Haunted Tulane Avenue, which is nowhere near the famous college of the same name. This street’s been a bad neighborhood my whole life, but there are some cool buildings and an almost ZERO effort at gentrification whatsoever, which is kind of laudable. Because of that, most of these pictures were taken with a complete lack of guerilla photography integrity, i.e. I was too scared to get out of the car, which really complicates the process.
Actually, I’ve spent weeks at a time in Thrift City. But technically it’s on Carolton Ave, which intersects Tulane and I’ve always seen it as my little piece of neutral Switzerland in this neighborhood.
Then, later on that night Kim suggested we go to this club, owned by one of my favorite singers (said Irma Thomas) because supposedly Irma does two shows a night. And I was like, gulp, okay. I’ve always wanted to go there and have only seen her a couple of times. It looked seriously closed when I took this picture and nobody answered the phone when we called.
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Here’s another place I’m totally afraid of. I actually got out of the car and stuck my head inside a bit when I took the picture because it’s just been killing me to know what goes on in a ‘middle-age’ Latin Dance Club and it’s across the street from Thrift City. It just looked like an old man’s bar to me. Later on, this came up as another suggestion as a place to go. All this planning was happening at the restaurant where Kim works and one of the waitresses said Las Islas was really, really disturbing (!), but that they had an old man who DJ-ed in a bright orange matador outfit. We ended up wisely hanging out at Kim’s house, which turned out to be a good idea since it flooded pretty bad that night.
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New Orleans, like most places, I guess, has a lot of re-purposed fast food restaurants. I like this one especially because the new owners made such a minimal effort at turning a Popeyes into a Chinese restaurant. Which reminds me, my mom told me when I was home that Popeyes puts mayo in their red beans and rice. I keep threatening to try it because seems like such a genius idea.
I went into the criminal courthouse here once about 10 years ago just to check it out and got really freaked by all the people in shackles. It’s across the street from Irma Thomas’ club. Does she have a big ex-con clientele?
Another reason why Steve Espo Powers is so cool! (thanks Rob)
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