The Rock-n-Bowl and Ye Olde College Inn are institutions in New Orleans and world famous icons of our city.

Susan Guidry, the New Orleans City Councilwoman representing the two establishments, may not know this. And it doesn’t appear that some of the neighbors of Ye Olde College Inn, located adjacent to two major thoroughfares (South Carrollton & Earhart Expressway) don’t understand that the business’ rightful adherence to the Light Industrial zoning should be allowed.

No, not in the land of the professional objector – not in a city where it’s more palatable  to have a pair of flooded out homes than a more efficient overflow parking operation (that’s not the streets)  with a veg garden to service Ye Olde College Inn – which is the plan being opposed.

You can read the article, originally written in the New Orleans Times Picayune here. The piece notes the call to action from Simone Bruni of Demo Diva while on her WGSO radio talk show and her exasperation with the lack of sense that observed by all these NIMBY front groups.

The community responsibility that the YOCI & R-n-B team demonstrate is unshakable. They live in New Orleans, have renovated old homes in Mid City near their businesses, they worked their asses off to get their operations open after Katrina, and gave their employees work opportunities in their reconstruction process despite the fact that they got $0.00 from their insurance. Today the chicken coops, herbs, and vegetable gardens they operate across the street from the restaurant are charming and should be examples of neighborhood cooperation. Six jerks in the neighborhood are painting the family as robber barons set out to rape the land and pour concrete over the bones of the neighborhood’s fiber……. sad characterization for a family who own no less that three historically significant homes and has remodeled a 90 or so year old A&P into the structure that now holds Ye Old College Inn.

But when people who don’t fit the liberal model want to CONTINUE their own green practices, serving food grown close to home, sourced locally, and in the process provide lucrative, humane employment to their workers (in an industry under fire for it’s lack of those traits), the obvious double standard aches to be repaired.

If  these people don’t deserve to succeed, I don’t know what else qualifies……

UNCLE GUS!