"The street has changed and we didn't change with it"

The owners of Cafe Rose Nicaud are in their 70s now and ready to cash out. You can't really blame them for that but also it's kind of a shame. Especially so since it seems clear the space will very likely not continue as a cafe in its next incarnation.  We'll know more about what that is when we find out who is the new owner.

Melba Ferdinand, who started the cafe with husband Kenneth, said the couple, now in their 70s, are retiring.

“It’s that time for us, and just as important, the street has changed, and we didn’t change with it,” she said. “That’s not regrettable, we love what we did and how we did it.”

The couple own Café Rose Nicaud’s property, a two-story historic building near the corner of Royal Street. Ferdinand said a sale of the property is in the works, though she could not name the prospective buyer.

Which Motwani is it this time? Also how many Chicken Shacks do we think can fit on Frenchman Street if there even is a limit to such a thing?

Quality of life enforcement

Not really sure what the situation is with the bookstore. People are mad at them for calling the cops at all.  Maybe they shouldn't do that. But there should be some reasonable expectation that they can operate without having their entrance obstructed. Maybe they have unreasonable expectations about what is and isn't an obstruction. I really don't know what the scene was like.

One thing is for sure, though. Once NOPD shows up, they need to try harder not to shove any autistic kids to the ground and arrest them. 

Moses said Grant, who is in his early 20s, is a "floater," who plays trumpet with various bands on the corner and is well-known there: “New Orleans musicians, they practically raised this little boy.” Grant is known to be disabled, Moses said, “as we say in the city, ‘slow,'" but that he was "never irate. ... I can’t see him being aggressive."

Moses said she counted 15 police cars responding to the incident — 13 marked and two unmarked, both NOPD and Louisiana state troopers — and has video of them.

“You would think they had weapons of mass destruction the way the police were responding,” she added.

Too bad there was no kindly white homeowner nearby to offer up their lawn as an alternative performance space so this whole situation could have been avoided.