The Lens asked, 2221-23 Deslonde St. had not been inspected since 2010, city spokesman Ryan Berni said.

Update: The city has responded.

On Monday, four days after we asked about the property, it was inspected and found wanting. “The property will be cited and moved towards administrative hearing,” Berni wrote Thursday night by email.

City records examined briefly by The Lens show that, in fact, the property was inspected on May 14, four days after The Lens first asked about the property. We couldn’t determine the results of that inspection, however, and Berni didn’t immediately respond to clarify the inspection dates.

It’s not the first time Johnson has been associated with still-struggling property. In January 2011, The Lens reported on various derelict properties owned by a local non-profit connected to the council member, including one directly across Deslonde Street from the one now in question.

As usual, it didn't take long for the underground political commenters to get in gear and produce this image, which is making the rounds in cyberspace. It was circulating within hours of Wednesday's non-meeting of the council.

More reporters than City Council members attended today’s non-meeting of the city’s legislative branch, which again was stymied by the absence of Jon Johnson and Cynthia Hedge-Morrell.

Because the seven-member council has one open seat, the lack of two members means the council could not achieve the required five-member quorum.

After the roll call, the council clerk declared that city business could not be conducted. This follows a similar situation at Wednesday’s special meeting.

The council heard some reports today nonetheless, and members took the opportunity to throw more barbs at their missing colleagues.

Initially, reports were that the no-shows were upset about the handling of a proposed change to the election process of the council’s at-large positions. But it has increasingly become clear that the real concern is a perceived imbalance of power with Councilwoman Stacy Head’s appointee Errol George poised to take her seat.

Head moved from the District B seat to an at-large position two weeks ago, creating the vacancy in her former position. Since then, the council hasn’t had enough members to even consider a vote on George’s appointment. Any appointee would be interim, serving the remainder of Head’s term and by law be banned from running for election to a full term.

George and his supporters were in chambers today.

Dana Henry said of his friend: “Errol has more integrity than anyone I have ever met.”

Henry went on to say that he found the behavior of the missing council representatives “embarrassing.”

Councilwoman Kristen Gisleson Palmer alluded to rumors that Mayor Mitch Landrieu was exerting influence on the decision as to who should take Head’s seat.

“If the intent of this is to let the mayor appoint, I ask the mayor to respect our decision.”

If the council doesn’t appoint an interim member within 30 days of the vacancy, the privilege falls to Landrieu. That deadline is June 1. The council has no meetings scheduled before then.

Johnson and Hedge-Morrell left a May 3 meeting before the council could consider George’s appointment. Even though the council couldn’t take any binding action, the remaining four members went on to take a unanimous vote in favor of appointing George to the position.

Those same four members attending today’s meeting – Head, Gisleson Palmer, Susan Guidry and President Jackie Clarkson – were not happy with the continuing stalemate and inability to get work done.

“We are not always going to win, but picking up our toys and walking off is not going to work,” Guidry said pointedly.

Clarkson was equally sharp.

“This should be unacceptable to the people.”

Head pointed out that other interim appointments in the past weren’t universally supported by the council members but that those candidates went forward with the full vote of the council.

“I would have hoped that I would have been shown the same respect,” she said.

And with that the meeting came to a close with a few confused residents wandering the chambers, wondering why their land-use matters had not and would not be heard.

Scuttlebutt in the chambers is that Landrieu is looking to install former state Rep. Diana Bajoie in Head’s former seat.

Bajoie also was a favorite of the mayor to fill the seat that Arnie Fielkow vacated, a position that went to longtime City Council staffer Eric Granderson. Head replaced Granderson May 2.

The next meeting  – whenever that might be – ought to be a long one.

An image from Squandered Heritage as New Orleans attempted to bulldoze its way to recovery. credit: Karen Gadbois

Newcomers to this site may not be aware that before there was The Lens there was a blog called Squandered Heritage.

With help from a wee band of fellow zealots, I devoted Squandered Heritage to the task of chronicling the parlous state of the built environment in New Orleans post-Katrina, with particular attention to the city’s priceless residential architecture.

I could hear the sound of bulldozers rumbling in the distance as “blight” hawks chased after FEMA demolition funds and eagerly proposed eradicating vast swaths of the flood-ravaged city.

Love of New Orleans – and anger at those who would so stupidly destroy it – got me up in the morning and kept me up late at night. But in due course these raw emotions gave way to an education and something like strategic expertise. Squandered Heritage became the go-to site for information on demolition, permits and many other aspects of the war to save New Orleans.

We were cited at City Council hearings; we were written up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. In 2007, in collaboration with television reporter Lee Zurik, yours truly shared a Peabody Award, TV journalism’s Pulitzer Prize.

Encouraged by these successes, I teamed up with reporter  Ariella Cohen to place Squandered Heritage’s mission within the broader context of issues and concerns that are the focus of The Lens today.

It’s been a gratifying transformation – but I confess, I missed my baby. And so, with this debut article, we are reactivating Squandered Heritage as a standing feature on The Lens home page.

Alas, there is much work to be done: The city’s economic revival is proving to be nearly as grave a threat to its poignant beauty as the floodwaters and bulldozers were half a decade ago.

In this, the debut edition of a revived Squandered Heritage, it seems appropriate to glance back over some of what the site has managed to do, its heritage, so to speak.

For starters, I’ll hark back to the debate over just what we were going to call the site. Early candidates included “My Blighted New Orleans” or “NOLA Blight” – both of which were rejected. They played too directly into the mindset of the politicians and grant-chasers hankering to crank up those bulldozers in the name of a War on Blight.

As we collectively pondered how to save what the storm hadn’t taken, an influential fellow-blogger from Washington, D.C., a guy named Richard Layman made a case for New Orleans that I found utterly convincing: .

“Architecture, history and urban design are the key competitive advantages possessed by New Orleans even today,” Layman remarked to me – and I wholeheartedly agreed. No matter how many of us summoned the resolve to return to the city, what would be left of the New Orleans we loved if these assets were destroyed.

It was Layman who then steered me to a powerful series of articles on urban destruction that had run in the Chicago Tribune in 2002 under the logo, “A Squandered Heritage.” In multiple installments, reporter Blair Kamen had explored significant Chicago architecture lost to ignorance, greed and lack of political will. We drew inspiration from Kamen’s work and honored it by borrowing his logo.

Damaged but reparable, the neoclassical double at 2008 Jefferson Davis survived Katrina but not the bulldozers.

My first post slammed the proposed demolition of a neoclassical shotgun double  in Mid City.

At first I wrote mainly about properties in areas of the city where demolitions were governed by a committee then called, ironically, the Housing Conservation District Review Committee.

It was a panel of mostly mayoral appointees and city workers, and it met — as the cheesiest script for a movie on corruption might require — in a back room of the Safety and Permits department at City Hall. Items were added to the agenda at will and sometimes, when the agenda was large, attempts were made to get blanket approvals. Members regularly made motions to  demolish buildings before their addresses had even been read aloud or opponents – like me – given a chance to speak out.

It was post-Katrina’s version of the Wild West, and the stampede to grab FEMA demolition funds was at full thunder. The first wave of demolitions were owner-requested; then came the flood of city-requested demolitions. I was joined by an unpaid crew of three: Sarah Elise Lewis, a graduate student in urban planning; Laureen Lentz, an ardent preservationist and Randall Fox, the wunderkind of the trio, a preservationist who at the time was a freshman in high school. In tandem and apart, we scrambled across the city photographing the nearly 2,000 properties the city was proposing to demolish.

Our visual database alerted the city’s unsuspecting residents to the decimation that was being proposed. It was a wake-up call – most especially for folks who found their houses on the demolition list even after they had been renovated and reoccupied.

Chanel DuBose was one of those people. She and her husband, Stanley, had worked long and hard to revive their house, in a part of the city over burdened with abandoned commercial structures.

Our chronicle of their plight figured in coverage by the Wall Street Journal reporter. Rick Brooks had visited New Orleans to see what was going on here two years after Katrina and came to appreciate Squandered Heritage as the default authority on the widespread demolition threat.

In a conversation with me, Brooks described city officials as “craven” – a word as good as any, I thought, though I might also have used “Kafkaesque” or “Orwellian” in reference to the so-called Imminent Health Threat demolition program, a doomsday machine with no built-in appeal process.

Lee is fourth from the left, I'm at the far right as we collect our Peabody Award in New York for exposing corruption in the New Orleans Affordable Homeownership program.

What really put Squandered Heritage on the map – and on the Peabody Award list – was our focus on the now infamous (and aborted) New Orleans Affordable Homeownership (NOAH) program.

I had been wanting to write about what a relatively small allocation of funding would do for a neighborhood, and the Mayor’s program to gut and remediate houses for the elderly seemed like a good place to start. With money to burn, NOAH began a program to restore homes for the elderly. Or so they claimed.

What Lee Zurik and I found was that mainly what was getting gutted was the public till. Cronyism was rampant, and with friends in high places, some contractors weren’t even bothering to perform the maintenance and repair work they were billing the city for. Others claimed to be busily at work – but at addresses that didn’t exist.

Just last week contractor Earl Myers pleaded guilty to charges stemming for his NOAH work. Lee and I doubt he’ll be the last.

The powerful response to our NOAH coverage was the germ of what became The Lens: the fulfillment of our dream to team with a staff of skilled journalists to address the full gamut of municipal concerns.

Unfortunately, just because we’ve reached adolescence as a news service and resource for community action does not mean the issues that nurtured Squandered Heritage in its infancy have gone away.

While the pace of post Katrina demolitions has slackened, there are still a large number in the pipeline.

Next week Xavier University will seek permission to demolish 11 houses near its new convocation center – and no plans have been made available to show what they propose to do with lots once they’ve been scraped clean.

An Uptown house just sold for over a quarter of a million dollars – and the new owners propose to destroy it – a signal that an era of high-priced tear-downs has arrived.

One New Orleans classic that still stands: a barber shop that doubles as a barbecue pit.

The grassroots struggle against unwarranted demolitions won’t be our only mission. We’ll also be strolling and rolling around town to snap photos of unpermitted, illogical or simply baffling building projects – some lamentable, some definitely worth savoring. The Central City Tonsorial Parlor is a goner. (A tonsorial parlor in funky old New Orleans? Who knew?) But the mixed-use Gert Town “Bar-ber-Que” hair cut and food joint is still with us and, hopefully, will be for years to come.

And that little double shotgun I first wrote about? Well it is now a gargantuan 4,000-sq. ft. McMansion rumored to have six bathrooms on each side and a sister building right next to it, so poorly planned that a giant oak sits where a driveway entrance should be.

Stay tuned.

Yes, but was the work actually performed?

By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |

Appearing Thursday in federal court before Judge Nannette Jolivette-Brown, former New Orleans Affordable Homeownership contractor Earl Myers changed his plea from not guilty to guilty of conspiring to commit theft of federal funds.

Until the city agency was shut down in November, New Orleans Affordable Homeownership, also known as NOAH, operated as a non-profit and accepted federal funds to address blight. Revelation that NOAH funds were used to pay for fictitious or incomplete work amounted to one of the bigger city scandals of the post-Katrina era.

One of five contractors charged with misuse of federal funds, Myers had been awarded over $500,000for NOAH work. He operated variously as Excel Development and also as Myers and Sons.

Assistant U.S. attorney Fred Harper Jr., representing the federal government, presented the charges as outlined in a bill of information. The charges included “conspiracy to embezzle with “City Official A”, as well a accepting money for work not performed and falsifying records for submission to a federal grand jury.

The bill of information identifies City Official A as NOAH’s executive director. Stacey Jackson, who was NOAH’s executive director during the period in question, has not been charged in connection with the case.

City Official A issued checks to Myers and then asked him to cash them and give her the money, the bill of information says. Myers understanding was that if he failed to cooperate with City Official A, he would not be awarded additional work.

City Official A also paid Myers $90,000 to renovate property she owned on  Sixth Street, according to the bill of information. A portion of the payment was made with funds belonging to NOAH, the bill asserts.

NOAH was awarded $880,000 in federal funds in each of the three years between  2005 to 2007.

Myers was indicted in March, along with Trellis Smith, Richard Hall, Jamon Dial and Shantrice Dial. Myers is the only one to date to have entered a plea.

Myers appeared with his attorney Richard Moore who later said his client changed his plea because he “just wanted to get it over with.”

Myers, 58, is in poor health, according to Moore, and has had multiple bypass surgeries. Moore said his client’s fragile health might impact sentencing, which is scheduled for July 17.

Myers faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

Harper declined to comment on the government’s case.

Stacy Head

By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |

Defying political speculation, Stacy Head told The Lens Wednesday she plans to take office as one of the City Council’s two at-large members before May 7, meaning she would not be eligible for two full terms after this partial term is over.

“I think it is important to take office as quickly as possible with a short transition period.” Head said in a telephone interview.

City voting officials reviewed Saturday’s voting-machine counts and confirmed Tuesday that Head won an exceedingly narrow 281-vote victory over former state legislator and City Council district member Cynthia Willard-Lewis, a frequent but unsuccessful candidate for an at-large seat. Willard-Lewis who has not conceded the race and has said she is considering her options.

Ironically, the only thing that could make Head eligible for an additional four-year term in the at-large seat is if Willard-Lewis files a lawsuit and delays Head’s swearing in past May 7.

That date is key because it marks the half-way point in the four-year term Head will complete for former at-large member Arnie Fielkow, who stepped down on Oct. 1 to take a job in Chicago.

Council members who fill more than half of a term can run only once for a regular four-year term, according to the City Charter. Political pundits, including two reporters at The Times-Picayune, have speculated Head would wait past May 7 to be sworn in, to maximize her hold on the office.

Head said she has “no idea why people are speculating as to my intentions” but that there is a lot of work to be done and she intends to begin as soon as possible.

After the Secretary of State certifies the election, she has 30 days to take office. Unless Willard-Lewis objects, that certification is expected to come Monday.

Head went on to say that she plans to take office as soon as possible with a replacement for District B announcement coming soon.

The swearing in will take place with family, friends and supporters.

Willard-Lewis could not immediately be reached for comment.

It’s a 19^th century house significant enough to have attracted a state Historic Building Recovery Grant of $45,000. And that was on top of $135,000 in Road Home money, plus another $20,000 grant from the Arab emirate of Qatar.

Whether to dismantle the house or repair it, work continues at 2013 Dumaine St. in defiance of a legal notice. Work has continued recently.

But today, with only minimal work to show for all that money, the Greek revival house at 2013 Dumaine Street has been slapped with a city demolition order, and Treme neighbors wonder if ongoing removal of old brick, timbers and architectural detail might lead the structure to collapse even before the bulldozers show up. The dismantling continues in defiance of a stop-work order slapped on the property.

The chain of events leading to the likely demise of yet another architectural gem is a tangled tale of botched rehabilitation efforts and seemingly little follow-up on how government grants for recovery and preservation are spent.

As early as 1946, l’Hote Townhouse – to give the residence its proper name – was identified in a city inspection report as “out of plumb 2 feet,” meaning the structure was starting to tip over. And the need for further remediation was noted in 2000 when the house was designated a landmark.

Efforts to save it intensified in early 2003. Owner Rod Lindauer, a local artist, occupied a small portion of the upstairs with his wife as they set about rehabbing a house that was falling down around them.

Termites had invaded the side of the house built of wood, but a wall of solid brick was structurally sound, Lindauer recalls.

Overwhelmed by the scope of the work, in 2004 the Lindauers sold the place to New York real estate investor Coy LaSister for $55,000.

Katrina likely worsened the subsidence that was tipping the house, Lindauer said, but on his visits to the place after selling it, he saw no sign that repairs were under way.

Neighbor Will Germain got the same impression. Now and then LaSister would come by and hang potted plants but, so far as Germain could tell, the new owner never spent a night in the house. To Germain it looked like an open-and-shut case of “demolition by neglect.”

Messages seeking comment from LaSister were intercepted by a brother who said he is ill and in a nursing home.

The historic townhouse dates to the 1860s.

The definitive study of the area’s housing stock, “New Orleans Architecture: Fauborg Treme and the Bayou Road,” describes the circa 1860 residence as a two-story Greek revival townhouse with significant iron work, the “major decorative element” on an otherwise “extremely restrained” façade.

After Hurricane Katrina, LaSister applied for and received funding to stabilize and renovate the property.

The $45,000 Historic Building Recovery Grant was awarded in March 2007. Work began but records on file with the state are spotty and in some instances were submitted past deadline or seek reimbursement for ineligible expenses, such as scaffolding, according to documents obtained by The Lens through a public records request to the state.

According to the contract LaSister submitted to the state, the work was being done by TH Montano General Contractors LLC, with a “principal place of business” on St. Claude Avenue.

Louisiana’s Secretary of State website shows no listing for TH Montano General Contractors in New Orleans, though there is a TH Montano Construction in Baton Rouge.

Lisa Batiste Swilley owner of the Baton Rouge business denies doing work on the Dumaine Street property but acknowledged that she has done work in the past with Tracy Williams, who eventually bought out LaSister and is now the owner of the beleaguered mansion along with David Taffet, her business partner on several real estate projects.

The New Orleans property assessor’s website lists Taffet’s home outside Philadelphia as the mailing address for Dumaine 2013-2017 LLC. The Secretary of State’s website calls Williams the LLC’s manager.

According to a letter written by Coy LaSister’s brother, Knox LaSister, an extension for the historic preservation grant was requested and approved, pushing the completion deadline back to December 2008.

In the letter submitted to the state, Knox LaSister said the contractor was “overwhelmed by the scope of the work” and subsequently fired.

LaSister went on to explain to state officials that a new contractor had been identified as well as additional funds from The Road Home and the Qatar Foundation’s $20,000 grant, which was to redo the roof. LaSister then  requested a further deadline extension, to May 2009.

In February 2009 LaSister was awarded the Road Home grant of $135,000. But in April 2009, the state partially withdrew the historic preservation grant. LaSister was forced to return $11,150 but was permitted to retain $7,000 as reimbursement for some early site-prep work. The rest of the $45,000 had not been spent.

In May 2009 LaSister sold the property and, by covenant written into the title, the obligations to rebuild the house with the grants received passed to the new owner, 2013-17 Dumaine LLC.

Williams, who owns numerous properties in the area, says she believes an earlier permit for repairs, issued in July 2011, is all she needs to continue the work; the city disagrees. On March 22, inspectors declared the house in imminent danger of collapse and issued a demolition permit.

Four days later, the city issued a stop-work order.

According to neighbor Will Germain, workers have been on site in recent days hauling away the bricks, in defiance of the stop-work order.

Williams contends the brick is being removed only temporarily and will be returned to the site as part of the restoration she plans.

Christina Stephens, communications director with the state Office of Community Development, the agency overseeing Road Home grants, declined to speak about individual cases but made clear that an owner who buys a property that has been awarded rehabilitation grants is responsible for completing the work.

“The new owner who accepted the covenants would be bound by the same timeframe for rebuilding and re-occupancy,” she said.

In the case of this property the deadline was February 2012, Stephens said.

She added that LaSister’s eligibility for hurricane recovery grants hinged on his being the owner/occupant of the property when Katrina struck, not just someone who came around from time to time to hang potted plants, as neighbors allege.

“If we suspect that this was not the case and the program had been misled by the applicant, certainly we would investigate the situation for potential fraud,” Stephens said.

Germain assumes the 150-year-old house is doomed. As he watched a laborer hauling off a wheelbarrow of ancient brick recently, his only question was whether removal of structural materials will cause the building to collapse even before the city demolition order can be executed.

A fading assessor's office photograph shows the billboard has been bestride the now blighted shotgun at 2724 N. Claiborne Ave. for quite some time.

By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |

One of the great philosophical conundrums of our time played out before the Neighborhood Conservation Committee this week: when is a house a billboard (and vice versa.)

At issue was the city’s desire to demolish a blighted Ninth Ward shotgun alongside the old concrete bridge that carries Claiborne Avenue up over the railroad yard near Franklin Avenue.

What makes the house distinctive is the giant billboard not just near the house but squatting on top of it. Assessor’s records place the value of the house at $5,300 – about what a well-placed billboard throws off in rental income every few months, according to industry sources.

The city Office of Code Enforcement applied for the demolition and said it plans to use FEMA funds to knock the house down.

The committee, which oversees demolitions across a wide swath of the city, heard what amounted to a chicken-or-egg argument as they tried to figure out which came first – the billboard or the house – and who owned what.

One member of the committee suggested the house was there before the billboard, but another said the foundation for the billboard was actually inside the house. In any event, the large support poles for the billboard run right through the roof and these days probably play a structural role in the shotgun as well.

The committee spent some of the session trying to determine the actual owner of the property, named on the assessor’s website as Industrial Outdoor Display, a Metairie based firm owned by the estate of Edmond and Eunice Brignac.

The billboard company, CBS Outdoor, said they purchased “the asset” some time ago and that they maintain the billboard but not the house. While they were prepared to yield to the city’s yen to demolish the house as part of the Landrieu administration’s ongoing “war on blight,” they said they wanted to make sure the billboard stayed put.

That complicates things. Most blighted houses are mowed down with a few quick passes by a bulldozer or claw. Disentangling a house from a billboard’s uprights is more exacting work and anyway, partial demolitions – which is what this becomes if the billboard remains standing — are never allowed.

Several committee members questioned the legitimacy of  using FEMA funds to demolish a house that is obviously a commercial money-maker for the property owner. Upkeep is an owner’s burden, not the state’s.

The description on file with the assessor does not list the billboard as part of the house.

That’s consistent with Louisiana tax law, according to New Orleans assessor Erroll Williams. Billboards are listed on the business owner’s personal property self-reporting form, and their value can be kept confidential, Williams advised in an email to The Lens. “While we believe that structures like these are permanent improvements and should be treated as real estate, [Louisiana Tax Commission] guidelines do not allow us to do so,” Williams wrote.

However venerable a part of the neighborhood, the house with the billboard growing out of its roof got no sympathy from the preservation committee. They voted to demolish the house – while somehow saving the billboard.

Lane Hughes stood his ground last June as city deferred decision on whether to demolish his rundown home. (photo: Karen Gadbois)

By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer |

With its tangled title, backed-up taxes, and an ambience that hovers somewhere between junkyard and barnyard, it’s no showplace. But for Lane Hughes, the waterless wreck of a house has been all that stands between him and the streets or a shelter.

In proceedings last June on whether to take down the Mid-City “eyesore”, Neighborhood Conservation District Committee members had been a tad startled to realize that the man taking the microphone to oppose demolition of the “abandoned” structure was, in fact, its occupant.

There’s a philosophical question at the heart of the matter. In this particular skirmish, is the city’s war on blight at cross-purposes with efforts to combat homelessness?

This week, after months of temporizing and red tape, the city bureaucracy ground into gear and spat out what Hughes has long fought: a demolition order.

The property, in the 1900 block of St. Louis Street across from the Lafitte Greenway, has been Hughes’ home since he moved to New Orleans after Katrina to help out his family. His Uncle Pike, a housebound Vietnam vet had inherited the place from Hughes’ grandmother, Octavia – in whose name the property remains. Why? Because, when Uncle Pike died and Hughes became the sole occupant, the assessor required payment of $8,500 in fines and back taxes before he would rework the title. For Hughes, who scrapes by collecting soda cans for sale to a nearby scrap metal dealer, that sum was, to say the least, a stretch.

Hughes’ may be the only house in the area with chickens pecking in the dooryard and a magpie’s accumulation of junk scattered all over the place, but then this stretch of St. Louis Street is never confused with Audubon Place. Other properties have been put to light-industrial use – cinderblock warehouses; a delivery truck garage – as zoning allows.

Hughes, now in his mid-40s,  sees himself as an artist and the debris as yard art. His contention that friends of the Lafitte Greenway are his foes in the demolition fight have been denied.

He did not turn up for this week’s fateful meeting of the Neighborhood Conservation Committee. Nor did he answer a reporter’s knock at his gate the next day. But an early morning visit to the property showed signs of recent gardening, a fresh profusion of plastic flowers and some roof work — evidence that he still lives there.

The NCDC’s 6-2 vote appears to doom the property. What happens to its occupant remains uncertain.

Informed that demolition appeared imminent, Martha Kegel, of Unity for the Homeless, said she would “reach out the Veterans Administration“ to see what services they might be able to provide Hughes.

Quietly and with no discussion, the City Council broadened the definition Thursday of what constitutes disturbing the peace during its meetings, asserting control over where people can stand to record public meetings.

Anyone who plans to record or broadcast meetings, either with audio or video, is now required to register with the council clerk before the meeting. The clerk will assign a position in chambers for that person to stand. The provision does not apply to those who are seated.

The clerk is not allowed to assign in a position that would be “unreasonable.”

The change appears to be aimed at local activist Sandra “18 Wheeler” Hester, who frequently appears at council meetings and has filmed the proceedings while roaming the room.

Perhaps one of the last wandering cameramen enters the City Council chambers and starts recording on the same day that the council voted to limit such recording. Photo by Karen Gadbois

"Cool as heck": A comment filed in support of Bacchanal at the city hearing. (photo: Karen Gadbois)

By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff reporter |

Patrons, neighbors and employees of Bacchanal, the ultra-hip Bywater nightspot, turned out in force for this week’s meeting of the Board of Zoning Adjustment.

Bacchanal, at the corner of Poland Avenue and Chartres Street, an area zoned for light industry, has been in business for over 10 years, growing from wine shop with light food offerings, to a full-tilt food and wine establishment with live music on the back patio.

On any given evening a food truck would appear near an opening in the patio area to offer light fare while the permanent kitchen was under construction.

The unique food service even inspired a scene on the HBO series ‘Treme” with well know chef Janette Desautel cooking out of the back of a truck.

The good times ground to a halt last summer when a neighbor’s complaint led to an enforcement action that determined Bacchanal was not properly permitted.

By December, after much to and fro with the city, the food and bar service was restored, but to revive the music, owner Chris Rudge was told that he’d need a waiver from the requrement that he provide 37 parking spaces – the topic of this week’s hearing.

In an impressive show of local support, over 20 speakers lined up to speak on Rudge’s behalf.

The comments ranged widely. One neighbor rhapsodized about the club, saying it has brought “safety, friendship, music, twinkling lights and cheer.” Another neighbor, friend and occasional employee of the club blamed last summer’s enforcement action against the club on a neighbor whom he described as a “myopic juvenile transplant tattoo artist.”

Landlords who own adjacent housing called the business a popular draw and tool for promoting their rental properties.

There were no speakers in opposition.

The speakers prevailed and the board voted unanimously in favor of allowing the parking waiver.

Reached by phone at Bachanal, sometime employee Ralph Schumaker said there are a few details to attend to before compliance with city rules will be complete but that the club is confident the music will be back  “within two weeks.”