Late this afternoon, I walked up Palmyra Street with my friend Sandra, heading toward Outer Banks Bar from S. Galvez Street.
It was the last time, it turns out.
I passed the seemingly vacant houses where Ruth Sanderson, Gaynell, and Robert Rogers once lived. I passed the vacancies where Kevin and Bobby, Barry, and the Monleys used to live. James was still haunting the bar itself; a few cars showed that some patrons remained. Greg Guth, who owns the bar building and continues to fight to defend his legal rights, was just heading out.
Off to our left, crews continued to pick up debris from more mature live oak trees that were chopped down today along what used to be Banks Street.
After we circled around, a police officer watching us for much of the time, we walked through the LSU Footprint where crews were just finishing after moving into another house on Cleveland Avenue.
The sun was going down, highlighting the sizable banner draped on an existing LSU building in the LSU Footprint. Very appropriately, it noted that we were wandering "Where The Unusual Occurs":
Around the block, the gate to the grounds of the now-vacant McDonogh No. 11 School, where Priestley Charter School students were recently forced to move to modular units on Almonaster Avenue over the holidays, was open.
Returning to S. Galvez, we saw that workers had moved the Road Closed signs to the opening of Palmyra. An excavator, off in the distance, began to tear up large patches of street. A worker arrived to turn on the generator-powered floodlight at the spot where the demolition was getting underway in the middle of one of the last stretches of street in the VA Hospital Footprint.
Interesting, I thought...starting at 5:00 p.m. as darkness falls.
Mr. Roy, stopping by to chat as he often does, shook his head as he surveyed the latest scene. "You can't fight the federal government," he said.
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