Art by Eric T. Styles Breakfast pastries have been a symbol of White supremacy and colonialism since honkies first learned to bake. Brought to America by imperialistic Europeans and forced upon itndigenous Americans early in the morning.
Just look at the names of breakfast baked goods: the Danish, the English muffin, French croissant and toast, Belgian waffles. The names reek of the stench from these European invaders.
The contemporary morning toaster pastry that has come to symbolize “American systematic racism and white supremacy” is the incarnation of the suburban atrocity we call “Pop Tarts.”
First off: The word “tart” is offensive to sex workers and should not be allowed. Combined with the word “POP” it implies indifference to violence against sex workers. Just educate yourself and be a better person.
A spokesman from the “French Quarter Think Tank on Stuff” points out the inherent racism that is baked into Pop Tarts. In a condescending tone of virtue he states the following:
“The blatant and overt racism of Pop Tarts has to be addressed. Look at the flavors, only white people would like the bland selection of flavors. vanilla creme and blueberry? No non-White person would eat that. If the Pop Tart people really wanted to bring equity to breakfast, they would offer flavors like barbecue and hot sauce. That would go a long way to bringing healing to this nation.”
The spokesperson really cranked cringe up to eleven by continuing: “It’s also wrong to assume that minority communities have access to toasters, many don’t. If they do, their electric may have been shut off from non payment and they are forced to eat the Pop Tart cold.”
(Art by Eric T. Styles) There are hundreds of ways that any one of us could die in the French Quarter. Let’s take a look at one way we could all die together.
Solar flares or an electromagnetic pulse. It’s estimated a large scale event could kill millions in the months following a massive solar flare and mass ejection towards the Earth. The large loss of life would occur in every major city effected. A large solar flare such as the one that took place in 1856 known as the Carrington Event would devastate our modern electronic dependent modern world.
Similarly, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) could be produced by a massive nuclear explosion high in the atmosphere above the continental United States by such nations as China or Russia. Such a blast would be delivered by new hyper-sonic weapons that the U.S. currently have no defense system to prevent. Given global tensions today, this is not so far fetched.
Either event would result in our electrical grid being shut down not for days, but possibly years. Replacing large transformers without an operating infrastructure would be near impossible. A strong enough blast would have the ability to fry nearly every electronic device. Everything from transportation to communication devices would instantly become useless.
Cities would take the brunt of the disaster. No electric means no fuel, no transportation for food deliveries or water distribution. You thought Katrina was bad? There won’t be any hope for outside assistance since every major city and town will be in the same situation. What little government and military still functioning will be looking after their own.
Let’s imagine the event’s effect on the French Quarter. To make it even more interesting we’ll have it happen on a busy holiday weekend like Labor Day. Every hotel booked, Bourbon Street filled with drunken tourists in the middle of the day.
THE FIRST FEW HOURS: There won’t be any warning. Just a “boop” as power goes out and all trucks and cars stall in their place. Most all vehicles made after 1990 have a computer in them. The worst part for all of us will be the total absence of any information. No TV or radio broadcasts, no Emergency alerts on our devices, just darkness literally and figuratively. People today flip out if they can’t get a wi-fi signal or their device runs out of battery life. Imagine if every device just turned off and wouldn’t even power on.
Crowded bars and restaurants go dark, the music stops and a collective panic sets in when we all look down at our blank screens. If caused by man in an upper atmosphere blast, we might hear a distant rumble a few minutes after when the sound wave reaches us. Any critical thinker would realize that this isn’t a simple power outage that may resume operation in a few hours. Battery powered devices turning off and all traffic stalling in place would be the ominous sign something bigger has happened.
Imagine being a manager of a crowded club. Both guests and employees would become increasingly panicked. Forget closing out the tabs, no registers, no ATMs, no credit card machines. Push the guests out and lock the doors. Employees will want to go home, let them. They will be worried about their loved ones and you will be too. It will be a long hot walk home, grab some water for the journey.
Where will the tourist go? Back to their dark and excessively hot hotel rooms? Loiter in the streets nursing their last drinks? Gather and spread rumors? Was it was China? Russia? UFOs? If you think that they are demanding and high maintenance in the best of times, imagine them all in an emergency. The looting will start before it’s even nighttime. Tourists and locals alike will push themselves into Rouses, the drug stores and any shop with food and liquor. The collapse of order will happen with in hours.
NOPD It’s possible that New Orleans city government may have a communication system hardened and protected enough from such a event to stay in contact with state government, which in turn would have lines to the federal agencies. It would still take hours before the full scale of the disaster would become apparent. The only reliable transportation available to NOPD would their horses. Inter-departmental communications would probably not be sophisticated enough to function after the blast.
It would be optimistic to expect the police to place their own personal concerns for family after that of the city. Is it reasonable to expect the law enforcement to maintain order without vehicles, communication in complete and total darkness while they are thinking about their own families in other parts of the city? If any remain on duty, they will be used to protect the wealthy areas and important institutions like the banks and casino.
Don’t expect to see the National Guard riding in to save the day anytime soon. Those who do actually report for duty will be put to work in Baton Rouge. No trucks with MREs and water, no crowd control, no relief.
By midnight most every shutter has been pried open and every bar and restaurant has been ransacked by tourists and a few locals. Don’t be an idiot by sitting out on your balcony with a warm beer and your last bag of chips rubber-necking at the unfolding chaos below you. You will be seen as a “have” by the “have-nots.”
Were you a big fan of ridiculous zombie apocalypse films? Always fantasized about how cool the anarchy would be? Good news, it’s here, the bad news is that you will be one of the zombies soon. Remember those AR-15s with a 30-round magazine that “No one needs?” I bet you wish you had a couple of them now.
Before dawn of the next day, someone will start a fire. Forget NOFD, their trucks don’t run and most went home to protect their families. After a night of smashing of windows, periodic gunfire and constant yelling the smell of smoke will drift across the French Quarter. Unlike previous fires that ravaged the Quarter in the past, there will be no bucket brigades or effort to extinguish the flames. Large swaths will burn for days with the slightest breeze from the river.
Other parts of the city are not fairing much better. The collapse was hastened in the French Quarter by the presence of thousands of tourists. Uptown where all of the highly educated elites live they too are suffering. Most probably don’t have more than two days worth of food in their large homes. The university professor with a doctorate in political theory is outraged that Uber Eats isn’t delivering during The Battle of Armageddon.
Perhaps it’s time to get out of the French Quarter. You and your friends gather up what little supplies that you have left and hop on your bicycles. You have to pedal through a few neighborhoods to find the promised land. Without cars operating, suddenly bicycles are a very valuable possession. You will head north. Without a phone with GPS it’s next to impossible for you to tell directions, you’ll follow the road signs. You bicycled across the Netherlands, Louisiana will be a piece of cake.
You have a Glock, so you are not concerned. You fired it a couple of times at the firing range and have watched all of the John Wick films so you have a few tricks up your sleeve. Confronted by a group of men, you pull your gun and before you can utter a clever threat you get shot in the back a few times. As you bleed out you get to watch your girlfriend being gang raped. How’s that action hero fantasy working out for you?
If you are fortunate enough to escape the city limits, a long hot ride through the suburbs awaits for you. You come across a looted supermarket. Unsurprisingly all of the vegetarian and soy products are untouched. You gather what you can carry and pedal on until you find a spot to camp for the night. Those hundreds of hours playing the video game “Fallout” have paid off, you got the skills. Perhaps you should have grabbed a can opener and bug spray back at the store.
All of you talk about finding a farm where you can start a commune. None of you have any farming experience, never hunted or fished and really don’t like physical labor. The farmers that are there can do all of that. You have other talents to lend to the new community. One of you has a college degree in women’s studies. They will be the school teacher for the farmer’s kids. They’ll teach the kids reading, math and critical race theory.
You can play the guitar. With no electronic media, the farmers with love you as you sit under a tree playing the few songs you know but they don’t while they work in the hot sun for 12 hours a day to feed everyone. The rural farmers will be so thankful that you sophisticated city folk have arrived to make their lives better.
You spot the first farm house, it’s huge. A barn, large vegetable garden, corn field and chickens. This will be your new home. As you pedal up the long dirt driveway, two men armed with long guns greet you. They seem a little scary, but with your superior intellect you can manipulate them into taking all of you in as one of their own. Perhaps you may even become the leader of the community like Mao.
The farmer who is unsure what has happened, with the loss of all electricity and electronics and only wild speculation as to what the outside world is going through. He sees a group of oily, dirty 20-somethings with purple hair, face piercings and tattoos trespass onto his property. His family nervously wait inside and are also heavily armed as he and his brother go outside to speak to the strangers.
Before you can finish your well-thought-out speech about fairness and entitlement, they point the barrels in your faces and tell you to turn around. Maybe if you start crying it will soften them up, it always worked with your parents. Or maybe not. You threaten to call the cops but stop mid sentence and turn around to pedal on to the next farm up the road. Perhaps the next farm won’t be Trump supporters.
All of you stop along the country road for a good cry and plot to come back that night to steal vegetables that you are so rightfully entitled to. The next day your dead bodies are fed to the hogs.
When I came to New Orleans more than a decade ago and first drove by the present City Hall, I guffawed. The boring lackluster modern design of it should be expected for municipal buildings built in 1957. The pebble concrete exterior is darkened with decades of mold and dirt. A yearly pressure wash was never in the budget, apparently. Add to that the incredibly tacky and poorly installed neon signage that crowns it, which equals cringe-level architecture. The city is forced to lease additional space in nearby buildings to accommodate workers. Perhaps it is time for a new City Hall.
A few large vacant buildings could be renovated to house the city government. The phallic shaped eyesore Plaza Tower, located at 1001 Howard Ave., comes to mind.
Recently, shards of the neglected facade that have come crashing to the ground only highlighted the urgency to do something with the building. This month, proposals have been brought forth for high end condos and hotel space. Hopefully it will come to fruition, unlike previous proposals. It’s in the best location, not far from the existing municipal buildings.
Purchase use the old Charity Hospital and renovate that. The building is not only structurally sound, but a beautiful example of Art Deco design built in 1939. Sure it would be costly to renovate it to current standards, but it would be preserving a historically significant structure that is important to the appeal of New Orleans.
The mayor is proposing to move City Hall to the vacant Municipal Auditorium in Treme next to Congo Square. The square was sanctioned as a location for enslaved Africans to congregate in 1817 and was considered by many in the Afro-Caribbean community as a “sacred place.” If New Orleans is the birth place of jazz music, then Congo Square would be the birthing table. The significance of the site cannot be overstated.
There is a strong opposition from the Treme community with concerns of the municipal building changing the essence of Congo Square and Armstrong park area, as well as the neighborhood over all, should it be converted into City Hall’s new location. Nearly 1,000 parking spaces would be added, including a five-story, 700-space parking garage.
There have been comparisons made to the construction of the I-10 overpass that runs over Claiborne Avenue in 1966. The overpass destroyed a tree lined commercial district in the predominately black neighborhood. Opposition to the project had no political clout to prevent it. There is still bitterness in Treme over what was lost to progress and to deaf ears.
The proposal has gotten a lot of push back on social media from residents’ objection to the idea. Latoya Cantrell has tried to smokescreen the controversy by pointing to other infrastructure projects involving a few street repairs and the Sewerage and Water Board working with Entergy to update the power sources for the pumping stations.
The Municipal Auditorium was built in 1930 and had many uses over the decades, from concerts to basketball and hockey games. It was heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and has been vacant ever since. The 7,800 seat auditorium is just that, an auditorium. The amount of re-design and modification to turn the large open space into a multi floor efficient office space would be staggering. It could be done, but at the cost of destroying the interior beauty.
Certainly one appeal to the city is 40 million dollars that FEMA had earmarked for the building following Katrina. It wouldn’t cover the entire cost of renovation but would be a nice offset. Local governments love that federal money.
Cantrell’s proposal has brought a heated backlash from the Treme community over the impact on the area. Cantrell’s response was that Congo Square will not be touched. There is no dispute the overall area will be impacted by additional traffic and parking.
In this day and age we should also consider that moving City Hall there will change it from a cultural space to a political space. Expect to see protests and rallies to spill over into adjacent areas. Congo Square and Armstrong park could easily turn into “Occupy” camp ground if enough outside protesters were bused in. Sounds far-fetched? Look at such public spaces in many cities around the nation.
The mayor relied on her favorite political catch phrase: “Time to re-think the use.” The same jargon she applied to the idea of turning streets in the French Quarter into pedestrian malls.
If you are dating someone and they say “It’s time to re-think our relationship,” just leave. It’s never a positive term. Whoever may be running against her in the next election should use the campaign slogan: “It’s time to re-think our leadership.”
Eric T. Styles is a Quarter rat and loves to hear your feedback. Email him at styles@thequarterrat.com.
(Photo by Kassie Hall) Have you ever thought about what would happen if you were seriously injured in the middle of Bourbon Street on a packed Saturday night and needed emergency care?
Well unfortunately this guy found out the hard way. I didn’t see the events leading up to this man lying in the street gushing blood that, ironically, looks like a spilt daiquiri, but I witnessed the response. The incident occurred last Saturday evening, on June 12, as the Bourbon Street crowd capacity was at its peak.
New Orleans Police were on scene and rather quickly began taping the scene off, blocking the street and pushing back the crowd, who obstructed medics in their efforts to provide emergency help from this injured man.
After the cops arrived, a crowd of drunk tourists with Hand Grenades in tote began dancing on the cop cars and gathering around the caution tape to record all the chaos.
Watching from the balcony above I have a perfect view of the ambulance attempting, and failing horribly, to get through the crowd.
Stuck rolling at barely 2 mph trying to split the crowd as the drunk “woo” girls decide to use the ambulance as a balance to twerk on. Unfortunately this has lately been a common occurrence in the French Quarter.
Vehicular and pedestrian traffic keep emergency response vehicles from reaching those in need of critical care quite often.
Disappointed by the lack of empathy and general lawlessness from the crowd, I watched on as the ambulance finally made its way to the man.
He was able to stand to get himself on the stretcher and seemed to be OK aside from a gash on his head.
Just as soon as the police tape came down, the party continued on as if nothing ever happened. The man’s blood pool was left on the asphalt for the street cleaners in the morning.
Starting this Memorial Day weekend, the restrictions on hours and occupancy have been lifted for bars, restaurants and live music venues in New Orleans. The past few weekends have been busy and we will probably see a great weekend. The weather is excellent and only about a 43% chance of showers on Saturday evening. With the shutdown becoming a thing of the past for now, those who were suffering from cabin fever will be coming out this weekend to see their shadows for the holiday.
Graph from NOLA READY
The state dropped the 1 AM closing rules along with the number of occupants. Posted on line are bunch of graphs and statistics that if any you claimed that you understood them, I would call you a liar. Whatever, can we just go back to earning a living now?
I spoke to the owner of Molly’s on Toulouse, they will be returning back to their original hours prior to the pandemic: 2 p.m. to 6 a.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. until 7 a.m. on the weekends. The outside tables that were added for cafe seating during the initial limited Phase 3 guidelines will probably be kept.
Molly’s on Tourlouse, open Mon-Thu 2 PM-6 AM, Fri-Sat 11 AM-7 AM and Sun 11 AM-6 AM.
There was even speculation for 24 hour operatios on the weekends if business and manpower allowed. Finding workers is a concern for many French Quarter businesses. Trying to entice workers to come back to work at the beginning of the slow season is the challenge. Fat and convenient unemployment benefits is causing a foot drag with the returning workforce. (Shaddup, you know it’s true.)
Even our supply guy told me that they are busy as hell, and short handed. Nationally there are still many supply line interruptions and suppliers are short stocked as well. Add to this rising fuel costs that will contribute to higher costs for all involved.
Everyone is hoping for the best but don’t really expect it to be exactly like it was before the shutdown. Business owners are holding their breaths waiting for all of the cards to be dealt before they plan how to play them. Customers want to come back to make up for a lost year. Customers are also concerned about the economy and pending inflation as well.
This is the new normal, or new abnormal by a French Quarter metric.
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