On the east bank of the Mississippi River in the Lower 9th Ward, the Holy Cross neighborhood is no stranger to industrialization.

Nearly a century ago, the nearby Industrial Canal opened, connecting the river to Lake Pontchartrain. The 5.5-mile man-made waterway, which runs along the edge of Holy Cross, separates the Lower 9th Ward from the rest of New Orleans. 

In the Lower 9, residents are now surrounded by water on three sides. In Holy Cross, the Lower 9 neighborhood that hugs the river, many neighbors use the Mississippi’s levee for outdoor recreation. But their peaceful place along the river may soon be disturbed, as the Port of New Orleans moves forward with plans to bring maritime commerce and freight trains back to the neighborhood’s Alabo Street Wharf, which has fallen into disrepair. 

Alabo Street is a residential strip that runs from the river to Florida Avenue, a few blocks downriver from Fats Domino Avenue (formerly Caffin Avenue). In Holy Cross, a beat-up railroad track connects the Alabo Street Wharf to tracks on St. Claude Avenue. The track goes up the middle of the street, meandering like a river, and in some places runs only a few feet away from homes with small children.

“The train track is what, 150 feet away from these two new homes that were just built?” said Holy Cross Neighborhood Association board member Jeffrey Wittenbrink Jr. “And probably 10 or 15 feet away from this home right here on the corner.”

The Alabo Street Wharf began operating in 1921. Many early residents of the Lower 9 worked on the river; it was a place where a working wharf was part of the neighborhood’s fabric. In the 1970s,  the Port of New Orleans purchased the terminal and began using its rail lines in 1982 to transport river cargo such as lumber, copper and sugar. But those deliveries were sporadic.

In June, the Port of New Orleans approved a new project for the wharf—a terminal for organic grain imported from Eastern Europe, through a lease with a company called Sunrise Foods International.

Sunrise Foods did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Before the Port’s June board meeting, two public notices appeared in the Advocate, announcing – as required by Louisiana’s Sunshine Laws – that the board “intends to lease to Sunrise Foods the Alabo Street Terminal.” As outlined in the notice, the Port would provide the lease and $10 million to Sunrise, to induce the company to develop and improve the property, which the Port would own when the revitalization is complete.

An earlier public notice, published in November 2023, had declared that active negotiations with Sunrise Foods would be confidential, under a state law that specifically protects “port economic development negotiations” for a 12-month period.

Holy Cross residents saw none of the public notices, they said. So they didn’t attend the Port’s board meeting in June to make public comments before the lease was confirmed.

The activists who accidentally testified for the Sunrise Foods lease

In an odd twist of events, some activists were present at the meeting in June for an entirely different purpose. And they weighed in on the Sunrise Foods lease offer. 

For eight months, a group of pro-Palestine activists called New Orleans Stop Helping Israel’s Ports (NOSHIP) have attended Port of New Orleans board meetings to demand that the Port end its contracts with entities that supply weapons to the Israeli government. 

NOSHIP members spoke favorably of Sunrise Foods International during the public comment period, because it has no direct relationship to Israel. No one raised a single objection to the lease during the meeting. To board members, the project may have looked like a shoo-in.

Now, NOSHIP members are stepping forward to clarify. They were not speaking for the neighbors who could live with the repercussions if the Alabo Street Wharf Revitalization moves forward, they say.

The comments were made only because of the group’s anti-Israel position, nothing more, said Maya Sanchez, a member of NOSHIP, who says now that the Port is misconstruing their comments as support for the Sunrise Foods project. As someone who is not from Lower 9, Sanchez finds the whole situation “really upsetting,” given the information they now have –  “that the terminal is going to do harm” to the Holy Cross community. 

Three months later the Holy Cross community finally learned about the project proposed for their backyard, at a town hall hosted by Rep. Candace Newell from District 99, the state legislative district that includes the Lower 9th Ward. 

There, at the Sept. 17 meeting, a representative from the Port mentioned a plan to bring an organic grain terminal to the Alabo Street Wharf. Newell, seeing her constituents’ reactions, realized that the neighborhood had not yet heard about the Alabo Street Wharf Revitalization project. 

Given the wharf’s location and warehouse space, the project seemed like an ideal fit, the Port wrote in an email after the meeting to The Lens/WWNO.

Wittenbrink, the Holy Cross neighborhood board member, questioned that assertion. “It probably will be good for the Port,” he said, “but it’s not going to be good for us.”

Bringing Grains and Trains Back to Holy Cross

That September meeting sparked a flurry of questions in Holy Cross. Wittenbrink and Lindsay Edwards, Holy Cross residents, got to work. Yet it was difficult to get information from the Port, including which company the terminal had been leased to, they said.

They also didn’t understand why the Port had been so willing to offer a lease to Sunrise Foods. “I hope the Port would see that this is not a welcome project,” said Edwards, who believes that many residents still do not know about the Port’s plans – and would be opposed, if they did. 

The association arranged a community meeting on Sept. 27 to share those details. Homeowners said that they were concerned that the revamped railroad tracks would endanger nearby children and bring down property values. According to research published in The Appraisal Journal, proximity to a railroad freight track line reduces home sale prices by approximately five percent. 

“This is not fair to the Lower 9th Ward,” said Holy Cross resident Gale Gettridge-Branon, while speaking at the community meeting. “We don’t want it, period.”

Traffic on the Alabo Street line will start at a minimum of 10 railroad cars per day, five days a week, with the option of scaling up to 20 cars per day, according to a review by The Lens/WWNO of email between Sunrise Foods and Norfolk Southern, which will operate the railroad. The railroad cars will travel as one train to and from the wharf each day.

The track has always been considered active and was used sporadically as recently as 2017, a Norfolk Southern representative wrote in an email. According to Norfolk Southern, the planned rehabilitation work will focus on the Holy Cross section of the Alabo Street track.

Residents around Alabo Street also worry about pests, such as weevils, and about grain dust, which can be harmful to respiratory health, causing issues such as asthma and chronic bronchitis. 

But the Port contends that the grain dust will be completely contained and managed according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards, said the Port’s Chief of Staff, Sarah Porteous. Those standards also require the facility to mitigate the risks of a grain dust explosion.

Wittenbrink is skeptical. “Every single terminal where they’ve had an explosion or they have had other problems with grain dust, there are OSHA regulations, right?” he said. “At every single grain facility in the country, there’s gonna be OSHA regulations.”

The proposed Sunrise Foods grain terminal will be much smaller than the major grain elevator and export facility stopped in St. John the Baptist Parish earlier this year. To minimize air pollution around the facility, the Alabo Street Wharf terminal will not have open spaces such as a grain elevator or silo, Porteous said.

“They really do want to be a good neighbor,” Porteous said of Sunrise Foods International. “They are willing and interested in making improvements to the neighborhood.”

Over the 15-year primary lease, the revitalization project will create both temporary and permanent jobs while contributing to the local economy — according to the Port’s projections. 

But Wittenbrink said the Port cannot make promises that jobs will go to members of the Holy Cross community. 

The Port’s leasee, Sunrise Foods will control all hiring and operations, he contends.

“We are often promised, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get jobs. We’re gonna get part-time, full-time. They’re gonna be paying $70,000 a year, and make neighborhood improvements,” said one resident to Porteous at the community meeting. “But they don’t really materialize.”

Still, others believe that the Alabo Street Wharf Revitalization project has the potential to bring positive change to the community. “It’ll bring in some more focus to the area,” Newell said, “so that the Lower 9th Ward could be the self-sustaining neighborhood that it was when I was growing up.” 

Like Wittenbrink, Edwards is skeptical. “[The Port] can’t promise any improvements. That’s also up to Sunrise Foods,” she said. 

History of unwanted industrial development

In the middle of October, Norfolk Southern began the construction to revitalize the railroad tracks in Holy Cross. 

To Willie Calhoun Jr., a longtime Lower 9 resident and a pastor at Fairview Mission Baptist Church, this project is part of a long, sad history of unwanted industrial development in the Lower 9th Ward. 

“We’ve been, in my opinion, sold down the river a bunch of times – pardon the pun – because there’s no conversation here,” Calhoun said. 

Central to the current problem is the Port of New Orleans, he said, which is reviving train tracks in his community even as it makes plans to remove railroad crossings in the Bywater, a whiter, wealthier neighborhood on the other side of the Industrial Canal. 

“Who lives in Bywater and who lives in the Lower 9?” Calhoun said. “So yeah, you got a bias and it’s a racial bias that’s there. Again, it’s all in the name of making money.”

To find a plan for the Alabo Street Wharf that works for everyone, he and other Lower 9th Ward residents hope that the Port will meet with community members near the wharf to discuss what changes are possible – and what plans have already been made. 

“Norfolk Southern, Sunrise Foods and the Port need to come to this community and sit them down and say, ‘This is where we are.’ Anything short of that, I believe, is wrong,” Calhoun said. 

WWNO’s Aubri Juhasz contributed reporting to this story.

Clarification: The article has been updated to reflect that the railroad cars will travel as one train to and from the wharf each day.