70130, Ready Or Not, Here We Come: According to a map in today’s paper version of USA Today, the Garden District (GD) is included in Central Business District (CBD) re-entry slated for September 26th. However, some GD residents are going in starting Monday (09/19) anyway, assuming they are not going to get kicked out if Uptown residents are permitted to stay. Why GD re-entry is lumped in with that of the CBD is unknown.
This line from the AP report on re-entry is in all of the major papers, and I consider it misleading: “Those [re-entry] areas, for now, are limited to Algiers, the French Quarter, the central business district and Uptown, which includes the Garden District.” Quite a few GD residents will assume logically that if Uptown includes the GD, we should be allowed to go in with Uptown residents. Our amenities are coming back up, slowly but surely, as evidenced in this note from my landlady: “There is no power in the neighborhood but [our neighbor] said there are Entergy trucks in abundance, clearing debris and working on lines. There is gas, water, and phone service. I called our land line today and the phone rings and the voice mail comes on (today is the first time the vm has come on). He said he was there on Tuesday, and that the difference between then and today is very impressive–lots of progress had been made in that four day period. He also said traffic into the city wasn’t bad at all today.”
I’m sure the traffic will get worse once people go back in. Again, we’ve stayed away this long and a couple or three days more is not going to hurt. The city doesn’t need the strain over the course of one weekend (wonder what’s going to happen when all of those toilets flush at once).
The bottom line: It’s up to you. Take a lot of bottled water and boil city water for everything else. Don’t drive around a lot for there are no open gas stations, respect the city’s curfew (8PM – 6AM) and love that you are inside your home again.
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I Thought Frenchmen Desire Good Food: Next on my reading list is John Churchill Chase’s Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children And Other Streets Of New Orleans. ByTheBayou warned me that the book was written in the 1940s and, therefore, contains references to “savages,” i.e. the natives before current natives and slaves, but is overall an informative narrative on how New Orleans transformed from swamp to the colorful place we know, love and call home.
