The Barryfest Chronicles

Dear Dan,

Across the street from my apartment, there is a decent sized, stand-alone building that formerly served as a Robért Fresh Market but is now completely boarded up and dying for occupation.  Other than the two days the ample parking lot served as base camp for the cast and crew filming Carmen Electra’s new movie, it just sits there, an apparent casualty of the disorganized jack-o-lantern spattering of property revitalization that has been trudging along since the storm of 2005.

Don’t get me wrong, there is amazing work going on all over the city; in every single neighborhood and on every single block.  But there are some shocking plots of land that, for one reason or another, have just been left behind.  This is one of them.

I think it would be a perfect place to open a Trader Joe’s.

I mean, you’ve got stores in Minnesota and those fucking rubes make you jump through hoops just to grab a sixer of microbrew with your groceries.  If you were to open in the greater New Orleans area, there would be no need for that loophole exploiting pay-for-your-groceries-at-one-register-then-walk-through-the-antechamber-to-the-booze-shop bullshit I had to go through at the St. Louis Park location up north.

Not to mention the fact that the Lower Garden District in actually in dire need of a decent place to make groceries.  If you want fresh produce, your closest option is the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas, and shopping there is a brilliantly designed test of your patience.   If you were to take anything that has ever ruined a trip to the supermarket  – crowded parking lots, rude employees, narrow aisles, long checkout lines, dirty floors – and roll them all into one terrible clusterfuck that takes aesthetic and design cues from 1978 Beirut; then, and only then, will you begin to understand what it is like to walk through the doors of that place.

I drive an extra seven minutes right past that shithole so I can do my shopping at Rouse’s, a clean supermarket with employees that don’t ignore you and the amazing idea that with the rising food and gas prices people don’t need any extra reasons to dread visiting your store and forking over some skrilla.

But the real motives for my offering you first right of refusal on this awesome land grab are pretty selfish.  I’m not saying that developing the block of land at the corner of Annunciation St. and Melpomene Ave. would not do wonders for the neighborhood.  It certainly would.

The reason I would like a Trader Joe’s in my zip code involves my previously noted love of Charles Shaw wine.  The last time I needed to re-up, I had to shuttle nine cases of the stuff back from Chicago, Smokey-and-the-Bandit style.  While it was totally worth the trip, suffice it to say the excursion wasn’t exactly the height of convenience.

So whaddya say?