EAT~DANCE ~SING~PAINT & ACTIVATE
Circle Food 4 Thought!
Kick-off Campaign to Re-Open the Circle Food Store
DATE: August 5, 2009
TIME: 6:30pm
WHERE: Circle Food Store Parking lot
LOCATION: 1522 St. Bernard Ave.

FEATURING
•    The Hot 8 Brass Band (Brass Band) www.hot8brassband.com
•    Saddi Khali (Spoken Word) www.myspace.com/saddikhali
•    Chuck Perkins (Spoken Word) www.voices.e-poets.net/PerkinsC
•    Elizabeth Traina and Ivan Watkins (Muralists )
•    Mondo Bizarro and Fyre Youth Squad, (Digital Media) www.mondobizarro.org
•    Upper 9th Ward Farmers’ Market, fresh produce and prepared foods

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
CIRCLE FOOD 4 THOUGHT!
Campaign to Re-open Circle Food Store

For More Information, Contact:
Khalil Shahyed
504-259-1673
7th Ward Neighborhood Center
504-373-5117
circlefood4thought@gmail.com

“How many of you remember the Easter holidays, with all the Easter rabbits, pecan, heavenly hash and gold brick eggs???? The snack bar in the old days was the bomb. Gumbo crabs, shrimp, catfish and crawfish were to die for. You could also purchase school uniforms and supplies for your kids at Circle Food Store. Cash checks, purchase money orders and pay your utility bills there too.”

NEW ORLEANS, July 23, 2009 – The kick-off event of the Campaign to Re-open Circle Food Store, CIRCLE FOOD 4 THOUGHT! will take place at 6:30PM on WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, AT 1522 ST. BERNARD AVE. in the CIRCLE FOOD STORE PARKING LOT.

This event will include a variety of activities, including: the unveiling of a mural by local artists, muralists Elizabeth Traina and Ivan Watkins, spoken word by SADDI KHALI and CHUCK PERKINS, brass band music from THE HOT 8 BRASS BAND, a marketplace featuring local fresh produce and prepared foods vendors from various FARMERS’ MARKETS, audio recordings of stories about the store by community members produced by MONDO BIZARRO and FYRE YOUTH SQUAD, and testimonials by community members and the store’s owner, DWAYNE BOUDREAUX.

Additionally, there will be opportunities for attendees to sign postcards to local officials pushing for the store’s re-opening, and for recording memories and stories about CIRCLE FOOD. In addition to community members, we will be inviting other local neighborhood organizations, food-related organizations, local politicians, and local business owners.

HISTORY
-    Circle Food Market opened in 1919 as a farmer’s market.
-    In 1938, the store was formally incorporated and eventually became a full grocery market.
-    It was the first African-American owned and operated grocery store in New Orleans.
-    The store has been closed since Hurricane Katrina caused massive flooding and structural damage.
-    Bring Back Circle Day – August 25, 2007 – brought out over a thousand local residents to shop at an open air market held in the Circle Food Store parking lot.

WHY KEEP CIRCLE FOOD STORE LOCALLY OWNED?
-    60 cents of every dollar spent at a locally owned store is reinvested in the local economy.
-    20 cents of every dollar spent at a chain store (e.g., Walgreens or WalMart) is reinvested in the local economy.
-    6 cents of every dollar spent at a big box retail grocery (e.g., Rouses or Albertsons) is reinvested in the local economy.

Benefits of a Community Owned-Cooperative Grocery
-    A community-owned grocery ensures local ownership.
-    A community-owned grocery can help to keep prices low because the goal is not private profit but rather to meet the shopping needs of the community.
-    Profits from a community-owned grocery belong to the whole community rather than to individual investors.
-    Community ownership means shared responsibility for and investment in the grocery store’s success, thus strengthening the community.
-    Community ownership empowers local people to have greater control over local economic development decisions.

CIRCLE FOOD 4 THOUGHT! will also serve as one of several Community Renewal events held in conjunction with the Urban Bush Women Summer Leadership Institute, bringing community members of the 7th Ward and surrounding areas together with other supporters of the Circle Food Store to celebrate the store’s rich history and push for its re-opening.

Sponsors:

7th Ward Center
The 7th Ward Neighborhood Center is a community-based neighborhood center located in New Orleans’ historic 7th Ward area. Sponsored by Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans, the 7th Ward Neighborhood Center opened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to provide community members with a space where neighbors can come together to reconnect and organize and to participate in the rebuilding of their lives and neighborhoods.

Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans (NHS NOLA)
NHS NOLA was founded in 1976 as a private, non-profit housing corporation.  It was created in the belief that a partnership between local residents, financial institutions, businesses, and local government working together can stop decline, promote reinvestment, and restore pride and confidence in urban neighborhoods.

Urban Bush Women
Urban Bush Women (UBW) seeks to bring the untold and under-told histories and stories of disenfranchised people to light through dance. We do this from a woman-centered perspective, as members of the African Diaspora community, in order to create a more equitable balance of power in the dance world and beyond. www.urbanbushwomen.org

Junebug Productions
The Mission of Junebug Productions is to create and present artwork of the highest quality that encourages and supports African Americans in the Black Belt South who are working to improve the quality of life available to themselves and others who are similarly oppressed and exploited.
www.junebugproductions.org

 July 8, 2009

by Emilie Bahr, America’s Quarterly blog http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/712

Just upriver from the French Quarter—New Orleans’ oldest and most famous district—the wrought iron balconies and handsome Creole townhouses give way to a scruffier set of neighborhoods that are getting lots of attention lately thanks to new development plans.

The Faubourg Marigny and Bywater districts in recent years have become the city’s new havens of bohemia—places where artists, musicians and eccentrics thrived after the French Quarter became overrun with tourists (many of them in search of 3-for-1 beer specials) and wealthy folks.

Now, locals—and good music—are more likely to be found at one of the bars in the Marigny than along bead-laden Bourbon Street.

Hurricane Katrina—the 2005 storm that went down as one of the deadliest in U.S. history—only strengthened the two neighborhoods’ appeal. Like the French Quater, they escaped serious flooding due to their strategic location along the Mississippi River, on some of the city’s highest ground. Today, these traditionally working-class neighborhoods are also the site for an ambitious project set to break ground in the fall that will transform much of the riverfront into a park. Not surprisingly, housing values have skyrocketed and investors are busy buying up the peeling shotgun structures that can still be had at bargain prices.

Running just north of these two neighborhoods is St. Claude Avenue—a stark dividing line between areas of increasing vibrancy and those where the poverty is more heavily entrenched and the flood damage, even four years after Katrina, pronounced. St. Claude today is a patchwork of grand and ramshackle buildings, many of them boarded up and abandoned or donning signs advertising payday loan outlets and fast-food joints. Followed for a few miles, St. Claude leads into the city’s infamous Lower Ninth Ward.

But the avenue is staging a comeback. It is already home to a burgeoning arts community, with galleries and music venues cropping up with regularity alongside funky standards with names like Sweet Lorraine’s and Saturn Bar.

This spring, a group of MIT urban planning students adopted the avenue, tasked with developing a plan for revitalization. In May, they presented their findings at a former St. Claude public school that has been converted into artists’ studios and a performance space.

There is also talk of bringing the city’s iconic streetcar back to the avenue, which was once home to one of 26 streetcar lines that crisscrossed the city at the peak of service in the mid-1920s. Plans to extend the streetcar to St. Claude Ave. have been in the works since the late 1990s, but floundered after funding for the project proved elusive. Transit officials and streetcar advocates are now optimistic that the plan can be realized with the help of public transit funding included in the federal stimulus package. The proposed extension is dubbed Desire, after the streetcar line that once ran parallel to St. Claude and lent its name to Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire.

Among the other players agitating for the St. Claude transformation is developer Pres Kabacoff, who intends to soon begin construction on a multi-million dollar “Healing Center” to be housed in a former furniture store along the avenue. The multi-purpose center will include such signature urban amenities as a yoga studio, food co-op, organic café, and meditation space. An athletic 60-something who sports a silver goatee, Kabacoff, through his firm, was responsible in the early 1980s for the redevelopment of the city’s Warehouse District, then a mishmash of discarded one-time manufacturing facilities, into the high-end condos and apartments of today.

Kabacoff’s current venture, undertaken with his voodoo priestess girlfriend, has garnered widespread praise. Still, there are those who wonder how they figure in to the grand plans being hatched in their midst. The concerns are perhaps most pronounced among the residents of the mostly poor, African-American neighborhoods on the northern side of St. Claude.

As Reggie Lawson, an African-American resident of a nearby neighborhood told me: “You can’t force evolution. They want coffee shops and antique boutiques and on and on and on. That’s not the history of the neighborhood.”

His concerns might be exaggerated, but they speak to an ongoing challenge among myriad ones confronting New Orleans as it continues to rebound from Katrina: balancing the new opportunities that stand to benefit the city as a whole with the interests of those that help make it so special in the first place.

Emilie Bahr is a guest blogger to AmericasQuarterly.org. She is a staff writer at New Orleans CityBusiness.