(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the May 20, 2013 edition.)

New Orleans resident Barbara Risin has lived in the first block of Jackson Avenue near the levee-protected Mississippi River since the 1940s. Sitting outside of her wood frame home between Tchoupitoulas and Rousseau Streets...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the May 13, 2013 edition.)

Ground breaking for Magnolia Marketplace--a two-story mall on nearly seven acres off South Claiborne Ave. at Toledano St. in New Orleans--is slated for the third quarter of this year and a bit later than...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the May 6, 2013 edition.)

This spring, thirteen Crescent City residents completed a year of classes and hands-on training in streetcar maintenance, funded by the Federal Transit Administration and run by the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority and Delgado...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the April 29, 2013 edition.)

Houston-based Halliburton Co. is in talks to settle private claims related to the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion three years ago, company officers said when they released quarterly earnings last Monday. The Gulf spill trial's first phase...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the April 22, 2013 edition.)

Last week, BP called its final witnesses in the first phase of the Gulf spill trial that began in New Orleans on Feb. 25. The U.K. company has tried to shift blame to rig-owner...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the April 15, 2013 edition.)

Last week, BP executives and others testifying at U.S. District Court in New Orleans said the company was safety conscious when it drilled the Macondo well in the Gulf. Attorneys for the U.K. firm called their...

(This article was published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the April 8, 2013 edition.)

At the spill trial last week, Halliburton staffer Jesse Gagliano said BP rejected several of his recommendations, jeopardizing the cement pumped at the Macondo well in April 2010. He testified in the trial that...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the April 1, 2013 edition.)

At the Gulf spill trial last week, a Transocean executive and a company captain testified that the Swiss-based giant hadn't ignored maintenance on its Deepwater Horizon rig, countering what another witness said the week before. In...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the March 24, 2013 edition.)

In the fourth week of the 2010 Gulf spill trial, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier dropped claims Wednesday against contractors M-I LLC and Cameron International while Halliburton came under increased scrutiny for concealing cement at its...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the March 18, 2013 edition.)

Week three of the Gulf oil spill trial under Judge Carl Barbier in U.S. District Court in New Orleans focused in part on Halliburton's role in the April 20, 2010 disaster. And outside experts...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the March 11, 2013 edition.)

In the second week of a milestone spill trial at U.S. District Court in New Orleans, oil experts last week spoke about the technical and physical challenges inherent in deepwater drilling. In the admiralty...

(This article is published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the March 4, 2013 edition.)

A landmark environmental trial kicked off last week at United States District Court in New Orleans as Eastern District of Louisiana Judge Carl Barbier began the process of deciding the faults of BP, Transocean, Halliburton, Cameron...

(This article was published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the Feb. 25, 2013 edition.)

New Orleans officials hope to move residents toward a consensus this spring about whether to remove or keep the 1960s-era Claiborne expressway that destroyed African American neighborhoods in Treme, the Seventh Ward and vicinity.

Last...

(This article was published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the Feb. 18, 2013 edition.)

Seafood sales rise in the more than forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter, helping some south Louisiana vendors by as much as fifty percent as tastes turn from Mardi Gras king cakes to oysters, shrimp...

Spacious, solar-lit shelters on the new Loyola Ave. streetcar line, opening on Jan. 28, will accommodate Super Bowl fans in New Orleans. But elsewhere, commuters huddle under less protection. Bus and streetcar service, shelters and ridership have improved since Veolia Transportation partnered with the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority in...

(This article was published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the Jan. 14, 2013 edition.)

On South Broad and Earhart in New Orleans, the Rosenwald Center--the city's only major recreation facility for African American youth during racial segregation--was torn down last week to be replaced by a new one next year....

(This article was published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the Jan. 7, 2013 edition.)

Former residents of Revilletown--an African American community torn down 25 years ago in Iberville Parish--are trying to preserve a cemetery founded by ancestors there in 1874. The cemetery, started by ex-slaves, is now within the grounds...

(This article was published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the Dec. 17, 2012 edition.)

No matter where you live in New Orleans, sooner or later you'll find yourself on Claiborne Avenue, speakers said at community meetings in December on improving the corridor. The tree-lined boulevard was the heart of the...

The New Orleans BioInnovation Center or NOBIC -- a glittering, $47 million, state-funded structure that looks as if it might house modern art -- opened a year and a half ago on Canal Street. The downtown edifice is part of the city's larger BioDistrict, to be anchored by the University...

(This article was published in "The Louisiana Weekly" in the Dec. 3, 2012 issue.)

The feds and the state want to see Bayou Bienvenue in the Crescent City's Lower Ninth Ward restored to the cypress-tupelo swamp it was before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the MRGO shipping channel...