Dear Julia,
At the corner of St. Charles Avenue and Common Street there is an obelisk-shaped marker announcing that the spot was the southern terminus of Jefferson Highway which ran between New Orleans and Winnipeg, Canada. It is dated 1918. I know Jefferson Highway runs through part of the New Orleans area, but to Winnipeg? Is this correct? Why would anyone want to go from New Orleans to Winnipeg?
Thomas Smith, River Ridge
Thomas, Winnipeg, though separated by 1600 miles, is almost exactly due north of New Orleans. The highway, which was built in the 1910s, was seen as a route up the center of the nation going through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota. The largest American cities along the route are Kansas City, Missouri, Des Moines, Iowa and Minneapolis. (More famously was the Lincoln Highway which ran across the country from East to West.) Jefferson Highway was also hyped as the “Palm to Pine” road for the different trees along the route.
As the federal highways system grew, numbers were used to designate the highways. The name Jefferson Highway is still used for short stretches along the original route, but in most places the road is marked differently. In Louisiana what remains of the original route is officially listed as U.S. Highway 71. Its path includes Bunkie and Shreveport before crossing into Texas.
We doubt if anyone ever drives between New Orleans and Winnipeg per se, though Winnipeggers, we presume, might like to escape to New Orleans, especially during the Canadian winter. There are no great mountains or valleys along the route, mostly flat lands. However, visitors can at least appreciate that they have arrived in a city that was founded by Iberville and Bienville, the Lemoyne Brother, two Canadians. They came by boat.
Dear Julia and Poydras,
What was so fat about Fat City?
Colleen Kershaw, Rapid City, South Dakota
What was fat? Only the ambition, which proved to be way overweight. In the early 1970s, a nighttime entertainment district near Lakeside Shopping Center was planned partially as a suburban alternative to the French Quarter. Condo developments were planned around it. No one took it very seriously until the original Morning Call coffee and beignet stand left the Quarter and opened on Severn Avenue. This seemed to be the ultimate statement of city interests moving to the suburbs. There were a few night clubs and some buzz at first, but ultimately it did not work. The problem is that Fat City was not real—there was no history, no architecture, no artistry. The buildings, which were faux French Quarter, did not impress.
One of the developers had the idea of naming the area after the nearby “Fat City” snoball stand. The idea caught on and the whole area becoming known by that name, and eventually getting official sanction from the parish. The snoball stand was named after a movie about a boxer. Never fully explained is what the movie or the snowball stand had to do with the neighborhood. But that didn’t matter.
Many of the original places have since closed. There have been efforts to revive the neighborhood. Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng has been interested in revitalization and so has current council member Jennifer Van Vranken. One model that is mentioned is Times Square in New York City, which was once popular, then became seedy, and has been redeveloped toward having a better class of businesses and to being more of an artistic area. Poydras also recommends a retirement village for parrots, but that assumes that the parrot he has in mind actually worked for a living.
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