For well over a century, the blue-and-white tiles that identify hundreds of New Orleans streets have been emblematic of this city.
Yes. The tiles are uniquely adorable. Such charming, historic details make living in New Orleans delightful. Who wouldn't treasure them?
But, in neighborhoods across the city, street and sidewalk repairs that would normally be cause for celebration have had an unfortunate byproduct: the disappearance, possibly temporary, of the beloved tiles.
The hell you say! It's unthinkable that street repair-work would occur in New Orleans without the conscientious replacement of the historic street tiles. It would be a cultural sin. I therefore don't believe it.
"They came and replaced the sidewalks and they left blocks of wood where it looked like they were going to replace the street tiles," said Ashley Hansen of Hansen's Sno-Bliz, the snowball stand that has occupied the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Bordeaux streets since 1939.
"They came in and put cement in the places that they had left for the tiles," Hansen said.
Well surely, surely this is just one little isolated oversight. Surely the cultural destruction isn't widespread. Right? (Perhaps now we could hear from an authority who could make some soothing promises?)
Robert Mendoza, the city's director of public works, said that in keeping with city policy, all the tiles will be replaced.See? The director of public works has a policy to replace the tiles. They didn't have a vendor until recently*. 'Nuff said.
"Our policy is that if a corner has existing street-name tiles, we put them back," he said. "Post-storm, or maybe just before the storm, the shop that made the tiles for us went out of business or moved. We didn't have a vendor for the tiles until about seven months ago."
At the corner of Pine and Birch streets, it's apparent that repair work was done on March 13, 2008. That's the date someone carved into the concrete while it was still wet.
What isn't known is why the tiles for Pine are intact while the ones for Birch are missing.
Well, who cares about... wait a minute. Pine and Birch... Pine and Birch... for some reason that particular intersection rings a bell.
Some of the historic tiles met their demise in recent years after Entergy New Orleans cut through sidewalks to replace gas lines.
Heaven Forfend! Et tu, Entergy?
"As part of our normal inspection process, Entergy New Orleans managers discovered that a subcontractor's crew had destroyed the street name tiles on six blocks," Entergy Vice President Rusty Burroughs wrote in a letter to The Times-Picayune at the time. "That crew was immediately terminated from the job."
Burroughs added that "of the nearly 1,500 street corners impacted by the rebuild to date, approximately 500 have street name tiles and only about 18 were not replaced --a clear violation of Entergy's practice."
See? It wasn't so bad. The Entergy VP terminated the crew ("from the job") for clearly violating Entergy's "practice" of replacing destroyed street name tiles. That Entergy VP sounds like a real problem solver. I wonder what else he said fifteen months ago when he commented on this issue. If only there were some sort of digital record of his statement with perhaps some righteous contextual commentary to boot.
Ah, yes. Back in April of '08, the Entergy VP apparently was responding to a Chris Rose column about a blogger who complained about the street tile destruction. The Veep said:
In his column, Chris Rose mentioned the destruction of street name tiles during our gas rebuild. ... Those tiles will be replaced, and were in the process of being replaced before the article was written by Mr. Rose.It's just very puzzling to me why the tiles on Pine and Birch haven't been replaced fifteen months after the Entergy VP said they would be replaced. He clearly said the "restoration of the tiles... would have been completed regardless of who 'reported' the story"... and yet... that "restoration" never occurred. Now the City's Director of Public Works is saying the same thing, except that they are using the ole "we only got a tile vendor seven months ago" excuse.
...
The discovery and restoration of the tiles was spurred by our employees doing their job well -- inspecting the work of subcontractors -- and would have been completed regardless of who "reported" the story.
Fifteen months ago, Entergy claimed that the destroyed tiles "were in the process of being replaced". And that statement was, shall we say, not entirely true. (Btw, which vendor was Entergy using?)
Ashley thought this matter was important. Entergy responded to Ashley's concerns in narrow language that still makes my skin crawl. And then they didn't fix the problem.
FYYFF.
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* Don't you just love the brazen way they submit that "we only got a vendor seven months ago" excuse at face value? As if no reasonable person couldn't expect them to both purchase and lay down street tiles in only seven months.
Labels: ashley morris, Roads
