It’s almost here. Not quite over 90 degrees yet, but the mercury is inching up slowly. It was a hot one today and breezy, but the summer afternoon rain looks imminent, as I look outside my Frenchmen Street perch.

Last Friday, the one before Memorial Day, was a busy one on Frenchmen Street. The day before, I had received notice that there was going to be a water outage on Thursday morning, as the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board (S&WB) was doing some work to the water system on the street. This did not happen, and Jason Patterson of Snug Harbor questioned whether the work would be finished in time to not disrupt the businesses on Frenchmen, who depend on night-time business.  Then, notification was changed to say that the outage wouldn’t happen on Thursday, but on Friday morning, from 9 a.m. to noon.

Guess what? At 5:30 p.m. on Friday, contractors were still tearing up the street on Frenchmen and water service still wasn’t available. I personally asked the guy in charge of the job to show his permit. He didn’t have one to show.

What this says to me is a few things: First, the city and its contractors still do not respect the businesses on Frenchmen Street. If they did, they would have made sure that the work was completed early, on a day earlier in the week, when Frenchmen Street businesses were closed. I doubt seriously if anything like this would ever happen on Bourbon Street.

Secondly, there’s a problem with the way construction and water work is contracted in New Orleans. The S&WB wasn’t the party who didn’t get the job done (although they did have an inspector present). I found out that the reason the street was dug up was that the Laborde property—which is now supposed become only a restaurant, not a music venue—is required to include a sprinkler system, and the water supply wasn’t adequate to complete the job.  The contractor hired by the developer of the property (remember “Bamboula”?) hired a general contractor, who in turn had to hire a sprinkling contractor who had to hire a plumbing contractor to do the work. The way I understand it is that whenever there’s a “street cut” involved, the process is put out to bid and the contractor has the option to choose the lowest bidder. By the way, the S&WB can put in a bid as well, but if a bid comes in lower, the S&WB may be excluded as a contractor (in this case, it was; a private contractor did the job). The contractor who was doing this job happened to dig too deep and broke a main pipe. Well, accidents happen. They could happen to anyone who was doing the job. But, if the job was done on days and times that Frenchmen Street wasn’t busy, there would have been a lot more leeway to get the job finished in a way that wouldn’t affect those businesses on the street.

Third, the city’s infrastructure is in dire shape. This isn’t something we typically think about, but when you hear about the mess of piping and sewers under our streets—particularly in places like the Quarter, the Marigny, parts of Uptown, and older parts of the city (and I heard a lot about it from the S&WB’s inspector George Wise, who was on the job last Friday), it sort of makes you cringe. We’ve all endured the “boil water” mandates over the past year. Just how bad is it? Mr. Wise told me that under the streets looks like someone took a plate of spaghetti and threw it up against the streets above. It’s pretty bad.

Somewhere, somehow, the citizens of the city need to be cognizant of the infrastructure, and what we’re going to need to do to keep New Orleans operational. We all know we have crappy streets. But what about the sewer and water lines? Those are pretty important in keeping residents and businesses healthy, active, productive and commercially viable.

One other thing: it’s clear from my conversation with the S&WB inspector that there’s little or no communication between departments of the city. In this day and time, that’s just ridiculous. The right hand should know what the left hand is digging up.

 

On another note, the ongoing Jimmy’s Club controversy just keeps on chugging along. I believe that the city will eventually allow Jimmy Anselmo to obtain his liquor license. There’s the threat of a lawsuit, and if the suit is at all credible (it is in that it challenges the lawfulness of instituting a moratorium over a proscribed period of time), Jimmy and his partners will once again open the club. It’s just taking a lot longer than they’d hoped.  But isn’t that always the way in New Orleans? What other cities can do in a month takes a year here.

Our sympathies to Jimmy: he’s had a really difficult time on re-opening his club, and to make matters worse, his mother passed away last week at the age of 91. Mrs. Mary Ellen Anselmo was a key person in the history of Jimmy’s:  she put up the money to open the club, and worked at the club every Thursday to pay for the liquor and beer. In the early days, she’d even work the door. Too bad she won’t be around to see Jimmy’s in its second, even more successful, act. There will be a celebration of her life this Sunday, June 2 at 3 p.m. at Southport Hall, 200 Monticello Street, Jefferson, LA.