36 / 60
34
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
JULY | AUGUST 2015
eating, hemp-wearing, paddle boarding,
farm-to-table aficionado and enlightened
craft cocktail connoisseur — you won’t
catch me rocking 8-inches of tumbleweed
on my neck in the middle of New Orleans
summertime.
It’s called a Brain Gain when young, smart
and forward-thinking people move into a
place, and after 30 years of Brain Drain, I
think it’s an unequivocal win for the city.
It’s hard to envision the day when the
Thinking Class outnumbers the Drinking
Class in this beautiful beat-down city; I
see it more as us approaching a necessary
equilibrium between the old and new, the
practical and the frivolous, the digital and
the sensual.
New Orleans is today, as it was before,
a place suspended between the physical
world and the realm of imagination. The
experience of everyday life here is magnified
by emotional intensity and creative reverie,
yet also reduced by the heat, humidity
and altitude to its most basic and primal
elements: Food, shelter and the Saints.
You can regulate our smoking and regulate our
music and – hard to believe this day has come
— but you can even regulate our Go Cups.
But you cannot regulate soul. You cannot
legislate funk. And you cannot pass an
ordinance that makes us ordinary.
The best things about us will never change.
• • •
We’ve done the near impossible. We’ve
remade this place. Sure, we’re still a troubled
town with a split personality and a closet
full of skeletons, but a lot of those are Mardi
Gras costumes.
We’re a better place, it seems, by so many
measures. We have Rouses instead of
Sav-A-Centers. We’re more engaged,
involved and thoughtful. Hopefully more
appreciative, unified and committed.
But what New Orleans is today, most of all,
is the story of the unshakable faith of the
human condition, the indomitable ardor of
the human heart and the eternal triumph
of the human spirit. Dependent upon the
kindness of strangers, as always.
The old Lakeview
School on Milne
Boulevard in New
Orleans, LA, built in
1915, was one of the
first in the Lakeview
area’s nascent years.
According to the
Preservation Resource
Center, local architect
E.A. Christy designed
the now-dilapidated
building.The building
is scheduled to be
demolished.
the
Anniversary
issue
SAVING WILLIE MAE’S
SCOTCH HOUSE
Willie Mae’s Scotch House is a soul food
restaurant known for its fried chicken. It
had been serving the same food for over
50 years, to the same customers, by the
same hand of the same lady.
Like a lot of restaurants, Willie Mae’s was
flooded in Katrina. The Southern Food
Alliance saw that we could do something
to save this place, and we jumped on
it. We also helped Leah Chase of Dooky
Chase’s in the same Treme neighborhood.
Not only did we save restaurants, we
established a beacon of hope in that
neighborhood.
Therestaurantcommunityhasalwaysbeen
philanthropic. We provide sustenance to
people, we’re involved in our culture, and
we have the responsibility to give back to
those from whom we make our living. It’s
all part of feeding the soul of a city.
—Chef John Currence
The Southern Foodways Alliance documents,
studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures
of the changing American South. Chef Currence
has been a board member for nearly 20 years.
Currence was born and raised in New Orleans.
He was interviewed for this story by Julian
Brunt in June, 2015 in Oxford, Mississippi,
where he has six restaurants.
“When we took over the Sav-A-Center’s
after Katrina, Leah Chase said something
I’ll never forget, ‘You can build a great
neighborhood around a great grocery.’
There has been so much development
around our Mid City store in recent years,
and there is even more on the horizon.”
—
Donald Rouse