okkate

Claiborne Tire and Auto at Claiborne and Esplanade

March 2nd, 2010

Oh, it’s cold out. And windy. And this particular New Orleans bicycler is more than ready for spring and summer to get here. But in the meantime I’ll just bundle up, remember my mittens, and pedal hard against the headwind. Tonight’s ride took my downtown to join the gym (water aerobics, here I come!) and then to the coffee shoppe in Mid-City for a meeting with the Metro Bike Coalition (join!). I rode back Uptown through the Treme and a quick stop to say hi to S. I stopped at the corner of Claiborne and Esplanade to snap this picture of this old tire shop with a broken public telephone in the foreground. This is a really busy corner with two busy streets intersecting, the freeway above. And yet this blighted business occupies what seems to me should be valuable property where a grocery store or something would both make money and make sense for the community. And then there’s that public phone. We’ve privatized phones at this point. Everyone has her own cell phone (mine’s a touch screen–wooooo!), and public pay phones have all but disappeared. The sign on the side of this one reads “Katrina broke our city and capitalism isn’t going to fix it.” Well, Katrina and the breached levees did a whole lot of breaking, but this city was broken before, like so, so many cities. But yeah, I’ve got a feeling capitalism isn’t going to fix any of us.