LSU championship game boosts Uptown economy

By Christian Willbern, Loyola University New Orleans

As the LSU Tigers paraded down Victory Hill on Saturday, Uptown restaurant and stores still basked in the influx of cash from Monday night’s football game. LSU’s national championship win against Clemson gave a boost to the local economy, especially to businesses that kept the drinks coming. “Keep in mind that all the Baton Rouge kids are all driving down here. We got a 50% increase in sales just on Monday alone,” said Broadway Food Store manager Kal Ghalbatar. “It was crazy.”

“Probably 80% of our customers were not regular customers.

Vacant home of suspended Tulane fraternity catches fire

A vacant Tulane fraternity house was damaged in a fire early Friday morning, authorities said, leaving a newly scorched structure directly next door to an empty lot on Broadway Street where a frat house that burned last October was recently torn down. The former Sigma Alpha Mu house at 712 Broadway caught fire around 1 a.m. July 20, said Tulane University spokesman Michael Strecker. The building was unoccupied and undergoing renovations, so there were no injuries, Strecker said. He referred questions about the cause of the fire to the New Orleans Fire Department, which did not have information on the investigation readily available Tuesday afternoon. The Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity has been suspended for several years, Strecker said.

Redevelopment of former Nine Inch Nails studio on Magazine, Audubon Charter expansion on Broadway return to city board

The planned redevelopment of the former Nine Inch Nails recording studio on Magazine Street and the proposed expansion of Audubon Charter School both return to a city board Wednesday morning seeking waivers required to start their projects. The owners of the old Nothing Studios on Magazine near Jena Street intend to redevelop the property into a combination of the existing residential units, a space for a doctor’s office, and ground-floor retail space. The large building would technically require nearly 60 parking spaces, and the ownership of the lot being proposed to satisfy that requirement caused some consternation for members of the Board of Zoning Adjustments last month. The owners of the building were instructed to meet with the neighborhood a second time before Wednesday’s meeting. Similarly, the firm handling the expansion of Audubon Charter School’s Broadway campus asked last month for more time to meet with neighbors about that project.

Sinkhole swallows section of river-bound Broadway Street

The sinkhole that opened underneath Broadway Street near Maple now consumes most of the riverbound side of the street there, and a difficult repair job to the broken sewer line underneath means the block will be closed off for at least the rest of the week, authorities said. The hole — which opened up on Saturday as Tropical Storm Lee poured rain over Uptown New Orleans — is not growing, said Sewerage and Water Board spokesman Robert Jackson, but contractors have peeled the asphalt back to reveal the size of the hole. Workers at the site estimated it to be around 10 feet deep. “The hole is still the hole that’s there, but the opening is larger,” Jackson said. The hole was caused by a broken 21-inch sewer main, but it lies underneath two water pipes, a 6-inch and a 12-inch main, Jackson said.

Expansion of Audubon Charter begins to take shape

Audubon Charter School parents, teachers and neighbors literally applauded a new design for the expansion of the school’s Broadway campus on Wednesday night, but as more details began to emerge, so did more vocal concerns about traffic flow around the school as children come and go. Ultimately, the streets on either side of the school may need to be made one-way, said one neighborhood leader. The school is in the early stages of planning a two-year renovation of the Broadway campus that will dramatically reconfigure the interior and add 10,000 feet of new space onto the current historic structure. The FEMA-funded expansion will not add more students to the high-performing Montessori and French-immersion programs, however; it will simply give the current student population larger classrooms and more amenities required by state standards. Exactly how those new rooms will be configured has been the subject of a series of community meetings at the school this fall.

Uptown police investigating string of armed robberies, afternoon shooting

A string of armed robberies stretched across the city and a man survived a volley of bullets on Delachaise Street in the Milan area in a weekend that showed an unusual amount of gunplay in Uptown neighborhoods, police said Wednesday. The first two robberies came Friday evening, back-to-back within 20 minutes, said Sgt. Shaun Ferguson of the NOPD Second District persons-crimes division. In the 500 block of Broadway, a couple reported that a group of men approached them, showed a gun, and demanded their belongings, Ferguson said. Police found several of their credit cards in the same block that night, and found their keys nearby the next day.