Nossiter's Harry Lee Obit

Every bit as hacktacular as one might expect. Granted, Lee was indeed a complicated figure but Nossiter, in his own unique fashion, plays the facts with an almost perfectly tone-deaf lack of understanding. And, of course, the usual inaccuracies are thrown in for yucks (between the fat jokes, that is).

He was born in the back room of the family laundry business on Carondelet Street in New Orleans in 1932 into an immigrant family that spoke Chinese at home and were in a lonely minority in a Southern city that has never had a large Asian population.

First of all, I'd like to see Nossiter explain that to the city's sizable Vietnamese poluation. What's worse, the very neighborhood where Lee was born in that Carondelet Street laundry was actually known as New Orleans's "Chinatown" from about the 1870s to the 1930s. Here's a snip from what I could find in T-P back issues.

Final remnant of city’s Chinatown cleared for the ax
Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA)
January 19, 2005
Author: Bruce Eggler
Staff writer

Marketplace of the past

For about 60 years, ending in the 1930s, the two-block stretch of Tulane Avenue between South Rampart and Saratoga streets was the heart of the Chinatown district, where Chinese immigrants and their descendants sold sandalwood, firecrackers, litchi nuts and Chinese musical instruments. Other merchandise apparently included opium and other drugs for the "pleasure palaces" of Storyville, the red-light district a few blocks away.

The Chinatown district also was home to Chinese laundries and restaurants, all centered on a market on the downriver side of the 1100 block of Tulane.

Many early jazz musicians frequented Chinatown, buying gongs and cymbals there, eating at its restaurants and procuring less respectable goods and services, historians say.

In the late 1930s, the Chinese market was torn down to make room for a parking lot, and the Chinese shopkeepers moved away, many of them to Bourbon Street. In 1950, an oil company built a 10-story office building on the site of the old market.

In 1958, many of Chinatown’s remaining buildings were demolished to make way for more office buildings, leaving just a handful of structures. One of those, a former laundry at 160 S. Rampart, was torn down last year.

That left the two-story brick building at 1120 Tulane Ave. Although apparently built in the early 20th century, the structure’s facade has been covered in recent decades with white panels that destroyed the original architectural details.

The other day, the T-P ran a thorough obit of Lee that more accurately portrayed the man's life and the good and bad aspects of his career. Nossiter's half-completed homework assignment serves as yet another slam against the local "buffoonery" for the enjoyment of his national audience. Maybe Nossiter can serve as a consultant when Fox decides to write in a Sheriff Lee type character to the K-Ville cast.

(Nossiter link via Varg, BTW)