b.rox

Today is National Dam Safety Awareness Day.
Sadly, there is no National Levee Safety Awareness Day.
Dammit.

I’m going to try to articulate a few ideas knocking around in my head about the recovery of Mid-City.
Remember, the City Council’s planning process is now underway, and the common wisdom seems to be that if we don’t participate, we’ll be flattened.
Also, please realize that I don’t consider myself any kind of expert in urban [...]

Another .rox blogger: Welcome aboard to Lee, the DVD Guy who will be blogging at magic.rox.

Well, this sucks. Scientists report that parts of New Orleans are sinking “four or five times faster than the rest of the city,” at a rate of an inch or more per year.

Here’s a short (two minute) video for the nine month mark. I uploaded it to both Vimeo and YouTube, so take your pick.

The YouTube one was looking funny so I’m embedding Vimeo’s here, but you can access either via the links above.
And just to give you more options, you can also download it in .mov [...]

If Alberto avoids us
If Beryl doesn’t break us
If Chris doesn’t crush us
If Debby doesn’t drown us
If Ernesto doesn’t exile us
If Florence doesn’t flood us
If Gordon doesn’t gank us
If Helene doesn’t hammer us
If Isaac doesn’t ice us
If Joyce jogs away at the eleventh hour
If Kirk doesn’t kill us
If Leslie doesn’t level us
If Michael doesn’t maul us
If [...]

Check out this presentation on the rebuilding of Xavier University (PDF, about three and half MB). Astonishing pictures of the flooded campus.

Somehow over the course of the last month or so, my frame of mind has slipped from tightly-bridled optimism to vague worry, mild stress and general foreboding. Perhaps it’s overextended civic involvement. At first, the fact that my neighborhood organization was planning a festival seemed like a case of misplaced priorities — like unto Nero [...]

Mark the Carpenter is back at work on our house today, after a hiatus of almost two months. Sadly, his helper Tony is not returning because of deteriorating mental health. He went off his meds and became increasingly reckless and deranged. Seems amongst other troubles he was in a car crash and the passenger was [...]

Best news I heard yesterday: People are finally starting to move into the trailer site a block from our house. The trailers have been sitting there empty for three months now. Hopefully we will have a couple hundred neighbors soon. Of course, this could create a whole host of new problems…

The Second Annual Lafitte Corridor Rail Hike was a screaming success!

On Sunday, May 21st, eighteen of us hiked about three miles from Armstrong Park to Canal Boulevard, right through Mid-City following the old Norfolk-Southern rail line. The Louisiana Institute of Film Technology is building a film studio on a key parcel of this land, and [...]

I’m disappointed by the spin of this article in City Business — the headline in particular. “Film studio under fire”? C’mon. No one is criticizing the LIFT project. In fact, everyone I’ve talked to is pretty excited about it. What we are questioning is process by which the public land was sold.

My take on Mayor Nagin’s re-election? I can’t say it half as well as da po’ boy already did.

So I went to the neighborhood planning meeting for Mid-City and Gert Town Saturday morning, and was deeply disturbed by what I saw there. Something doesn’t smell right. It’s not just the lack of publicity for this particular meeting. The whole process seems suspect.
The aim is to come up with a recovery plan for each [...]

I got my sample ballot. Here’s how I plan to vote in the runoff Saturday:

Clerk, Criminal District Court
Nick Varrecchio, Democrat, Ballot # 21
Mayor, City of New Orleans
“Mitch” Landrieu, Democrat, Ballot # 61
Councilmember(s) at Large
Arnie Fielkow, Democrat, Ballot # 73
Councilmember, District B
Stacy Head, Democrat, Ballot # 92

I don’t have much reason to vote for anyone, but [...]

I just saw something I’ve never seen in my seven years here at the University: students throwing a football around in the quad. It did my heart good. It almost seemed like, well, college.

My friend Michael is fighting back. Anyone else out there in America who pays money to Big Insurance Companies — I hope you’re paying attention to what’s going on down here, because it’s a travesty.

The most radical proposal I heard at last weekend’s AIA conference: Tear down the stretch of I-10 that passes through the center of New Orleans and restore North Claiborne to its former grandeur, routing interstate traffic onto 610 instead. I’m all for it.

As it develops, not only am I on the search committee to find my new boss — I’m the damn chair.

Uh oh. I don’t like the looks of this.