New Orleans It’s a wild couple of days when you combine holidays, family visits and glad tidings, and critical organizational events all in a power-packed couple of days, but that’s been life in our fastlane over the end of the month. Show me someone who says they like moving, and I will introduce you to a walking, talking mental health problem, but that’s also become our reality over recent weeks as we finally move double-time to a new organizational home place as well.
In the middle of November with deadlines hard upon us, we closed on a building a dozen blocks up the street on St. Claude Avenue in New Orleans. We’re moving from the red hot Bywater neighborhood to the almost hotter Marigny neighborhood right below the French Quarter only 22 blocks from Canal Street. Luckily for us we’re on the still seedy side of the street with bars to the right of us and, well, it’s New Orleans so there are three or four within several yards of us, punk, karaoke, regular and whatever. We’ve definitely found a couple of blocks where we can live in peace with our crazy hours and push-the-envelope work.
It will take some work and we have crews of folks working with us. Given all of the bars, a second location for Fair Grinds Coffeehouse may be just what the area was secretly hoping for! We’re excited to try regardless. The back of our building was where snoball machines were repaired and sold. Our mobile biodiesel rig has been desperately looking for a place where we could operate, and it cleared the garage door by inches. The storage space in Arabi down the river is now gone, and our boxes of old issues and books for sale now have a higher, dryer, altitude only 10 blocks from the Mississippi River on the alluvial flood plain.
From the front stoop we’re 20 feet from where the next stage of the streetcar will stop at Elysian Fields and St. Claude. A supermarket across the street closed since Katrina finally settled with their landlord and supposedly is readying the time to reopen. Best for us, we can stand on our front steps and look cattycorner across the way and see our old office where we worked for more than a dozen years, which is also a nice feeling of bringing things back full circle.
Once again we’re all under one roof, firmly planted on our own ground. Moving may suck, but finally having a home place again is a great feeling.