Lamenting Bucktown
I was standing in line at DeBlancs on Friday waiting to get my prescription filled and fanning myself furiously as my hot flashes have bordered on demonic, when a friend in front of me was waiting for her HRT script while the woman in front of her was getting birth control pills.
One of the five clerks was going through a file of restaurant menus because the pharmacist was saying she was so hungry she could eat paper. The clerk said, “Well, you could say this one is open [holding up a menu from Mandina’s] since Katrina, but it ain’t the same as it was before. Some of these need their own file.”
This morning before my bike ride I was reading New Orleans Magazine and Errol Laborde was writing about Bucktown – a place that is so indelible in my mind because I know of no other place like it in the world, only recreations of it in movies. Bucktown was a slice of Americana, of New Orleans, unlike any other place. Rumor has it the name derives from the ability to find a whore for a buck there among the fishermen, but the area was more about families than about licentiousness.
Old timey houses with screen doors that gave way to Formica tables and rusted metal chairs with seats covered in plastic leather, black and white televisions still humming, and a yard with old appliances and laundry hanging to dry. The path by Sidmars following the 17th Street canal was a cluster of squatter houses and fishermen’s boats that led across a wooden bridge since redone into a concrete and steel haphazard structure to look at and negotiate. A few iconic restaurants survived the city’s greed to put in a paid parking lot – one exception was my first husband’s family business – Fontana’s – which had long closed.
But today, it’s all gone – everything from Brunings to Sidmar’s – wiped away by Katrina and in its place a grotesque set of pumps and iron locks have been installed to keep the next storm out.
Even Al Copeland is gone – not due to the storm but his cigarette boats and lake house were a part of the landscape – his ghost has no place to haunt.
These are the Louisiana places that will never return post Katrina – now part of our collective memory – and while what has taken its place is possibly better or safer, lost is poetry as Laborde writes, and romance of Bucktown, one of the few places in the world where time had stood still.