Neighbors worry about safety issues around “Lusher hump”

A raised chunk of concrete on Lowerline Street, scarred and streaked across the top where its scrapes the bottoms of passing cars every day, has earned the nickname the “Lusher hump” from the neighborhood leaders imploring the city to fix it. The issue is the top infrastructure priority of the Central Carrollton Association, whose members even confronted Mayor Mitch Landrieu about it at one of his recent budget hearings. Bill Capo, the action reporter with our partners at WWL-TV, has more:

City officials have told the association that the equipment needed to fix the lump is in the shop.

Two armed robberies reported minutes apart on Lowerline

Two groups of young men were robbed at gunpoint within minutes of each other early Saturday morning on Lowerline Street, authorities said. The first robbery took place about 1:49 a.m. at Maple and Lowerline, and the victims were a group of four men aged 18 to 20. About 10 minutes later, three men in their early 20s were robbed about four blocks away, in the 1200 block of Lowerline. In each case, the victims were approached by a pair of men, one with a gun, who took their belongings and left on foot, police said. The gunman is described as a 5-foot-9, 145-pound black man with a beige hat, dark shirt and blue jeans, police said.

Rash of Uptown armed robberies continues with more on Maple, Upperline

Two more armed robberies have been reported this week, continuing a rash of the crimes in various Uptown neighborhoods over the last two weeks. About 10:30 p.m. Monday, a man approached pedestrians near Maple and Lowerline streets with a silver semiautomatic handgun and demanded their wallets, police said. Once they turned the wallet over, he left in the direction of St. Charles Avenue. Around 9 p.m. Wednesday, two people walking their dog in the 1200 block of Upperline were approached by a man armed with a nickel-plated semiautomatic handgun who demanded their money, police 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.