Merchants group hosts open house

The St. Claude Avenue Merchants Association held its first open house Tuesday. It was a night of networking between merchants, community leaders, city officials and neighborhood residents.

The association started about four years ago in reaction to the Industrial Canal Lock Replacement Project. The Army Corps of Engineers put together the Community-Based Mitigation Committee to get locally affected neighborhoods involved in the project, and, indirectly, the association was formed.

"Initially, business owners were interested because there was possibly $39 million involved in the mitigation process that would go to communities," said Greta Gladney, executive director of the SCMA. Business owners along St. Claude were also concerned with protecting their interests.

"But when the project didn't move forward quickly, interest and membership in the organization dwindled," she said.

JoAnna Jackson Hutcherson, an SCMA founder and director of the Jackson Child Development Center, said the corps invited business members onto their mitigation board because of local opposition to the lock expansion project. Her 30-year-old business is in Holy Cross, right next to the St. Claude Bridge. A rumor that it might be replaced by a high-rise bridge got her involved.

"My biggest concern was that we would not have any input," she said.

While the lock expansion project is still under way, a new bridge, built elsewhere, will replace the current one without negatively affecting the area, she said.

Like Gladney, Hutcherson grew up in the area and said there are fewer businesses on St. Claude now.

"It's gone down, and that's why we're trying to revitalize the area and bring businesses back."

Also of interest to St. Claude merchants, as well as residents of the six neighborhoods along the commercial corridor, is the proposed riverfront development project, which many expect will bring more business to the avenue.

Lisa Suarez, former president of the Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association, current chairwoman of the riverfront development committee for the association and co-chairwoman for the Bywater Neighborhood Association, said she hopes the proposed cruise ship terminal and other riverfront developments have a positive impact on St. Claude Avenue "in terms of economic development but also historic preservation of the neighborhood."

The open house brought together other local activists such as Reggie Lawson and Keith Plessy of the Crescent City Peace Alliance. Plessy, who is a fourth-generation descendent of Homer Plessy, the shoemaker who was arrested where Press and Royal streets meet on June 7, 1892, for riding in a "whites only" railroad car, is working to establish a civil rights memorial at the intersection. Homer Plessy lost his U.S. Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the "separate but equal" law stayed in effect up until Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954.

Perhaps the most unifying element to the meeting was the recent creation of a business directory of St. Claude Avenue merchants. This was done by eight Tulane students from the Office of Service Learning who, as part of their class projects, volunteered their energies to Stay Local!, a project of the Urban Conservancy that works to keep local money in New Orleans. The Urban Conservancy, which started in reaction to the building of the Uptown Wal-Mart, works to improve the quality of life in the city.

Two of the students, Jenna Kellam and Lauren Wagner, both 21-year-old seniors, used the phone book and the Internet to gather the business listings, then drove down the avenue and found many of the listed businesses closed, as well as new ones that were unlisted.

"The turnover for these businesses was so great," Kellam said. "There were so many that had closed since last year."

The SCMA now has the database the students created, and together they will work to expand it into a widely distributed glossy publication.

"The goal is to update it annually," Wagner said.

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To contact Perry Kasprzak, call him at (504) 483-0899 or e-mail him at pkasprzak@bellsouth.net.