NOLA at night

My Southwest flight from Miami to Houston a couple of weeks ago made a stop in New Orleans, and our final approach into MSY took up over the heart of the Big Easy.

This picture would have been better had it not been for the reflection from inside the cabin, and there was no way I could take it without also getting the front of the airplane's engine. But I took it anyway, because I normally don't approach MSY from this direction and the clear evening provided a great view of the city:

The circular building on the far left is the Superdome, and Canal Street runs vertically through the left of the picture. The French Quarter is in the lower center, bounded by Canal to the left, Rampart to the top, and the Mississippi River at the bottom. Tremé is in the dead center of the photo, and Marginy is the neighborhood closest to the engine. You can even see the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway at the top of the photo.

The End of the New Orleans Insectarium

This makes me sad:

The brutal chill that the coronavirus put on New Orleans tourism has claimed one of the city's top attractions for children.

The Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium, closed since March due to city-mandated shutdowns and a sharp drop in visitors, won't be reopening its current location at the U.S. Custom House on Canal Street, officials from the Audubon Nature Institute said.

Audubon Chief Executive Ron Forman said the closure was necessary as part of a broader cost-saving initiative aimed at keeping the non-profit financially sound.

The current plan is to eventually relocate many of the insectarium's exhibits, including the Japanese-style indoor butterfly garden, into a renovated space in the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas at the foot of Canal Street — a move Forman expects will save roughly $1 million a year in lease payments.

The Insectarium was located in the impressive 1881 U.S. Customs House at the corner of Canal and North Peters. Its opening was a positive indicator of New Orleans' on-going post-Katrina recovery. But New Orleans, along with the rest of the world, now finds itself in the midst of another catastrophe. 

The insectarium now appears to be among the casualties of the economic downturn after more than a decade in operation. The 23,000-square-foot interactive exhibit opened in 2008 at a cost $25 million and quickly made it onto the top-ten lists of family-friendly tourist attractions in a city more often known as an adult playground.

It took up half the ground floor of the 19th Century landmark Custom House building, and was touted as the largest freestanding museum in North America devoted to insects.

With thousands of beetles, butterflies, cockroaches and other crawling, flying creatures, it was a kid-friendly detour with petting stations, termite hills and insect shows. And its butterfly garden allowed visitors to walk through a room brimming with hundreds of monarchs, common sergeants, tailed jays and other fluttering lepidoptera.

I first visited in 2009 and re-visited many times, owing to to the museum's uniqueness as well as its closeness to our timeshare. One of the museum's highlights was the "Bug Appétit" kitchen, featuring insect-based foods such as mealworm salsa and cinnamon-flavored crickets. The Japanese-themed butterfly garden was also enjoyable.

Normally, while walking along Canal or North Peters Street, you'd be able to peer into the windows of the Insectarium and see the butterflies in the garden resting on the Insectarium's windows. But the last time I walked past the Insectarium, a couple of nights before my wedding, I looked into those saw windows and saw no butterflies fluttering about. I felt sad.

The Audubon Nature Institute plans to move some of the Insectarium's exhibits, including the butterfly garden, into the Aquarium space it already owns. But the enjoyable uniqueness of the Insectarium itself is, alas, likely gone forever.

A one-two punch from the tropics

Because it just wouldn't be 2020 without two hurricanes in the Gulf at the same time...

Travis Herzog/KTRK

Fortunately, since this graphic was produced earlier today, the forecast has changed somewhat such that Marco no longer appears to be a major threat to Houston. Laura's track is less certain and could still pose a threat to the region. Corinne and I are pretty well stocked up and are secure in our brick-and-concrete mid-rise apartment, so there's nothing to do but keep our eye on the weather while we go about our business.

The more immediate concern is that, as of this evening, both storms are tracking towards the same general location in southeastern Louisiana: a potential one-two punch that New Orleans most certainly does not need.

The coming week, incidentally, will mark the third anniversary of Harvey's landfall, and the fifteenth anniversary of Katrina's landfall.

A small wedding and a socially-distant honeymoon

Well, we did it.

Corinne, myself, and the sunset over Lake Pontchartrain, just as we had planned.

On the evening of Saturday July 18, Corinne and I had our formal wedding ceremony at Lakefront Airport in New Orleans. We had about 35 people in attendance: mostly close friends and family, and less than half the number we were expecting for our originally-planned March ceremony, but still within the State of Louisiana's limit of 50 attendees for events such as these.

This was good, as it gave people a chance to spread out; we encouraged social distancing and mask-wearing as much as we could (although it gets hard for people to comply as food is served and champagne flows), and our awesome venue caterer was very good with their sanitation protocols. Over three weeks after the ceremony, we've gotten no reports of any of our attendees falling ill from COVID. We're thankful and relieved.

Our wedding occurred almost two years to the day from
when I proposed to Corinne in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia.
I celebrated by posting on that village's Facebook page
and received a wonderful response from them.

To be sure, the decision to go forward with the rescheduled ceremony was agonizing for both myself and Corinne. We knew that a lot of people wouldn't be able to attend and we knew that we could be putting ourselves and our loved ones at risk. As we watched the infection rate increase both in Texas and Louisiana, we even considered postponing again or canceling entirely (after all, we were already technically married). But in the end, for reasons both contractual and psychological, we decided to press ahead, to make the best of it while being as safe as possible, and to give our family, our friends and ourselves a small bit of enjoyment in the middle of this otherwise-interminable Coronavirus bleakness.

In retrospect, it was the right decision. The ceremony and reception were everything Corinne and I had planned (see here for some early pictures from our wonderful photographer). The food and cake were delicious. Our vendors were happy to be working a wedding again. Everybody in attendance had a good time. Nobody got sick. And it's all behind us now: no more stress of planning and preparing, no more agony of waiting.

We had our wedding, and it was good.

We stayed in New Orleans for a couple of days after the wedding, visiting with family and friends who remained. Then, on Tuesday July 21, Corinne and I got into a rented Chevy Impala and embarked upon a honeymoon roadtrip that we were probably looking more forward to than the wedding itself. After spending the night with friends in Knoxville, Tennessee, we made our way to Gatlinburg and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We spent a few nights at a secluded cabin on the Tennessee side of the park before heading south and spending a couple more nights at another secluded cabin on the North Carolina side, and spent the time hiking, relaxing and enjoying the scenery. While there were lots of people in the park itself and mask-wearing was not universal, we were generally able to keep our distance as we hiked. Car-based excursions such as the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail and the Cades Cove Loop also allowed for social distancing. The only big crowds we encountered were at Clingmans Dome, and even those weren't horrible. I was also finally got to see what the view from the observation deck looks like when not completely obstructed by fog, although the walk up there brutally reminded me how fat and out of shape I am.

Th observation deck at Clingmans Dome without the fog

After spending several days in the Great Smoky Mountains, we spent a few more days driving the Blue Ridge Parkway. This was a much better experience for me than my first drive along the road eight years ago, as there was no fog to obscure visibility and the Impala handled the curves much better than my previous rental. However, it turned out that three days is still not enough to see all the sights and take all the hikes along the Parkway; it was also a bit disappointing that most of the visitor centers along the Parkway were closed due to the pandemic or that a particularly scenic section of the Parkway around Roanoke was closed due to mudslides. Nevertheless, we enjoyed what we were able to see; the Blue Ridge Parkway is fascinating in that you can learn about biology, geology, geography and history all at once as you drive along it, and the views (as long as they're not obscured by overgrown vegetation) are spectacular.

A view of the North Carolina countryside from the Blue Ridge Parkway

We ended our trip with a brief drive through Shenandoah National Park, and spent the last two nights of our honeymoon in Fairfax, Virginia. The original plan was to spend a day in Washington DC, as Corinne had never been there. However, after the Mayor of Washington issued a decree requiring anybody entering the city traveling from "high-risk" areas (such as Texas or Louisiana) to self-quarantine, we decided that entering the city would not be a good idea. Instead, we went to the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport. I enjoyed it, since I hadn't been in over a dozen years and wanted to see some new items that had been added to the collection since then. Corinne enjoyed it, too, because she got to see the Space Shuttle Discovery and other NASA artifacts that greatly interested her. The Smithsonian limited crowds by requiring people to make reservations in advance and required visitors to wear masks at all time, so we felt very safe visiting.

A Concorde, among other aircraft at the Udvar-Hazy Center

The following day we drove up to Baltimore-Washington International Airport, dropped off the rental car, and flew back to Houston. While flying on an airplane may have been the riskiest part of our trip (or maybe not), Southwest is taking things seriously by limiting their boarding groups to ten people at a time, keeping middle seats open, requiring passengers to wear masks at all times, and reducing points of contact as much as possible. That meant, unfortunately, no beverages (other than water) and no working the crossword in the in-flight magazine. But the precautions appear to have worked in our case, because Corinne and I are showing no symptoms of any diseases a week and a half after the flight.

All in all, it was a wonderful and much-needed vacation. But now, unfortunately, the fun is over and it's time for me to get back to work. Due to the high infection rate here in Houston, my employer has abandoned the practice of allowing some of us to go into the office a couple of times a week on a rotating basis. This means I'll be working from home full-time for the foreseeable future, and I'm not excited about that. I did get my computer repaired (a failing hard drive was causing it to operate slowly), so I'll be able to be at least somewhat productive here at home. But it's just a matter of time before I start to go stir-crazy again, and it will only be worse if I don't have any college football to look forward to this fall.

Which begs the question: is it too early for Corinne and me to start planning our next roadtrip?

Love (and Marriage) in the Time of Coronavirus

Yesterday was supposed to have been the Big Day for Corinne and me. It was supposed to be the day our friends and family came to New Orleans to celebrate our wedding. We had spent well over a year (and many thousands of dollars) meticulously planning the entire experience: the venue, the food, the music.

Of course, none of that happened yesterday. Neither we nor our friends nor our families went to New Orleans. We did not have a ceremony. We did not eat and dance at a reception afterwards. The wedding that we so carefully planned did not happen.

We had been approaching the wedding date with a background awareness of the Coronavirus situation, but it wasn't until a couple of weekends ago - when SXSW in Austin was canceled and the first guests informed us that they would probably not be attending out of concern for their safety - that we began to become truly concerned. Over the following days more events were canceled - the Rodeo, sports - and more of our guests expressed concern about traveling to our wedding. We found ourselves among those with upcoming wedding plans who were agonizing about what to do: continue as planned, even though many people - our parents included - might not be able to attend due to the risk involved, or cancel, disrupting everyone's plans at the last minute and potentially incurring thousands of dollars in lost deposits and cancelation fees.

However, after Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards decreed two Fridays ago that schools be closed and that all public gatherings larger than 250 be canceled, we saw the writing on the wall. Even though our gathering would be smaller than 250 people, we knew things would only get worse as the number of positive Coronavirus cases in the New Orleans area increased. We couldn't ask our guests to put themselves at risk by attending our ceremony.

So we called our wedding off.

After hurriedly working with our venue and other vendors (all of which have been awesome!), we tentatively rescheduled for a date in July of this year and informed our guests as quickly as we could.

There's no telling if the Coronavirus situation will have passed by July - Louisiana is being badly affected by the virus outbreak right now and some epidemiologists are forecasting that it will take 18 months before this plague is brought under control - but it's the date the venue had available. Even if the Coronavirus threat does pass, there's no guarantee that the society and economy on the other side of it will even let us have a wedding. We're very worried about our vendors - our venue/caterer, our baker, our photographer, our deejay - and can only hope that they make it through the difficult weeks ahead.

Sure enough, last Monday the Centers for Disease Control suggested that all events of fifty or more people - weddings included - be canceled. That same day, the Mayor of New Orleans ordered that all "public and private gatherings" be canceled and that people not gather in groups larger than "the number of people in a reasonable household" in order to reduce social interaction and transfer of the virus. Had we not postponed our wedding, the decision would have been made for us.

But that's not the end of this story.

As the seriousness of the Coronavirus situation unfolded over the last week, Corinne and I began to discuss the need to be able to make legal and medical decisions for each other, should the need arise. We also found ourselves in a defiant mood: why should we allow this pandemic to interrupt our plans for our relationship?! It didn't hurt that we also had in our possession a marriage license from the State of Louisiana that would be valid through the end of the month.

So we made a few phone calls, and last Friday morning we drove from Houston to Lake Charles, Louisiana to meet our pastor, Tommy Dillon (the rector at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Baton Rouge) at a park on the south side of town. A couple of our friends drove separately and met us there in order to serve as witnesses. My son was with us as well, but unfortunately our parents were not as they are elderly and high-risk. (There were seven of us total, so we complied with the Governor's most recent prohibition of gatherings of ten people or more. We were careful not to touch each other and sanitized our hands frequently.)

It was raining, so we ended up having a brief ceremony underneath a picnic pavilion, with our bottles of hand sanitizer serving as paperweights to keep our marriage documents from blowing away and my son serving as photographer. It was not the most romantic setting, but it was nevertheless a moving and meaningful ceremony.

 

 

Afterwards we bid our pastor and witnesses farewell and drove to the Calcasieu Parish Clerk of Court to file the marriage license. All the bars and restaurants in Lake Charles were closed, so we couldn’t celebrate there. Corinne and I drove back home in the rain as husband and wife.

Even though we are now legally married, we still want to have our full ceremony in New Orleans with all of our family and friends. Corinne still plans to get her hair done and wear her wedding dress. We still plan to serve delicious food and dance to party tunes at our reception.

But as of right now, who knows when, or even if, it will happen.

UPDATE: Episcopal News Service interviewed Rev. Dillon regarding his ministry during the COVID-19 crisis. He used Corinne and I as an example of his work:

With the situation changing swiftly and unpredictably, Dillon is working with those he serves to meet their needs in a flexible way. He was scheduled to marry Corinne Perez and Thomas Gray of Houston, Texas, in New Orleans on March 21, with a full Eucharist and a reception. When those plans were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dillon encouraged them to get married anyway, recognizing that a couple’s legal status would be critically important in the event of a medical emergency. 

“I talked to them and I was like, ‘You know what? This is a time when the wedding needs to happen. Because, no matter what happens, you need to be legally married,’” Dillon said. “And so I said, ‘Let’s make this happen." 

The couple had a Louisiana marriage license, so Dillon suggested they meet in Lake Charles, Louisiana – near the border with Texas, and about halfway between Houston and Baton Rouge – on March 20 and have a big celebration with friends and family later. In keeping with health officials’ guidelines on physical distancing, it was a very small service: just Dillon, the couple, and a few friends as witnesses, who drove in separate cars. Standing by a picnic table in a park, Perez and Gray became husband and wife. 

“It was one of the holiest weddings I’ve ever officiated at,” Dillon said. “I said, ‘The kingdom of God is right here in the middle of this pandemic.’”

New Orleans's new airport terminal will be a flying foodie's paradise

New Orleans's Louis Armstrong International Airport is about to open a new passenger terminal to replace its dingy and decrepit existing one, and it only makes sense that the new facility will feature some of the Crescent City's best culinary offerings for hungry travelers.

The $1 billion terminal was designed by the late Argentine architect César Pelli and will replace the original terminal, which was constructed in 1959.  

The 972,000-square-foot structure features a long list of upgrades, including free high-speed internet; chargers at half of the seats in the gate areas; water bottle refilling stations; parents’ rooms; and music venues both pre- and post-security. 

But the upgrade we’re most excited about is the food. There will be 40 retail stores throughout the terminal, including some standout dining venues. Sure, the standard airport fare like Auntie Anne’s, Chili’s, and Panda Express are in the mix, but there are some notable culinary highlights that will likely have us heading to the airport a little early the next time we’re flying out of New Orleans.

One of the centerpiece venues will be Leah’s Kitchen, an homage to the late, self-taught Creole chef Leah Chase, who died earlier this year at age 96. The New York Times reported that Chase’s grandson, Edgar Chase IV, will operate the restaurant, which will serve classic Creole cuisine. 

Chase’s storied restaurant Dooky Chase’s, located in the city’s Tremé neighborhood, has an outpost in the airport’s old terminal, but that will shut down when the old terminal does on November 6. At Leah’s Kitchen, diners will be able to indulge in Leah’s famed fried chicken and gumbo to the backdrop of a large mural depicting her image.

Another star player will be Folse Market from Louisiana native chef John Folse, who has become a global ambassador for Cajun cuisine. Together with New York chef Rick Tromato, Folse is at the helm of the upscale Restaurant R’evolution in New Orleans’s French Quarter. The forthcoming Folse Market at the new terminal will serve seafood, po’boys, charcuterie, coffee and wine; it will also sell merchandise.

Showy chef Emeril Lagasse will have a presence at the new terminal, as will Carrollton landmark Ye Olde College Inn. Café du Monde will have an airport outpost to cater to your beignet needs, and Angelo Brocato will be serving its famous Italian gelatos and desserts. Locally-based chains such as PJ's Coffee and Smoothie King will naturally be represented as well.

Mixed in with familiar New Orleans establishments will be some newer offerings:

One of the newcomers we’re most excited about is the highly acclaimed New Orleans venue MoPho from chef Michael Gulotta, which marries southern favorites like shrimp and grits with Vietnamese standards, including, of course, pho soup. MoPho’s interpretation of Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches offers fillings such as “Nola hot sausage,” fried shrimp, and fried oyster with more traditional banh mi fixings.

But what if you just want a drink while you're waiting for your flight? The new MSY has you covered there, as well:

And of course, no trip to or from New Orleans would be complete without a proper cocktail. Bar Sazerac will be serving them up in a sophisticated, speakeasy-style setting. And for one last hit of live music as only New Orleans can deliver, at Heritage School of Music you can get a drink while musicians play on stage.

The new 35-gate airport terminal is the largest infrastructure project that the City of New Orleans has undertaken since building the Superdome. It was originally scheduled to open last May, but due to construction delays will now open November 6th. It is located on the north side of the airport property (the old terminal is located on the south side); more information about the facility, including how to access it, can be found here.

I was looking forward to checking it out in an upcoming trip to because it was designed by one of my favorite architects. Now I'm looking forward to grabbing a bite to eat there, as well!

Were the Saints victims of bad officiating or bad coaching?

As anybody who even casually follows American football now knows, the New Orleans Saints lost to the Los Angeles Rams, and therefore missed out on a trip to the Super Bowl, on a game that was marred by a blatant officiating error. The referees failed to call an obvious pass interference penalty late in the tied game that would have benefitted the Saints and perhaps had helped them win:

The Rams defender, Nickell Robey-Coleman, clearly blows up Saints wide receiver TommyLee Lewis while the ball is still in the air, a textbook example of pass interference. There was some helmet-to-helmet contact there, too, which is also a non-no. Robey-Coleman has admitted that he got to Lewis early and that he expected to be flagged on that play.

Had the penalty been correctly called, the Saints would have been awarded first-and-goal and probably would have scored with no time left for the Rams to come back. As it was, the Rams did have enough time to get the ball back and send the game into overtime, where they punched their ticket to the Superbowl, 26-23.

I watched the game with my native New Orleanian fiancé; she was apoplectic. After the game was over, my Facebook feed (which is full of Saints fans) exploded. Twitter exploded as well. The Who Dat Nation is furious; Saints fans are putting up billboards, a New Orleans lawyer is suing the NFL, and even Louisiana Governor Jon Bel Edwards is formally complaining to the NFL.

None of these protests will change the outcome; bad calls (or non-calls) are simply part of the game. Furthermore, as the Houston Press's Sean Pendergast argues, that missed call is not what cost the Saints the game. The real culprit, he says, is Saints head coach Sean Payton:

That call did not lose the game for the Saints. If you're looking for someone to blame, Who Dat Nation, look no further than your head coach, who completely botched the final two minutes of that game. The Saints had the ball on the Rams 13 yard line, 1st and 10, with 1:58 left in regulation and the score tied at 20-20. The Rams had two timeouts left, so basically what this meant was that if the Saints just ran the ball three times and kicked a field goal, the Rams would have the ball with about 45 seconds left, down 3, with no timeouts. Instead, Payton called for two pass plays that went incomplete (one of them was the missed pass interference call) and essentially gave the Rams two extra timeouts. The Rams wound up with the ball, down 3, with 1:44 left and one timeout, more than enough time to kick the tying field goal and send the game to overtime. Yeah, the referees botched that P.I. call, but Payton had an avenue to win that would have kept the zebras out of the mix, and he chose not to use it. Sean Payton lost this game.

Pendergast has a point, as I found myself scratching my head on the poorly-executed short pass attempt on first down. However, I'm willing to give Payton and his staff the benefit of a doubt on the playcalling late in the game because he didn't want to settle for a field goal; he wanted to score a decisive touchdown. The conservative running strategy Pendergast advocates would still have given Rams quarterback Jared Goff 45 seconds to get his team into tying field goal range: difficult, but by no means impossible when you have a good quarterback. For the Rams to go the length of the field and score a touchdown to tie the game with such little time remaining, however, would have been much more difficult.

Furthermore, Pendergast is being a bit disingenuous in his writing. The only reason Payton's second pass play call went incomplete is because of the interference; judging by the trajectory of the ball,  TommyLee Lewis would likely have caught Drew Brees's pass if Robey-Coleman had not prematurely wiped him out. Pendergast's claim that Payton should have "kept the zebras out of the mix" by not passing the ball is also bizarre. Referees are always in the mix: it's their job to officiate the game - and to do so correctly - on every down. That means calling obvious pass interference penalties when they occur.

Besides, I sympathize with the Saints because I've seen a team miss a trip to the Super Bowl on poor officiating myself. Mike Renfro was inbounds!

We'll never know for sure, of course, if the Saints would have actually won that game even if the refs made the correct call. The Rams were in the NFC Championship game for a reason, after all: they were pretty good themselves. But there's no question that the Saints would have been in a significantly more favorable position to win if the flag had been thrown.

The NFL is going to spend the offseason discussing changes in officiating, including making "judgement calls" such as these reviewable. That's little comfort for the Saints or their fans.

Christmastime at the Roosevelt Hotel

Corinne and I went to her hometown of New Orleans last weekend, and she took me to see one oft he Crescent City's holiday must-sees: the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel.

The lobby of the 124-year-old hotel spans a block, the length of which is positively bursting with Christmas. It's been lined with 78 birch trees that glitter with lights from bow-bedecked planters, and 46 Christmas trees dusted with fake snow and shimmering with red and gold ornaments. 

There are also 387 bows and 1,610 feet of lighted garland — and that's not including the other decorations throughout the hotel, which flank the reception hall doors and are scattered throughout the incredibly festive gift shop. 

All that decor is added to an already opulent setting, with a line of chandeliers down the lobby.  

Though the hotel opened as The Hotel Grunewald in 1893, it wasn't until the '30s that the tradition arose of decking out the lobby — the same decade that Governor Huey Long would regularly stop by to stay at his own suite there. Since then, it has become a local favorite, with thousands of New Orleans residents and visitors filing in to enjoy the stunning seasonal show. 

Every day throughout the month of December, crowds shuffle in and out throughout the day, dressing up in their Christmas card best to snap family photos and pictures with friends. If they stop in at noon, they can catch local school choirs signing carols.

Although the hotel itself dates back to 1893; the current building was built in 1923. It was severely damaged after Hurricane Katrina and was extensively renovated a couple of years later. It is now a Waldorf-Astoria property.

A view of the lobby from one of its entrances. The corridor was packed with hotel guests as well as sightseers.  

If you look carefully, you can even see Santa Claus enjoying the spectacle.

Another view of the lobby, which is pretty impressive even without the holiday decorations. The tile floor is pretty cool. And look at those chandeliers! 

Corinne and I decided that the festive scenery would make a nice backdrop for a picture.

Of course, you really can't fully enjoy the spectacle without a Sazerac from its namesake bar in the hotel.  

While perhaps not quite as spectacular, Canal Street just outside the hotel was decked out in holiday lights, wreaths and ribbons, too.

Fun!

Revisiting the Claiborne

Following up on a post from several years ago where I discussed the future of the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans, including the possibility of it being torn down and replaced by an urban boulevard: it turns out that the Claiborne probably won't be coming down anytime soon; instead, the neighborhoods through which the freeway runs are claiming and repurposing the space underneath:

For nearly a half-century, people have mourned how this raised section of federal highway sliced through more than two miles of the city’s historically black neighborhoods, dooming Claiborne Avenue’s thriving business corridor. (Tulane’s School of Architecture has an image gallery that juxtaposes before/after pictures of the Corridor.) 

Today, the outermost pillars along this stretch of Claiborne Avenue are painted to look like trees, while about 40 of the inner pillars are the canvas for original paintings by some of the city’s finest artists. They were created as part of a project called “Restore the Oaks,” spearheaded by painter and teacher Richard Thomas through the city’s New Orleans African American Museum of Art and Culture. 

The result is an open-air art gallery that reflects the live oaks, people and culture of Claiborne Avenue, Tremé, the 7th Ward and New Orleans as a whole. Those strolling under the elevated highway on ground-level asphalt can walk past both Charlie Johnson’s and Charlie Vaughn’s images of Big Chief Allison “Tootie” Montana, the famed Black Masking Indian who lived a few blocks away. They can view a detailed image of a typical jazz funeral, painted in by Nat Williams, who works as a barber nearby. 

“We were given sour lemons and what happened? We kept our culture. We evolved,” says Mona Lisa Saloy, a highly celebrated poet and English professor who is active in the neighborhood. 

The pillars are just one of the ways that the neighborhood has sought to make the best of what was forced upon them. Whenever social aid and pleasure clubs pass underneath the highway, during funerals or Sunday-afternoon second lines, horns point upward and play a triumphant call-and-response flourish. Inadvertently, highway crews fashioning this concrete box created a makeshift urban cathedral that broadens a brass band’s sound and sends it across the neighborhood. Saloy describes the effect as “joy multiplied.”

The space "under the bridge" is set to get even more upgrades by way of the Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District, which bills itself as "a 25-Block transformation of the elevated I-10 expressway along Claiborne Avenue from Canal Street to Elysian Fields Avenue."

Informed by a series of 11 design charrettes held with residents and architects from May 2017 to February 2018, the master plan sets out to beautify the corridor while increasing jobs and economic stability through innovations such as a marketplace built with green infrastructure, which will run within a 25-block segment of the corridor.

Cosmetic work on the corridor has already begun, as part of a demonstration phase made possible thanks to an $820,000 construction grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, matched with operational support from Ford Foundation, Chase Global Philanthropy, Surdna Foundation, Kresge Foundation and Greater New Orleans Foundation. Through a contract with the city, fiscal sponsor Foundation For Louisiana has raised money and helped to form a separate entity, Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation, that runs the daily operations of the Claiborne Innovation Corridor. Construction on the public market is slated to begin early in 2019 and wrap up by that fall.

It turns out that the Claiborne has not been taken down because the surrounding communities could not reach consensus on its demolition. A variety of concerns came into play:

When Saloy looked at the data assembled for Claiborne Corridor planning meetings, she wasn’t pleased with the level of traffic projected to travel along Claiborne at ground level if the freeway were demolished. With a grimace, she envisioned, the projected 10,000 cars jamming city streets, complete with 18-wheelers and rumbling dump trucks. Economic data was even more alarming, she says, noting that other cities had seen exponential increases in housing costs after freeways came down and were replaced by greenways, markets and new developments. 

An instructive example would come later, from a few miles away, after St. Roch Market, damaged and shuttered after Katrina, reopened as an upscale food market in 2014. Taxes on nearby properties taxes tripled and even quadrupled, according to DeVan Ecclesiastes. 

The results of those discussions were captured in the “Livable Claiborne Communities Study,” a report published after the workshops and meetings supported by the 2010 planning grant. That report contained multiple scenarios, some in which the I-10 overpass stayed and some in which it came down. 

In the end, after the Livable Claiborne process was complete, it became clear, through surveys, focus groups and public discussions, that there was no consensus to demolish the bridge. Instead, neighbors opted to keep speculators and displacement at bay by holding on to their hulking overhead neighbor. “You take the monster away and it will be total gentrification. People will build things and they will not build them for us,” Saloy says. 

It was a tough decision. For some, the deciding factor was the estimated $300-million demolition price tag, which was required to demolish the bridge structure and re-design the city streets that would carry re-routed traffic. People decided that they’d rather see that money spent to stabilize the existing neighborhood with jobs, transportation and flood protection.

The surrounding community's failure to reach consensus regarding removal of the Claiborne, as well as the creation of a master plan to actually enhance the spaces underneath and around it, should be taken into consideration by the freeway removal movement: it is one thing to draw attention to the damage and division that urban freeways forced upon our nation's urban neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s and look for ways to mitigate those harms; it is something else to casually insist to those same neighborhoods that removal of that freeway is the only recourse. For all the ugly faults of the urban freeway, the "space underneath" might actually be a community asset, and the unknowns that come with its removal could be worse.

I'll continue to follow the story of the Claiborne Expressway with interest.

It's that time of year again

The Rockets' season came to a rather ignominious end on Thursday night, Kirby is down to his final two weeks of sixth grade, the University of Houston's academic year ended with a speech from the Ahnold the Governator, and the cooler, drier weather we experienced this weekend is most likely "going to be our last true front of spring." All this means is that, regrettably, another miserable Houston summer is upon us.

That also means that it's time for me to do what I successfully avoided doing a year ago, and find a new place to live. I've enjoyed my five years in Bellaire, but my wallet has not, and so it's time to seek housing that's a bit more in line with my socioeconomic status. I'm not looking forward to packing and moving - I haven't even begun putting things in boxes yet and as I look around this house I'm already feeling overwhelmed at what I'm going to do with all this stuff I've managed to accumulate - but the time has come. I'll be combining households with my girlfriend at my new place, which will lesson the financial burden somewhat but which will also mean a big step towards the next phase of my life, depending on how things work out.

There are also a couple of summer trips planned: the usual June trip to New Orleans and a weeklong vacation to Cancun in July. It's been over a decade since I was last in Cancun, so I'm looking forward to heading down there again and sitting my fat ass on a beach with a beer in hand for the entire week. Maybe I'll manage to see some Mayan ruins, too.

Unlike last year, I'm not taking a formal summer hiatus from this blog, but posting activity will probably be very light for the next few months for the reasons I just mentioned.

May everybody have a great summer.

The British are coming to New Orleans

Unlike a previous visit to the Crescent City, this might be more beneficial to all parties involved:

British Airways will launch nonstop flights between London and New Orleans next spring, marking the city's first direct connection with Europe since 1982. Local officials joined tourism and business leaders Thursday morning (Oct. 20) at Louis Armstrong International Airport to disclose the long-coveted connection, which they call a "game-changer" for the region.

The airline will provide year-round service to London's Heathrow Airport starting March 27. The 10-hour flights will depart London on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 3:40 p.m. local time and arrive at 7:40 p.m. New Orleans time. Returning flights will leave New Orleans at 9:10 p.m. and arrive in London the next day at noon.

Passengers will travel on a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which holds 214 passengers: 154 in economy class, 25 in premium economy and 35 in business.

This will not be the only nonstop flight to Europe from New Orleans; German carrier Condor will begin seasonal flights from Louis Armstrong International to Frankfurt next May.

The new international flights come as New Orleans seeks to push its total annual visitor count over the pre-Hurricane Katrina peak of 10.1 million. Tourism officials consider international visitors, who generally book longer stays and spend more, a key demographic in fueling local tourism growth. The United Kingdom is the second-largest market for foreign visitors to New Orleans, behind Canada, according to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau.

"We're beginning to make strides to where the airlines can see we can fill the back of the plane without an issue," said Stephen Perry, chief executive officer of the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Since first approaching British Airways, New Orleans-area tourism and business leaders looked outside the immediate region to strengthen their case for London-to-New Orleans flights, Perry said. Their "catchment basin" approach reached from Lake Charles to Destin, Fla., encompassing more than 5 million people, not only to find more potential passengers but also create more destinations for foreign visitors.

Can that "catchment basin" generate enough business and leisure travel to sustain nonstop flights to London (and, for that matter, Frankfurt)? Stay tuned; the region is far enough away from other major international hubs in the southeast - Dallas/Fort Worth, Bush Intercontinental, Atlanta and Miami - and New Orleans itself is such a major tourist draw, that it just might work. Besides, if Austin can have nonstop flights to London, why can't New Orleans?

British Airways was the last European carrier to service New Orleans, when its flights from Mexico City to London stopped there to refuel. That service ended in 1982. More importantly, this service marks a huge milestone in the region's ongoing recovery from Katrina.

One has to wonder: given New Orleans' French heritage, will nonstop flights to Paris one day become a reality, too?

Katrina, ten years later

Yesterday, August 29th, marked the tenth anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina. It devastated communities along the coasts of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana: 1,833 people lost their lives, over 350 thousand homes were destroyed, and an estimated $180 billion worth of property was damaged. Katrina was especially ruinous to the city of New Orleans: levee failures caused 80% of the city to be flooded for weeks, one hundred thousand housing units were damaged or destroyed, the city was almost entirely evacuated, and the storm created a level of human suffering unparalleled in recent American history.

Shortly after Katrina hit, I pondered the devastated city's future (see here and here) as well as its effects on neighboring locales such as Baton Rouge and Houston. Given the level of death and destruction New Orleans experienced, as well as the geographic conditions that made it so vulnerable to not only Katrina but future storms as well, did it even make sense to rebuild the city at all?

In retrospect, of course, the idea that an entire city was just going to "go away" - a city that has been there for almost three centuries, that anchors a metropolitan area of 1.2 million people, and that also happens to serve as the port at the mouth of the nation's largest and most important navigable waterway - is absurd. The Big Easy was always going to be rebuilt after Katrina. And while the city has met many milestones in its post-Katrina reconstruction, its recovery has been very uneven. Its population is one example, as The Atlantic's Laura Bliss reports:

According to the Data Center, more than half of New Orleans neighborhoods have now recovered to more than 90 percent of the occupied households they had prior to Katrina. Census estimates from July 2014 put the city’s population at 384,320, about 79 percent of its 2000 population of 484,674. Compared to 2000, about 100,000 fewer African Americans and 9,000 fewer whites live in New Orleans. The city is more diverse now: Its Hispanic population has grown by a little more than 6,000. There are more Asian Americans, too. (Notably, studies have shown that the post-Katrina rate of return for Vietnamese citizens was faster than the citywide rate.)

Still, thousands have not returned to the city they used to call home. We don’t know precisely how many or all of the reasons why. We do know that African Americans of low socioeconomic status, who lived in impoverished neighborhoods hit hard by Katrina, have been among the least likely to return. For example, as of 2013, only 30 percent of residents of the low-income, predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward had returned, according to Al Jazeera.

But out of all groups, it seems to be children who were the least likely to return to New Orleans. From 2000 to 2010, the Data Center reports, the number of children under the age of 18 living in New Orleans decreased by 56,193, or 43 percent. Presumably, their parents found better conditions outside the city, or found it too hard or expensive to move back.

The Crescent City, furthermore, has an affordable housing problem even as it remains saturated with blighted properties, still suffers from a high crime rate, its transit agency still only provides a fraction of its pre-Katrina services, the city has a 27% poverty rate and a huge income gap, and it struggles to attract major corporations and high-paying jobs.

Just as the idea that New Orleans could have been completely abandoned after Katrina is utterly ridiculous, a competing theory that arose in the days following the storm - that Katrina would "wipe the slate clean" and allow New Orleans to be "reborn" - to rise, phoenix-like, and become a better place to live, work and play than it was before - has proven to be just as fanciful.

In short, while the population of New Orleans today is smaller, older and more diverse than it was before Katrina, the city itself still suffers from the same problems, many of which were exacerbated by the storm and many of which are due to social and structural issues that are exceeding difficult to solve, hurricane or no.

Obviously, ten years is an insufficient period of time to survey the aftermath of an event as big and as catastrophic as Katrina on a city as large and as complex as New Orleans; its effects will continue to be felt for decades to come. A decade after Katrina, its recovery is nowhere near complete.

Shortly after the hurricane's landfall I also pondered the notion that Baton Rouge, which had been inundated with upwards of two hundred thousand Katrina evacuees, would replace New Orleans to become become Louisiana's pre-eminent city, much the same way Houston replaced Galveston as Texas's most important city after the hurricane of 1900. That proved not to be the case; the city's temporary New Orleans contingent made the trip back to their homes as soon as they were able to do so, and Baton Rouge's 2010 population was about the same as its 2000 population.

Finally, as Katrina evacuees made their way to Houston both before and after the storm's landfall, I pondered the effect of all these new residents on my city. Perhaps no city outside of New Orleans was affected by the storm as much as Houston, both in terms of the people it absorbed as well as the panic that it created among the population a few weeks later, when Rita approached and hundreds of thousands of people participated in a disastrous evacuation of the metropolitan area. Back to Laura Bliss:

The city of Houston received more Katrina evacuees than anywhere else in the country. As many as 250,000 arrived at the peak of the storm, many landing in the city’s Astrodome. An estimated 150,000 were still living in Houston a year later. For thousands of those evacuees, living conditions in Houston were not good. According to a 2006 survey by the city of Houston, about a quarter of former New Orleans residents who were displaced to Houston (including those displaced by Rita, which hit the Gulf less than a month after Katrina) were staked out “in FEMA-funded apartments in high-crime, high-poverty neighborhoods on the city’s southwest side.”

The influx slammed Texas government. Housing was scarce and often unaffordable for evacuees. Schools, transit systems, and Medicaid programs were overwhelmed. A 2006 report from the office of former Texas Governor Rick Perry beseeched the feds for $2 billion in extra funding to cover the costs of this new, highly vulnerable population, which included Rita’s victims. (The state, and others, did receive extra federal assistance to assist evacuees.)

To make matters much worse, longtime Houston residents were wary of Katrina evacuees, who were overwhelmingly poor and black. Residents complained of a crime wave connected to their new neighbors, which was later debunked. But the negative tone lingered. In 2010, an annual citywide survey revealed that 58 percent of Houstonians felt that the overall impact of the evacuees on the city had been “a bad thing.”

The "myth" of a crime wave in Houston caused by Katrina evacuees is explored in this article from Rice University's Urban Edge blog. It does note that violent crimes such as homicides and robberies increased following Katrina, but that other types of violent and property crime did not increase. "If a bunch of violent New Orleans residents were taking over the streets of Houston, it would be unlikely they’d commit homicide but not other crimes," the article notes. Nevertheless, the perception that Katrina evacuees created a spike in the local crime rate remains.

Ten years later, a large number of Katrina evacuees have remained in Houston:

As New Orleans marks the 10th anniversary of Katrina this week, many who called the city home in August 2005 will be absent. Tens of thousands swapped one of the nation’s most distinctive and historic cities for the car-centric urban sprawl and homogenous modern suburbs of a metro area of six million people that is today about five times larger than greater New Orleans.
Estimates vary, but of the 250,000-odd evacuees who arrived in Houston after the storm, up to 100,000 likely stayed permanently.

“We call Houston ‘New Orleans West’,” said Mtangulizi Sanyika, an academic who left New Orleans after his house flooded and ended up staying in Texas when his wife found a job at a hospital. Sanyika is chairman of the New Orleans Association of Houston, which is planning a series of commemorative events.

[...]

Carl Lindahl, a University of Houston professor, said that two sections of the displaced population in particular tended not to return: parents of young children, who felt Houston was safer and had better schools, and the elderly, who believed New Orleans lacked social services.

Which goes back to some of the basic issues New Orleans faces, issues that were part of the city before Katrina and which need to be addressed if the city is to fully recover. In the meantime, countless individuals still continue to live as citizens of two different cities at the same time:

Spread out across Houston’s vastness, the exiles remained linked by their common culture, said one of the evacuees, Dallas McNamara, a photographer. “Things like music allowed people to get together,” she said. Bands formed. Branches of New Orleans-based churches set up in Houston. Restaurants opened.

“I think people are kind of surprised by how much they like Houston. They have a nicer home, they like the schools. They’re blown away by the amount of driving that they do but they tend to become pleasantly surprised,” McNamara said. Still, she added, “I do miss the politeness that was just ingrained … and there are more rules here. You can’t walk out of the bar with your cocktail or beer.”

For Sanyika, “The most negative aspect of Houston for most New Orleanians is the transportation. The other is the food. It’s a very different kind of taste,” he said. “A Texas gumbo doesn’t taste quite the same.”

He misses the organic way that “New Orleans culture bubbles from the bottom up, from the streets, the neighbourhoods, the working class people especially”, but said he is happy in Houston. “You never lose your cultural heritage and roots, you simply learn to integrate them in whatever environment you find yourself in,” he said. 

The 73-year-old still visits New Orleans regularly. “When I leave there is always a sadness,” he said. “New Orleans is in your soul, your heart, your roots, it anchors who you are and you take it with you wherever you go.”

Given their geographic and economic similarities, Houston and New Orleans always have been and always will be closely linked to one another. Katrina only made those bonds stronger.

I've followed the story of New Orleans' recovery on this blog; see posts I wrote ten months, one year, three years and five years after Katrina.  

The New York Times has a lengthy but excellent multimedia presentation regarding the ten year anniversary of the storm: "Ten years later, it is not exactly right to say that New Orleans is back. The city did not return, not as it was," it notes.

Slate takes issue with a handful of Katrina myths, including the idea that "everything is better now." The Chronicle has its own slideshow of debunked myths. The Data Center has an entire page full of facts and graphs regarding the state of New Orleans, ten years after, and the series of articles at Vox and The Atlantic are worth perusing as well.

Thomas Colbert, 1954-2015

I never had Tom Colbert as a studio instructor at the University of Houston College of Architecture, but I knew him well. He was on several of my design juries while I was a student, provided me with some ideas when I was working on my Master's thesis at UT, and eventually became a neighbor of mine when he moved into a house a couple of doors down from me and my ex-wife in the University Oaks neighborhood adjacent to campus.

Hardly an afternoon went by when he wasn't in his front yard playing fetch with his chocolate lab. He had purchased a vacant lot down the street and I was always interested in what kind of house he would eventually build there. Unfortunately, he never got around doing so:

Tom Colbert, a University of Houston professor who fought to protect Texas' coastline, died Friday after a battle with stomach cancer. He was 61.

Colbert grew up in New Orleans, and Hurricane Katrina affected him powerfully. As I wrote in 2013, "He knew what that drowned city had been, knew how much was lost when its levees broke. After Katrina, Colbert's elderly father took refuge in a facility that ran out of drinking water. Nurses resorted to using saline IV bags to keep survivors hydrated."

What, Colbert asked himself, would happen to Houston, his adopted city since 1985, if a similar storm hit? The scientific projections, he found, are terrifying: If a worst-case storm hit Houston, the economic damage and loss of life wouldn't just be as bad as Katrina. It would be much, much worse. If a hurricane storm surge rushed up the Houston Ship Channel, knocking over and busting open the enormous chemical tanks there, toxic goo would slosh all over the city, going wherever floodwater carried it. The result could easily be the worst environmental disaster the U.S. has ever seen.

Colbert, working with Rice University's SSPEED Center (it stands for Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters), championed flood-protection infrastructure that wouldn't just fend off disaster. Done right, he argued, floodgates, levees and buffer zones could actually improve everyday quality of life — or even be tourist attractions. Levees, he noted, can be attractive public spaces, like the levee/park behind New Orleans' Cafe du Monde.

I had no idea that he was battling cancer, so coming across this article was a shock for me. He seemed to be doing well the last time I saw him, which was at a Houston Tomorrow event at H-GAC not too terribly long ago.

As we come upon the tenth anniversary of Katrina, we can only hope that Colbert's vision - storm infrastructure that enriches as well as protects - is realized before it's too late.

Colbert's full obituary is here. Like Bill Stern, Colbert was an immensely-talented UH College of Architecture instructor that cancer took from us too soon. He will be missed.

Retroblogging

This blog didn't really begin in earnest until the late spring of 2006. However, I had been blogging for at least two years earlier, on my old, out-of-date website that I finally put out if its misery a couple of weeks ago.

There were some things I wrote on my first "blog" that I wanted to keep. For example, posts regarding Kirby's birth, posts about Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the exploits of the Cougars and the Astros, my trip to Japan, my very first trip to Dubai.

So I went through all of them, decided which ones I wanted to keep, and moved them to this blog. I backdated them to the date I originally published them on my old website. I generally cut and pasted them as they were originally written, only lightly editing them. I didn't even strip out the hyperlinks in many of them, even though a lot of them are now unfortunately dead.

I note at the bottom of each post the date they were "retroblogged" (today, August 23, 2015) and in many cases add a sentence or two to update what I wrote.

Thus, every entry now on this blog from 2004, all but one entry from 2005, and one entry from 2006 are imports from my old website. There are 40 of them in total. They all carry the "retroblog" tag.
Some what I think are the more noteworthy of these "retroblogs" are as follows:

July 18, 2004: Local homeowners complain about development in spite of Houston's lack of zoning

August 21, 2004: Kirby's birth

October 12, 2004: Astros get past the Atlanta Braves to win their first-ever postseason series

November 16, 2004: 2004 Presidential Election thoughts (aka, they both sucked)

November 22. 2004: The Coogs conclude a disappointing season

December 27, 2004: Houston experiences a White Christmas

March 15, 2005: Disco lives! at the University of North Texas library

April 25, 2005: Political instability continues in Ecuador as another president is forced out of office

September 8, 2005: Pondering the future of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

September 25, 2005: The disaster that was the Hurricane Rita evacuation

October 12, 2005: The "Kat-Rita Bowl:" Houston 35, Tulane 14 in Lafayette

October 20, 2005: The Astros are going to the World Series (and I'm going to Japan!)

December 7, 2005: College football teams that got Screwed and Shafted by bowl selection committees

December 10, 2005: Pictures and a review of my trip to Japan in October 2005

February 19, 2006: Pictures and a review of my trip to Dubai in January 2006

It was truly interesting to go back and read all of those old blog entries - many of which I hadn't looked at in years - to see how things were and what my life was like a decade ago.

There is still some material I saved from my old website that I might put on this blog in the future, but I probably won't be backdating them as I did with the above posts.

My girlfriend the bug-eater

Here's my girlfriend Michelle, eating mealworm salsa and chocolate chip with cricket cookies at the Audubon Insectarium in New Orleans earlier this month. While I don't think she'll ever become an enthusiastic insect eater, I give her credit for at least trying it out.

Michelle wasn't as impressed with the Insectarium as she was with the nearby Aquarium of the Americas. She's says she's more of a fish person than a bug person. With the aquarium featuring specimens like this lionfish, who can blame her?

As a history teacher, however, I think she was most impressed by the National World War II Museum. I hadn't been there since 2000 myself, when it was still known as the D-Day Museum. The museum has undergone quite a bit of expansion since then (and further expansions are underway as well). It's a very fascinating place; somewhat depressing, considering just how bloody and brutal WWII was, but is definitely worth a visit.

And of course, no trip to New Orleans would be complete without a muffaletta from Central Grocery in the French Quarter. For the record, Michelle said it was much better than she did the insects that she ate earlier.

As many times as I've traveled to New Orleans over the past couple of years, the trip we took a few weeks ago might be my last visit for awhile. The University of Houston is preparing to leave Conference USA, which means no more trips to see the Cougars play Tulane in the Superdome. And as of right now I'm still leaning against participating in Mardi Gras next spring.

Krewe of Pygmalion 2012

Since I had so much fun doing it last year, and since my float lieutenant invited me back to ride again this year, last weekend I headed back to New Orleans for the 2012 Krewe of Pgymalion Mardi Gras parade.
One thing I love about Mardi Gras is that New Orleans celebrates the holiday with the same festive intensity that the rest of the nation reserves for the Christmas season. People decorate their houses, like this one in the French Quarter, with elaborate and beautiful decorations.
If you've never been inside a float, this is what it looks like. Hooks are provided for participants to lay out beads and other goodies to throw. The rest of the throws are in the bags below, and although the hooks are nice to have, it's hard to "refill" them once the supply of throws hung from them is exhausted and the float is moving. Which means we spend most of the parade frantically tearing through our bags, pulling out throws, removing them from their plastic wrappers and tossing them to the crowds. By the time the parade is over the deck of the float is strewn knee-high with plastic wrappers, cardboard boxes, vinyl bags, broken strands of beads and empty food and beverage containers.
This year's theme was vintage board games, and each float was dedicated to a different game. Mine was the "Payday" float. It was rather windy and chilly Saturday night. I was wearing a shirt, sweater and jacket underneath my costume smock and I was still freezing cold.
Some revelers on St. Charles Avenue. It seemed to me that the crowds were a bit smaller than last year - the cooler weather probably had something to do with it - but they were still out in force. In terms of throws, beads are still the main attraction. When they're flying through the air, they are magical, priceless artifacts that spectators jostle each other for. If they hit the ground without being caught, however, they're deemed to be worthless! (And to the punk kids who ask for beads and then deliberately move out of the way to avoid catching them: you aren't being clever, you're being annoying and stupid.) Children's toys are also quite popular, as are some of the Krewe's other specialty throws like lighted medallions. The occasional Moon Pie or bag of Zapp's Potato Chips is also appreciated by the revelers. Doubloons didn't seem to be quite as popular; a handful of collectors go crazy for them, but they're too small for most people to see or catch, especially at night.
Saturday I was a participant. Sunday I was a spectator. Here, the Krewe of Carrollton rolls down Canal Street. In addition to being in and watching parades, I also ate at a few of my favorite New Orleans restaurants, spent a lot of time walking around the Quarter, and, of course, hung out on Bourbon Street.

All in all, I had a great time. However, as of right now I'm not completely sure if I'll go back for a third ride next year. As much fun as I had, and as much as I enjoy the folks on my float and the people of the Krewe in general, the fact remains that participating in a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans is a costly endeavor. There's the membership fee, the cost of the throws, the cost of lodging (hotels in New Orleans gleefully jack up their prices for Mardi Gras), the cost of parking and transportation ($33 a night to park my car in the hotel garage? Seriously?), the cost of the afterparty and, of course, the cost for meals and drinks. To say I spent a total of about two grand on this year's trip would be a conservative estimate.

But, like I said, I had a wonderful time and I'm glad I got the opportunity to do this for the second year in a row.