In this month’s O Magazine, Oak Street is listed, right after home coffee makers and right before E-cards as one of the 100 Things That Are (actually) Getting Better. Oprah (and her writer’s) attribute the improvements to a $5.4 M overhaul and the fundraising of the Annual Po-Boy Festival but much credit has to go to the efforts of the merchants’ association and the early designation of Oak Street as a Main Streets Program. The Main Streets Program is a program sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and carried out through the State of Louisiana’s Department of Historic Preservation and the Department of Culture, Restoration and Tourism. Oak Street is possibly one of the most traditional of main streets. A six block long corridor running from Carrollton Avenue to River Road, Oak Street had its last heyday in the fifties and sixties. Like other urban retail districts in New Orleans and around the country, Oak Street felt the economic heat of the mass exodus to the suburbs in the sixties and seventies and the economic struggles of New Orleans in the eighties. Prior to Katrina, Oak Street was the stereo-typical combination of good and bad with some famous venues (the Maple Leaf Bar and Jacque-Imo’s reside on Oak Street) and struggling venues and its own share of neighborhood battles including one in the mid-nineties over a parking lot that the Castellon’s Pharmacy wanted to put in behind their store.
It also had good bones with a streetcar line at one end of the street and entry from Jefferson Parish and River Road at the other. The building scale of the street varies from one end to the other with two old classic bank buildings at the Carrollton end (one that used to be a Whitney bank and the other is now a Rue de la Course Coffee House) and more industrial uses at the other end toward River Road.
Katrina’s effect on Oak Street was looting and store closings.
Few stores re-opened up after the storm and those that did were isolated. Douglas Brinkley, in his book, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast dedicates chapter thirteen to the experience of Oak Street.
Post Katrina, a merchant’s association organized with the plan to go after a Main Street designation from the State of Louisiana. The Main Street program is a formal framework that provides guidelines for a grassroots organization (primarily volunteers) to manage their retail district. It provides funding for a program manager and offers matching grants for signage and façade improvements and sometimes for larger construction. It is a program designed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to help neighborhood retail districts coordinate their marketing, promotions and improvements for the betterment of the whole retail district. It requires that the district raise any discretionary funds on their own and it is phased out after five years under the expectation that the Main Street will be self-supportive by then. In addition, in the State of Louisiana, a staff architect to assist with façade improvements and a staff interior designer to help with store layouts is provided.
According to Marilyn Kearney who has been the Main Street Manager since Oak Street received its designation, Katrina mobilized the neighborhood and they came together with a singular purpose. The program has seen progress with much of the credit going to the success of the Po-Boy Festival that began in 2006 and has just had its third year in November. Over 30,000 people attended in 2009. In addition, The Oak Street Main Street has acquired a beautification grant from the Greater New Orleans Foundation to augment the City of New Orleans improvements that rebuilt the streets and sidewalks and added brick-lined crosswalks last summer.
Local businesses kicked in as well. Graffiti graphics handles all of the signage for the street. Idea Village provided a mini-grant in 2006 of $2000 that allowed C-4 Tech ( a business on Oak Street) to create the Po-Boy Fest website and C-4 continues to manage it and all web promotions to this day. Nearby Helm Paint contributed interior paint for stores undergoing upgrades. The History Department at the University of New Orleans through their Public History class maintains a photographic and oral history of the street and holds court during the Po-Boy Festival to share their studies.
The construction last summer didn’t destroy businesses
The Main Street Program and the local businesses worked hard last summer to counter the countless news stories that suggested that Oak Street was struggling during the construction of the street. In fact, Marilyn Kearney says, the construction pushed many businesses to become more inventive and creative and grew their business. Squeal Bar-B-Q reached out to downtown and neighborhood businesses and started catering business lunches. Jacques-Imo’s put picnic tables out in front of their restaurant and actually expanded their dining space during both weekends of Jazz Fest. Carrollton Jewelry began providing home delivery which continues on as a service they provide to their customers.
The Main Street office was central to these efforts, according to Kearney. Through the Economic Restructuring Committee, one of the four committees in the Main Street framework, they created the tag line “Have You Had Your Oak Street Fix Today?” to play off of the construction. The goal was to try to get the customers to feel an allegiance to Oak Street and to want to come shop there. It seems to have worked.
Ms. Kearney says Oak Street didn’t lose anybody during the construction and in fact they gained a few stores including a new wine bar that is under construction at Oak between Carrollton and Dublin, a bike and skateboard shop called Nobs, a clothing exchange called GLUE and a specialty T-shirt shop called Fleurty Girl.
The Future for Oak Street
Ms. Kearney (and Oprah) sees a great future for Oak Street. The goal for the future is keep working toward tying the two ends of the street together cohesively. The end closest to Carrollton has many more businesses and a close-to-continuous storefront. Even though the street is only six blocks long, people tend to turn around when they hit a gap in the retail fronts. The neighborhood needs a good zoning overlay, according to Kearney. The current zoning caused some trouble for the new wine bar because the city only has one designation for a bar. The wine bar is a complete historic renovation and is a great asset to the neighborhood but they really struggled with their permit. She hopes to see the Economic Restructuring committee providing input to the city on the specifics of the neighborhoods needs.
There are also storefronts that sit empty which could help provide continuity to the street. The old Meisel’s fabric store continues to be used as a storage facility while the owner has their primary business in another part of New Orleans. Kearney would like to have a market study done for the area to determine what other businesses could find the area attractive.
Kearney will also be watching the mayoral election with interest. Mitch Landrieu in his current position as Lieutenant Governor oversees the Department of Culture, Restoration and Tourism and also the Department of Historic Preservation; the two offices that oversee the Main Street Program. So he is very familiar with the success of Oak Street. It has been difficult thus far to get the current mayor’s attention about the program.
“New Orleans is made up of all kinds of neighborhoods,” says Ms Kearney. “It’s Mardi Gras. It’s food. But it’s not just that. It’s neighborhoods like Carrollton that are very traditional Main Street USA.”
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