By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer | A bridge running over a buried canal beneath a streetcar track — the setup sounds like a backdrop for the post-industrial romance of an Arcade Fire video. On Loyola Avenue in the Central Business District, however, the infrastructure sandwich will soon be a very expensive reality – and […]
Category: Land Use
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Land Use
Grocer forging ahead with plans to resurrect Seventh Ward's iconic Circle Food Store
Seventh Ward Neighborhood Center director J. Samuel Cook delights in the revived interest in the curved-front shopping center at Claiborne and St. Bernard avenues. Photo by Ariella Cohen. By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer It was the place to go if you wanted to put food on the table, a uniform on your child […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Land Use
Neighborhood Participation Plan cranking up after three years stuck in neutral
By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer | Three years after New Orleans voters approved a necessary charter change, City Hall is finally getting around to implementing the so-called Neighborhood Participation Program to give disparate communities all across the city a more direct voice in the governance process. According to a just-released “Scope of Work,” […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Land Use
Star turn for Central City bar – but can it still operate legally as the joint it's long been?
Bean Bros. Corner, as captured in a drive-by for Google Maps, is a neighborhood hangout that has operated for years, but without proper licensure. By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer | And this week the award for most creative argument in support of a zoning decision goes to attorney Ed Washington. Washington’s mission was […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Land Use
Flap over Magazine Street Pilates center prompts city to shape up notification rules
By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer | Once it opens, the new Romney Pilate Center on upper Magazine Street promises to help the workout crowd shape up. But because of neighborly unhappiness over the way the building itself bulked up after original designs were approved, the development has already begun reshaping the way the […]
Posted inLand Use
Interview: St. Roch art impresario holds forth from Tasmania on the wreckage left behind
By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer | Kirsha Kaechele now lives in Tasmania. In the years after Hurricane Katrina, Kirsha Kaechele made a name for herself as a kind of art world impresario. The city’s cultural elite flocked to soirees where they consumed fine food and edgy, disaster-inspired art — all this in St. […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Land Use
Homeowner or homeless? St. Louis Street resident fights to hang on to what he has
By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer | The stretch of St. Louis Street near Claiborne Avenue more closely resembles an industrial brown field than a residential neighborhood. And even in that context, the ramshackle house in the 1900 block has eccentricities of its own: the plastic flowers and ribbons that hang from the front […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Investigations, Land Use
Crackdown on Lower Garden District blight outs cop with dual homestead exemptions
By Karen Gadbois, The Lens staff writer | Taking action against the owner of blighted property is at best a ticklish business – only more so, residents of the Lower Garden District learned, when the owner claims a homestead exemption on the building. The property at 1026 Melpomene will now be auctioned. The informal citizen’s […]
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Land Use
City neighborhoods: a matter of evolving perception
There’s no escaping the need for neighborhood designations, but they often have more to do with bureaucratic arrogance than with on-the-ground realities and our sense of who we are.
Posted inGovernment & Politics, Land Use
State running low on money for property in the way of $1.2 billion teaching hospital
By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer | With more than a hundred properties left to expropriate, the state has spent more than two-thirds of its $75 million budget to acquire private property for the construction of the $1.2 billion medical center planned to replace Charity Hospital. The $55 million spent so far has paid […]