Coming back to Carrollton — Cooter Browns in the News!
September 29th, 2005Ok, the best comment is about Cooter Brown’s oysters!
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - A month after Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans in ruins and less than a week after Rita dealt it a second blow, officials relaunched a “repopulation” campaign on Thursday to get the city back on its feet. They threw open the doors for business owners in some neighborhoods and planned to allow residents to start returning on Friday in a phased effort to bring life back to streets now largely abandoned.
In the city’s Uptown area, store and restaurant owners used power washers to remove muck laid down by floods that had at one point swamped 80 percent of the city and moved out goods and food that were now ruined.
“If they don’t get these businesses going again, the city ain’t going to have any money,” said Art Depodesta, part owner of the restaurant and bar Cooter Brown’s. “I want to be the first to open in Uptown.” Workers busily scrubbed everything with bleach and Depodesta said he tossed away about $10,000 worth of rotten food. “It was nasty. The oyster cooler, well, the dead bodies I saw got nothing on that oyster cooler,” he said. “The time for all the ‘woe, woe, woe is me’ business is over. It’s time to get going.”
Signs were posted everywhere offering cleanup services, construction crews, electrical repairs and demolition.