Remaking our Streets: Tchoupitoulas Street transforms from port service to budding hip corridor

Growing up in the 1960s, Paul Bel remembers a very different Tchoupitoulas Street than the one he sees today as he looks out from his workshop on the corner of Ninth Street.

“This used to be all manufacturing along here, people making steel harnesses and other things for the ships,” he said, gesturing up and down the long central strip of Tchoupitoulas in the Irish Channel.

“When I was a kid you could see the docks, the longshoremen coming off boats with bananas, coffee, whatever,” Bel said. “If you could handle it by hand, you’d see guys walking with sacks and throwing it on the trucks. And everyone would go for lunch at Mura’s over on Louisiana,” a family-owned diner that has long since closed.

Bel, 67, runs a home-renovation operation out of part of the 11,000-square-foot building where for three generations his family made awnings, blinds and drapes for New Orleans homes and businesses.

But now, Bel’s building in the 3000 block of Tchoupitoulas has mostly been leased out to Sucré, a high-end pastry operation that moved in two years ago when he closed the awnings business.

“I’m getting ready to hang it up,” said Bel, who spends most of his time these days renovating a retirement home in the suburbs and working on his boat.

Streets, remade

The New Orleans area’s commercial corridors like Tchoupitoulas are constantly changing, but it can be hard sometimes to discern the transformations outside of cataclysms like Hurricane Katrina or major development projects like the one just beginning on the barren lots near the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

In recent decades, shifting demographics, changes in the economy, the steady march of gentrification and other trends have slowly reshaped the places residents and visitors live, work and gather. Tchoupitoulas is no different than many others.

Like other business owners in the Irish Channel, Bel’s family — refugees from the 1840s famines on his Irish side, “salt smugglers” on his Alsatian-French side — had been linked to the maritime trade during his great grandfather Horace’s time, making sails for ships.

They moved into awnings and blinds in the late 1920s and that business remained for nearly a century. But over the years, many longtime residents and businesses tied to manufacturing or the maritime trades along the 5.5-mile corridor have given way to a new batch of residents, and breweries and other businesses.

Instead of serving the port on the street’s Mississippi River side, many have shifted in recent decades toward serving the nearby Uptown neighborhoods. 

Metal-bashing businesses have been replaced by funky furniture makers like Disco Warehouse. There are a couple of traditional auto repair shops, but also “antique” car dealers and the state’s only Tesla service center.

There is an Urban Roots Garden Center and its sister Urban Roast Coffee and Tea Shop attached. Up the road, Big Easy Fitness and Crossfit offers patrons an open warehouse-style space where they can push truck tires and swing large ropes to build muscle. On mild weekends, Tchoup Yard is packed with groups grabbing beers.

Where once there were several large-scale, industrial breweries during the city’s “Brewing Capital of the South” heyday in the 1880s, now stand more modest craft brewing and tap room operations.

The newcomers include Nola Brewing, Miel Brewery & Taproom, Port Orleans Brewing Co. and Urban South Brewery. There is also Nola Distillery making “hand-crafted” spirits.

A unique building stock

Jacob Landry, who started Urban South Brewery in the 1600 block of Tchoupitoulas in 2015, says he was first drawn to the street because it offered relatively cheap space that could combine manufacturing and retail.

“We spent months looking for premises and this was the only place in the city with this kind of building stock, with warehouse and manufacturing space where you could also have a tap room close enough to interact at that retail level,” he said.

The vibe emerging on the Irish Channel strip of Tchoupitoulas might be described as “urban chic,” Landry said. “There is a utilitarian appreciation of it as a thoroughfare for folks to move quickly between parts of the city but also access some cool businesses along the way.”

The redevelopment

The shift of Tchoupitoulas from port access road to hip edge of Uptown wasn’t foreordained, according to architect George Hopkins, who had a hand in turning Tchoupitoulas into the smooth, multi-lane throughway that New Orleanians now take for granted.

“Tchoupitoulas was horrible.” Hopkins said of the street’s condition in the 1980s. “It had not been built to highway standards and had been run over by 18-wheelers since World War II. Because of the blight of the trucks and the port and the junkyard dogs and everything down there, it was in a terrible state.”

Trucks from the port had been trundling through Uptown streets like Magazine, St. Charles and Louisiana Avenue in search of alternative routes to Interstate 10, Hopkins said, because of the poor condition of Tchoupitoulas. Residents were up in arms as the trucks rattled their dishes and caused pollution and safety hazards.

Hopkins had studied Irish Channel blight for his doctoral thesis at Tulane University. Through an acquaintance with Lindy Boggs, the longtime U.S. Congresswoman for Louisiana’s 2nd District, he was eventually put in charge of the redesign of the Tchoupitoulas Corridor in the 1990s.

The massive project that ensued ran for a decade from 1993 and cost more than $140 million, funded by a four-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline and special fuels from 1990 through 2004.

It included building the Clarence Henry Truckway, the two-lane, 3.5-mile road that runs parallel to Tchoupitoulas on the port side of the flood wall, which itself had been built in sections by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers through the 1980s and early 1990s.

The erection of the flood wall and the Tchoupitoulas Corridor project completely changed the character of the Irish Channel area, separating the street from the port it had been an integral part of for so long.

Moving on Uptown

It also coincided with more interest along the entire strip, from the foot of Canal Street through the historic warehouse area and all the way to the Audubon Zoo’s giraffe enclosure.

Michele Beelman, a real estate broker who bought her house in the 6300 block of Tchoupitoulas in the early 1970s for $19,000, said even the Uptown section of the street had a “wrong side of the tracks” reputation back then.

“When we moved in there were no shopping centers, no banks,” said Beelman. “Everyone had to drive out to Schwegmann’s on Airline Drive to do their grocery shopping.”

Schwegmann’s eventually opened on Tchoupitoulas on a site now occupied by a Rouses. Other stores, banks and amenities turned the Uptown stretch of Tchoupitoulas into an upmarket neighborhood early this century.

When Beelman sold their three-bedroom family house in 2016 it fetched just under $1 million.

Still, change has been fairly slow to come to the Irish Channel strip, with Hurricane Katrina playing its part. An economic study in 2007 found that just seven port and 20 retail jobs had been created as a result of the Hopkins’ led Tchoupitoulas project, with the devastation of Katrina outweighing the benefits of the new infrastructure.

Save the cotton presses!

And not everyone was pleased to see change. Preservationists and housing advocates protested initial proposals for the development of Walmart and adjacent housing projects.

It meant razing the last remaining buildings of the old “cotton press district,” the Amelia Cotton Press complex which had been built in 1882.

The preservationists were partly successful, and that cluster of old buildings is still standing next to the Walmart, with its faded “Amelia Cotton Press” signage just visible. It is now owned by the city and used as a depot for the New Orleans Police Department’s special operations unit.

A new catalyst for change now looms for Tchoupitoulas: the proposed River District development and the conversion of the Market Street Power Plant, which envisions an entirely new neighborhood on about 50 acres once dominated by giant cotton press warehouses.

The area would focus on new entertainment and hospitality options for the city, including a venue and boutique hotel at the power plant, a civil rights museum, and possibly a sports stadium.

Hopkins said he has long advocated for rezoning of some of the old Irish Channel workshops so that multi-story residential buildings could go up there. He said the River District neighborhood, if it is successful in linking with the Irish Channel, could spur that kind of development.

Architect Peter Trapolin, whose offices are in the 800 block of Tchoupitoulas, said he is keeping a close eye on plans for the River District, whose developers have recently requested proposals from potential designers.

Its success will depend on whether they can create an authentic new neighborhood as opposed to one primarily focused on tourism.

Trapolin said he’s encouraged at least by the aims voiced by the developers for the new neighborhood.

“The River District developers seem intent on not trying to replicate old New Orleans but to have some feel and flavor of the city while giving it its own personality,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”