By John Howell

I’m sitting here at the PJ’s Coffee Shop on Tchoupitoulas Street where I’ve come to access their wifi to restore my iPhone settings. Somehow, I inadvertently eliminated everything in the iPhone last night. I don’t understand everything/anything I know about this.

When I drove up to our house on Laurel Street I noticed the alterations at Wisner Playground that my wife had been telling me about. They’ve closed the park where the dogs and their owners have so recently roamed with much freedom and in growing numbers. Closure is temporary to allow construction of a fence that will separate the outfield of the softball field from what will become a designated dog area.

The construction was a compromise between doggers who were so enjoying loosing their animals in the large, fenced space and againers who pointed to laws requiring dogs to be leashed. In what must have been a real dust-up of a public meeting, againers accused the doggers of being criminals for bringing their dogs to the enclosed park and then turning them loose.

Doggers retorted that it was them and their animals who kept the criminals from becoming re-established in the park after Katrina. Something about having dogs running around with sniffy greetings left the dubious crowd rather nervous, and they moved on.

The construction creating the designated dog area — DDA — is an attempt to make everybody happy. Dogs will be henceforth be prohibited from other areas under the threat of fine.
I am skeptical, but since I literally have no dog in the hunt, I can be happy sitting back and waiting for the outcome.

And that’s the report from Laurel Street in Uptown New Orleans where the ratio of neighbors to hoods is ever in flux and soon likely to realign.