The SELA endgame

Soooon. Very soon. But not yet.

A month-long partial closure of the busy Uptown intersection of Magazine Street and Louisiana Avenue is set to begin Thursday (July 5), according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The closure figures in the continuing construction of a drainage canal on Louisiana Avenue amid the Corps' years-long Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control project, or SELA.

Starting Thursday, traffic on Magazine heading downtown toward Louisiana will have to detour before reaching the intersection. Traffic on Magazine heading Uptown toward Louisiana will be able to pass through the intersection without detour. Two-way traffic on Louisiana will not be affected, the Corps says.

They are saying this is going to be finished by the end of the year at which point it might be possible to move about Uptown relative freely again.

Meanwhile, the latest update I can find about plans to finish the landscaping on Napoleon Avenue is from 2016. 

The exact plan of the landscaping cannot be drawn until the construction is absolutely complete, and Boh Brothers has submitted their own “as-built” specifications of the exact location of each new underground utility line, Wagner noted.


“I’d hate to put an oak tree on top of a new city line,” Wagner said.

Aiming for the spring planting season in 2017 is also somewhat complicated by Mardi Gras, he noted, as the crowds on Napoleon Avenue likely be harmful to newly-planted landscaping.

So, anyway, that never happened. Halfway through 2018 now and no one has planted even the first crepe myrtle out there.  Maybe that's out of the plan now?