Gordon Plaza
If I had a lesson to learn, I would have learned it by now. I went to the Agriculture Street Landfill today. There wasn’t much happening.
The houses at Gordon Plaza are gone. They were there when I was there last. It wasn’t that long ago. I grant that my feel for the calendar is fuzzy. I saw all sorts of things but none of them involved the houses that were gone. Everything is fenced off and it’s new fencing, not the kind I can slip through. I am also allergic to barbed wire.
The burn pits that were the City Dump, then the Agriculture Street Landfill, then the Sanitary Landfill, Dante’s Inferno that whole time, then Gordon Plaza, then the Agriculture Street Superfund Site are now slated to become a solar park. City Hall is involved. What could possibly go wrong?
I am not trying to be funny, but, can’t City Hall leave well enough alone? Let it be, the way the incinerator that replaced the landfill is forgotten. That location is right across Florida Avenue from the Lowes on Elysian Fields Avenue, right where the two streets meet, where the taco trucks park next to the Lowes lot.
Would you like to think about that? The Florida Avenue Canal is a constant through line in this story.
We live in a city that hasn’t learned the law of unintended consequences. It is hard to believe that any infrastructure work is urgent in this city of picturesque decay. Watch your step everywhere you go in New Orleans. The concrete terrain is cracked and topsy-turvy.
Since the tourists pay the bills, keep them upstream. Downriver, in the Third Municipality, as they used to say, where the slaughterhouses and tanneries were, the sausage makers and candlemakers, and soap factories and the pig farms where the city dumped the street sweepings, what used to be swamp, well, the tourists don’t go there.
They might if they have a chance to marvel at a field of solar panels. What could go wrong? If you think the brainiacs in City Hall are any smarter than the ones in California, you should think again.
When I got back to the 7th Ward, I asked some old timers when the homes at Gordon Plaza had been removed. The universal answer, its variations combined, was, “I don’t know. I haven’t been down there in a while.” Unless a person lives in Desire, or has family in Desire, or works in Desire, there is little reason to visit. It is walkable because it is flat.
There is only one building left standing in Gordon Plaza, that I can tell. I couldn’t find anyone to tell me if I am right or wrong. It is the school where a generation of children learned what leukemia is.
Since there were no buildings, no sign of life, in the part I thought was Gordon Plaza (I have been to that website, I did my online research) I explored the surrounding streets in person where there are buildings, where people still live. It was early in the morning but, sometimes, the early bird doesn’t get the worm. Nobody was around. Not even at the Desire Florida Multi-Service Center. This is where the Vespa broke down and I had to get the Yamaha. The lady I talked to that day wasn’t working. She was from Florida and didn’t know much about this side of the Canal. 3250 Industry Street is on the lakeside of the train tracks.
I went down every street. People live on Metropolitan Street. It is a different world in Desire. It always leaves a smudged impression.
I will tell paid subscribers a memory that I have every time I go down Metropolitan Avenue when we get behind the paywall. It is from the first time I visited the city, before I lived here. I may not know the street names, but I know the neighborhood in my way.
Something was going on at the Multi-Service Center [which is very nice inside—see the archives probably around April 2025]. The lady at the desk had too much to do, with her hands full herding little girls, that she didn’t have time to talk to me. I don’t blame her. The secret to everything is timing.
On the Florida side of the Florida Avenue Canal, I found an old man talking on his phone, leaning against the concrete wall that blocks the canal from traffic. The wall has a new chainlink fence. I couldn’t determine if this was landfill-related.
The man and I wished each other a Happy New Year when I drove by, then, since he was around, I circled back. “Are all the buildings in Gordon Plaza gone?” I asked.
“Where?” he asked.
I am not kidding. New Orleans, an onion of a city. It takes a lot of tears to get through every layer to its heart.
“Gordon Plaza,” I said. “Did they tear down all the buildings already? The ones over the landfill?”
“I don’t know anything about that. I don’t go over there.”
This is what I know.
A paid edition is coming later today. I have something to do, but I always remember what happened when I first visited New Orleans solo. It was me and my Ninja. We were in Desire. We were on Metropolitan Street. We were here then the way I am here now.