City leaders celebrate new marketplace under Claiborne Expressway
22nd April 2024 · 0 Comments
By Josie Abugov
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) — City and federal officials, local artists and economic development leaders gathered on Wednesday (April 17) for a ribbon cutting to commemorate a new event space under the Claiborne Expressway – the first phase in a large-scale planned revamp of North Claiborne Avenue.
The new “Backatown Plaza” sits on North Claiborne Avenue between Orleans Avenue and St. Louis Street. The renovated portion of the street will hold space for more than 30 vendors, string lights, a portable stage and green infrastructure to help mitigate flooding on North Claiborne.
The plaza forms the first portion of a 22-block renovation to transform the corridor into a bustling marketplace for businesses, performances and celebrations.
Local leaders present, including New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and several city councilmembers, said the revitalization project serves as a way to begin to remedy the loss of hundreds of Black businesses and the division of Treme when the 1960s construction of Claiborne Expressway cut the nation’s oldest Black neighborhood in two.
Nyree Ramsey, the executive director of the Ujamaa Economic Development Corporation, the organization spearheading the large-scale renovation project, said that the aim of “reclaiming the space beneath the bridge” has been a dream 50 years in the making.
“This is about how we reclaim space, how we invest in space, and how we put it back into the hands of the people who deserve it the most,” Ramsey said.
The marketplace will opened to the public this past weekend from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The marketplace unveiling represents a righting of historical wrongs, Cantrell said. The event reminded her “of the promise that we made to rebuild, but to build back better than we were before Katrina,” she said.
For City Councilmember Oliver Thomas, attending the event struck a personal chord. He recalled old Treme families who anchored the neighborhood as well as his own family members, including his paternal grandmother and great-grandfather, who owned a sandwich shop in the area.
“I didn’t really come here for a political event,” Thomas said. “I came here so the souls of my ancestors could see that we’re giving something back to a place that gives us life.”
For the next phase of the project, the Arts Council of New Orleans will commission local artists to paint trees on additional columns under the Backatown Plaza section of the underpass. The organization is applying for a grant from the National Endowment for The Arts to fund these commissions, said Arts Council President and CEO Joycelyn Reynolds.
Ujamaa will also be seeking Environmental Protection Agency funding for additional stormwater management measures, Ramsey said.
The completion of Backatown Plaza followed years of delays for the Claiborne corridor revitalization project. The city received a federal grant of $820,000 from the U.S. Economic Development Administration in 2017 to develop the North Claiborne corridor into a cultural innovation district. But various disasters – the collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel, the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricane Ida – slowed progress, as Ramsey, the former arts and tourism director in the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, has previously said.
Costs for the project swelled beyond the initial $1 million budget. City-issued bonds later covered a financing gap of more than $1.5 million from the initial budget.
In 2022, the city and the state also proposed a $95 million revitalization plan for the corridor in response to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act from President Joe Biden’s administration, which flagged the expressway’s historic harms in New Orleans. Last year, the federal Department of Transportation awarded the state $500,000 for the project.
Before the crowd dispersed for music and food from Cobbeanie’s Catering, Sunni Patterson, artist-in-residence at Ujamaa, closed with a poem.
“What happens when you fuel a dream?” Patterson recited. “Look around. You can see the results. This is how we press forward. How we get through to the other side. We get through with culture, we get through with partnership, and we get through with funding.”
This article originally published in the April 22, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
