The lost bumpers of New Orleans

On the highly textured streets and sidewalks of NOLA

Late Monday night, as we returned from a Memorial Day trip to St. Louis, we spotted something lying in the street that really, really made us feel like we were home: a dead bumper.

This time, though, we could see the car it’d once been attached to — fully ploughed into the side of the house on the corner.

One of the first things I noticed when we moved here last December was the ubiquity of lost bumpers: in gutters, on neutral grounds, on lawns, in parking lots, on the sidewalk, in dumpsters, repurposed as yard art. I started taking photos of them because they seemed as much a part of the city as Spanish needles, Spanish moss, tiny green parrots and very large crows.

It wasn’t like I wasn’t somewhat mentally prepared. Part of my training to become a new New Orleans resident was following Look at this Fuckin Street on Instagram (“Documenting the cracked and sinking streets of the Crescent City. Send submissions via DM!”). Even after watching this guy stick his whole arm down a pothole to noodle for catfish, the reality of New Orleans city streets and sidewalks knocked me sideways IRL, sometimes literally. It felt like a rite of passage as a new resident to spot my first Christmas tree stuffed into a pothole.

As you can see from that photo, the sidewalks here are as rocky, buckled, pocked and dangerous as the roads. To put a positive spin on it: walking at night on NOLA sidewalks does force you to become more physically graceful, because the alternative is pitching forward, falling on your face, and wearing a shiner for a month. Being a NOLA pedestrian is a real-world, informal martial art.

Somehow, though, I’ve found driving on NOLA streets doesn’t seem to have the same benefits, because the element of surprise is too intense. There are sneaky bumps and potholes you don’t see ‘til you’re bouncing through them so vigorosly your teeth are rattling. Drivers weave in and out of lanes like they’re aspiring to NASCAR, or make crazy, spontaneous U-Turns on the neutral ground. Et cetera!

The good citizens of New Orleans, at least the ones that don’t drive like maniacs, have been trying to push the city to address the pothole issue for a long, long time. Before Look at This Fuckin Street, there was Fix My Streets NOLA.

“Ask anyone in New Orleans about the condition of their street, and prepare yourself for an emotional tirade,” wrote The Shorty Awards, which is sort of an Oscars of Social Media. “In most cities, people relate by sharing stories of their sports teams, or the weather. In New Orleans, it's complaining about potholes.” In its 2014 nomination of FMSN, it praised the group for its work shaming the city into fixing NOLA’s streets by posting extreme pothole content to its Facebook account.

The organizers of Fix My Streets explained to the Shorty Awards that they aimed to use complaints to a productive end.

“Like throwing gas on a flaming pothole, pure emotion spilled out across local social media, leading to thousands of posts,” Fix My Streets said. “Thousands of angry residents posted pothole pictures across social media, igniting a blaze of media coverage. For the first few months, the City was pretty silent. That is, until they couldn't ignore #FixMyStreets anymore. December 2014, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu "We heard you @FixMyStreets.”

They organized National Pothole Day (mark your calendar: it’s January 15), and sent out press releases. “Again, social media played a huge part in our efforts,” it wrote. “A few weeks after getting every New Orleans media outlet to cover our ‘pothole press conference,’ the epic pothole where it took place, was actually repaired.”

Obviously, as you can see from these photos, it didn’t stick. The last entry on the group’s Facebook page was more than a year ago, when it posted a story in The Lens about the Cantrell administration’s refusal to spend money allocated for road repairs.

“Remember back in 2017, when members of #FixMyStreets were asked to be part of group that would plan out how to spend this 2 BILLION dollars? Remember when the non-Fix-My Streets members of that group, after 3 meetings, couldn't find time to meet anymore? Well, here we are!”

Yes! Here we are. But in the spirit of productive complaining and looking at the world shiny side up, walking the streets of New Orleans, dead bumpers really are just a minor feature of the streetscape.

There are also vacant lots filled with spontaneous wildflower patches; magnolia trees popping with blossoms the size of dinner plates; shotgun houses painted in every pastel sherbet color; anoles, frogs, cicadas, and Century Plants; and magic places like 3504 Royal, AKA Bywater Wonderland (which deserves, and will get, its own post).

Driving and walking in New Orleans can be a bag of jarring suprises, but more often, there are delightful ones, too. You never know when the sky will unfold into a big, beautiful blur of purple and pink, or what kind of animal will pop out from behind a car. A person walking in front of you might break into spontaneous song, or pull a kazoo out of their pocket and use it to play jazz covers. You might see someone ride by on a bike on a Tuesday afternoon dressed in full pirate regalia. You might walk into Mardi Gras Zone for a soda, and cross paths with a actual barefoot hippie in overalls and no shirt, as well as a community brass band rehearsing in the back of the store.

New Orleans is left field. And left field is not always the easiest terrain to traverse. But I’ll take it over right field any day.

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Right now, Thomas and I are sitting in our office, AKA The Orange Couch, crunching away at our respective Substacks and drinking very large coffees. If you’d like to support this work, which is very caffeine-fueled, and support a NOLA coffeeshop in the process …. you can Buy Me a Coffee!