In the first official week of the race for the District B seat on the City Council, Eric Strachan will be meeting tonight with a neighborhood association his parents helped found, LaToya Cantrell and Dana Kaplan are beginning to knock on doors in Uptown neighborhoods, and late entrants Buck Horton and Donald Vallee are both getting their campaigns organized. Continue reading »
Owen Courreges
This past Wednesday, the New Orleans Police Department announced that it would be holding a sobriety checkpoint in — wait for it — “the Orleans Parish area.”
This was a change. Normally the NOPD at least provides a general area that narrows down the location of the checkpoint in advance. A checkpoint will be held in “Uptown” or “Algiers” the NOPD will say, and then if you don’t want to be interrogated by police you at least have the option of trying to avoid that area. Continue reading »
Gary Landrieu, the outspoken cousin of New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, will make a second bid for public office with a run for Congress this fall, after coming in fifth out of a field of seven in this past spring’s at-large City Council election. Continue reading »
Broadmoor Improvement Association leader LaToya Cantrell will launch her campaign tonight with four simultaneous parties in neighborhoods around District B. Continue reading »
Allan Katz and Danae Columbus
The teams are complete, the matchups are clear. These guys don’t like one another and their philosophies could hardly be more different.
There was a time in America when then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace could run for President as an independent complaining that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates. That isn’t really a problem in 2012. The Obama-Biden view of the world is just about 360 degrees apart from the Romney-Ryan view of the world. Continue reading »
Uptown voters will see little change in their ballots for the Nov. 6 election after a quiet Thursday of filing. Continue reading »
The first day of filing for Uptown-based offices on the Nov. 6 ballot drew the previously-announced candidates for City Council District B, two incumbent school board members, and challengers for both sitting members of Congress, records show. Continue reading »
The former uniform store on Magazine Street near Louisiana is planned for a transformation into a new location of Dat Dog. (Robert Morris, UptownMessenger.com)
Dat Dog is one step closer to putting a smile on Magazine Street’s facade, after the City Planning Commission gave a positive recommendation to its request for alcohol Tuesday despite some objection by the Garden District Association. Continue reading »
District B City Council candidate Dana Kaplan speaks at her campaign kickoff party Tuesday evening at Victory bar in the Central Business District. (Robert Morris, UptownMessenger.com)
On the day before filing officially opens for the District B City Council seat — having just turned in what they believe is enough signatures to get candidate Dana Kaplan on the ballot — her supporters were ready to party.
And to get to work.
“This is really real. This is it,” said Norris Henderson of Voice Of The Ex-Offender at Kaplan’s campaign launch party on Tuesday night. “But that was the easy part.” Continue reading »
Hundreds of Uptown residents fill the auditorium at the Jewish Community Center on Monday night to discuss the city budget with Mayor Mitch Landrieu. (photo via WWL-TV)
Civics is hard, Mayor Mitch Landrieu told a packed room of hundreds of Uptown residents on Monday night, after hearing their calls for better roads, less blight, lower taxes, improvements to Gert Town, and full staffing of the fire department and city planning offices.
All those issues are undeniably crucial to the city’s future, Landrieu said in a sort of pregame show for the budget he will unveil after a series of community meetings around the city. How to allocate a limited amount of money to each of those priorities is where the real difficulty comes in. Take the firefighters, for example.
“I have great respect for them, [but] they are just like everybody else when it comes to budget,” Landrieu said. “When you spend a dollar on them, you can’t spend that dollar on anybody else.” Continue reading »
Mayor Mitch Landrieu and District B City Councilwoman Diana Bajoie will host a meeting at the Jewish Community Center on St. Charles Avenue this evening to discuss the 2013 city budget. Continue reading »
Owen Courreges
Thankfully, mercifully, live music has returned to Circle Bar. As I noted in last week’s column, the Circle Bar was among the most noteworthy establishments caught up in Mayor Landrieu’s senseless crackdown on live music venues, typically bars that have been operating for several years or more with live music and no complaints.
Apparently, Circle Bar had allowed its permit to lapse in 2004, and was rebuffed when it initially reapplied. After some wrangling with the city and a very brief blackout, Circle Bar has received its permit and live music has resumed. Continue reading »
A worker from the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans hands up a file he used to clean a broken water main under Adams Street before applying a steel clamp to it to seal the hole. (Robert Morris, UptownMessenger.com)
Seated on milk crates on the Adams Street sidewalk, Maple Street Patisserie owner Ziggy Cichowski and Babylon Cafe owner Alexander Sakla cheered on the arrival of large yellow Sewerage and Water Board trucks around noon Friday, even as water along the stretch was being shut off in preparation of repairs to leaks gushing in the street.
“Faster, faster!” Cichowski cried out as the trucks rolled up, to laughter from a number of onlookers. Continue reading »
Kakkoii Japanese Bistreaux on Maple Street hopes to open later this month, now that it has won approval to sell alcohol with meals. (Robert Morris, UptownMessenger.com)
A new Japanese bistro is looking forward to opening later this month on Maple Street after winning City Council’s enthusiastic approval Thursday for its transformation of a previously problematic college bar.
Kakkoii Japanese Bistreaux, in the building at the corner of Hillary Street that was formerly the Doors bar, will offer a traditional Japanese menu of sushi, sashimi and hot dishes, said Toan Tran, one of its owners. The name is a Japanese term for something “awesome” or “cool,” he said. Continue reading »
A New Orleans Police officer looks at the largest of the cracks on Adams Street flooding it and nearby Maple Street on Thursday afternoon. (Robert Morris, UptownMessenger.com)
Well after the rain cleared on Thursday afternoon, a group of gushing leaks erupted from a series of cracks in the pavement on Adams Street, sending streams of water pouring over the pavement just a few feet away from a busy commercial stretch of Maple Street. Continue reading »
A rendering of the proposed Tulane stadium. (via TulaneStadium.com)
The yellow-stucco mansion at the corner of Valence Street and St. Charles Avenue is the subject of a demolition request by Baton Rouge-based Crescent Road LLC, scheduled to be heard at 2 p.m. Aug. 20 by the Neighborhood Conservation District Committee, according to Karen Gadbois on her “Squandered Heritage” blog at The Lens.
The New Orleans City Council will hold its first meeting Thursday as the “Carrollton Palmetto Economic Development District,” the governing body established to oversee the tax credits the city will give to Costco for its new store on South Carrollton. Continue reading »
After a series of community meetings hosted by Tulane about their plans for a new football stadium, a nearby neighborhood is hosting its own meeting Thursday evening that will pair a university official with one of the most outspoken opponents of the project. Continue reading »
A city-owned car parked near NORD headquarters in the Lower Garden District was heavily damaged in a hit-and-run crash over the weekend, city officials told our partners at WWL-TV.