A stoop-sitter on France Street saw it happen last week, and when it was over, a slinky blonde cabaret singer was left standing in the doorway of blighted house at the corner of North Rampart and France Streets, brass instruments jutting out around her, Carnival beads dripping over the threshold. “He just nailed it up there and got back in his truck and left,” the woman said.
(via Drive-by artist leaves decorative doorways where there was only blight | NOLA.com)
The population of the Upper 9th Ward’s Desire neighborhood has dropped 68 percent since 2000, falling from 3,791 to 1,213 in 2010, U.S. census data analyzed by GCR & Associates shows. Where there were once occupied homes, weeds grow. The only commercial establishment within miles is the Money and Honey One Stop, a concrete-fronted corner store with unpredictable hours and an inventory heavy on 99-cent soda and potato chips.
Thx for the tip: Ingrid N.!
Note: There’s a piece on Desire in Letters From New Orleans.
NOLAbound is an all-expenses-paid program for 25 well-connected individuals from across the country within four targeted business sectors—arts-based businesses, biosciences, digital media, and sustainable industries—to assess the status of New Orleans as a model of new business progress and thinking.
From March 14-18, 2012, we’ll invite these individuals to explore the city and share their observations and insights about New Orleans and its entrepreneurial community. Those experiences and opinions—positive, negative, or otherwise—will be shared with the world, unfiltered and in real-time, on the NOLAbound website and via participants’ own social media networks.
The entire five-day program will be filmed, and a documentary will premiere in New Orleans in October 2012.
Sound like something you’re interested in? We’re taking applications through December 16, 2011. Apply, share, and be NOLAbound.
Beginning in 2010, the Hypothetical Development Organization, founded by G.K. Darby, Ellen Susan and me, set out to recognize, and expand upon, a form of urban storytelling. It works like this: First, we identify a suitable building: Something that appears neglected, and seems to have no immediate prospects for a future use. In short, we choose an unpopular place. Next we devise a hypothetical future for that structure. Specifically, we strive to make this future blatantly implausible: maybe provocative, maybe funny; above all engaging. Then an artist creates a rendering based on the imaginary concept. This is printed onto a 3’ x 5’ sign, modeled on those used by real developers. That sign, finally, goes onto the building.
In December 2010, our stories began to appear around New Orleans. By March of 2011 we had presented ten of them to the public at large. This effort concluded with a display of duplicates of each of the HDO’s initial creations at an art gallery in New Orleans. The project was realized thanks to the efforts of an astonishing crew of contributing artists, with the financial support of far-flung strangers.
More:
Plans for building Trump Tower in New Orleans are officially dead | NOLA.com
Ah, yes. Our friend Morris Brum lets us know that this particular hypothetical development ain’t gonna happen. No surprise, of course…
“New Orleans is a city that dwells within its own aura, and that aura is one of mystery and uniqueness.” So begins the introduction to writer Jon Newlin and photographer D. Eric Bookhardt’s Geopsychic Wonders of New Orleans, a curious and wonderful collection of evocative photographs and delirious prose first published privately in 1979. A 1992 reprint of the volume given to me by one of the authors became my road map of sorts when I first moved to New Orleans, despite the fact that several of the phenomena mentioned by Newlin and Bookhardt had already disappeared by then. But its practicality is besides the point: it’s more an idiosyncratic survey of New Orleans’ “secret realities” than the ones the visitor or resident can expect to find while walking down the street anyway.
A Geopsychic Tour of New Orleans
Thx: Rosemary!
The Lot Next Door initiative, spearheaded by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, offers buyers as much as $10,000 to restore vacant properties adjacent to their homes, as well as landscaping expertise to help owners turn decrepit parcels into side yards, vegetable gardens and other amenities. The money also can be used to rehab abandoned homes.
Links etc. related to places, and contemporary notions of place, that are of interest to Rob Walker, author of Letters From New Orleans and co-founder of The Hypothetical Development Organization.
See also: Rob Walker blog on Design Observer.
