Skip to main content

Decatur Street

Decatur Street is a foul sewer in the afternoon sun, running with taxis and buses full of tourists and sanitation trucks full of their leavings, the half-eaten oyster po'boys and vomit scented drink glasses fermenting beneath a cloud of thick with diesal exhuast.

We sit at the bar of the Abbey, M and J and I, but don't turn to look outside. M has discovered she loves Ramos Gin Fizzes and Betz is happy to make them, provided we can produce the egss. J has learned that the Central Grocery sells dried cod, an evil sort of fish jerky.

I need to finish this draft to make this place of memory complete.

Popular posts from this blog

Flood Street 1965 Flood Street A New Orleans journal Dispatches from an imaginary disaster Lakeview The Last Mardi Gras The Parish Ninth Ward The Tree-Shaded Avenues The River New Orleans • disaster • Katrina • memoir • Louisiana • history • Hurricane Katrina • flood • St. Bernard • hurricane • levee By Mark Folse, publisher of Wet Bank Guide N.B. I fixed some broken links on 1-27-06. Sorry. mf Some edits to one of the pieces on 10-2-06
Read more

Ninth Ward

After a twenty year absence, some parts of the city are a blur in my memory. Then, suddenly, I read a line in the newspaper, and I am transported back in time, can clearly see the view out my car window as I drive down a street I haven’t traveled in over two decades. Today, I read this about the Ninth Ward: “The city plans to finally reopen the lake side of North Claiborne on Dec. 1, allowing residents to freely walk or drive around their neighborhood.” Until I read that line, I couldn't match the terrible newspaper or television pictures of devastation with a neighborhood, could not place it in my own experience because, frankly, I never knew Bywater or the Ninth Ward. In the early 1980s, it was a routine part of my daily commute to follow Claiborne Avenue out from Esplanade until it became Judge Perez Drive. The places I traveled on that daily traverse had not crossed my mind in years. Suddenly, after reading one line in a single story in a distant newspaper, I am driving along e...
Read more