Fat City Makeover

Written by George Gurtner

Jimmy Camarillo is standing on a corner of Division Street in Fat City captured by the symphony of reconstruction sounds made by the street workers and giant machines as they pound out the first notes of “The Renewal of Fat City.”

“Ain’t it beautiful,” Camarillo says. “It’s finally happening.”

Camarillo first saw the jukebox joint neighborhood that was to become Fat City when he arrived more than 30 years ago, decked out in a powder blue polyester leisure suit replete with garish white belt and shoes. After a long time away from Metairie, Camarillo has returned home, and he comes back in a polished Brooks Brothers suit. He draws some analogies there.

“Yeah,” he says, “What the new council lady is doing with this area is kinda like taking it from a frumpy leisure suit to Brooks Brothers class, know what I mean?”

The “council lady” is Councilwoman Cynthia Lee-Sheng, a dynamo on the job less than one year (elected to District 5 in April, 2009) who is at the forefront of a “Fat City Task Force,” the goal of which is to revitalize the area into a “mixed use neighborhood.”

“The goals (for Fat City) are four-fold,” Ms. Lee-Sheng says. “We’re aiming for a vibrant, mixed-use neighborhood that has a stable residential base. In short, we want families to be proud to call this neighborhood their home. There will be a pedestrian-oriented core that will be centered on 18th Street. In this mix will be family-friendly retail businesses, restaurants and service businesses that serve the families who call the area ‘home’ and at the same time attract visitors and customers from throughout the region.”

The common thread running through it all will be compatible transitions between that aforementioned mixed-use core, the residential areas and the heavy commercial areas such as Lakeside Shopping Center and the business strip of Veterans Blvd.

To be sure, the idea of a “revitalized Fat City” is not a new one, and Ms. Lee-Sheng will be the first to admit that.

“For more than 30 years Fat City has been the subject of numerous studies and reports targeting its revitalization,” Ms. Lee-Sheng says. “Unfortunately, previous attempts to revitalize Fat City have failed. But, now we’re armed with a new found energy, and it’s being directed toward achieving lasting revitalization.”

Ms. Lee-Sheng gives much credit to her predecessor, Councilwoman Jennifer Sneed, who, in early 2005, began meeting with men and women who eventually would become representatives of the Fat City Task Force to begin brainstorming and coming up with a comprehensive plan to move Fat City in a new direction for the 21st Century.

The ball began rolling.

“There was a lot of energy and dedication in those men and women in those meetings,” Ms. Lee-Sheng says. “Capitalizing on that energy, Jefferson Parish began to increase regulatory enforcement of nuisance uses, adopted interim zoning regulations, increased code enforcement, implemented new code requirements governing things like signage, dumpsters and aesthetics, and established a Tax Increment Financing District (TIF) to support future infrastructure and other capital improvements.”

As visions of what Fat City could become grew and jelled into solid ideas, excitement and enthusiasm grew, and those ideas began to take shape.

Thus, Fat City was the only Jefferson Parish neighborhood singled out by the Jefferson Economic Development Commission’s overall (JEDCO) EDGE 2020 Quality of Life Initiative.

Ms. Lee-Sheng sits back and a broad smile crosses her face as she contemplates that fact and envisions what she feels will be the new Fat City.

“It’s happening!” she says. “Phase I of the construction of the 18th Street drainage improvements is expected to be completed this November (2009). Phase II of 18th Street drainage improvements will also consist of concrete panel street replacements, draining upgrades, decorative sidewalks and street scaping.“

And so, Fat City, which was born to become an “alternative to Bourbon Street,” lived a short life to that end (from 1970 to about 1975) then fizzled into a grizzled old anachronism of seedy bars and mega parking problems and more (or less), is looking at a new life for the future.

“We’re on our way and it’s exciting,” Ms. Lee-Sheng says. “We’ve had a lot of false starts in the past. But many people have put a lot of work into this. It’s a go! and the neighborhood that emerges will be something of which we can all be proud.”

Or as Jimmy Camarillo would say, “Fat City is going from leisure suit to Brooks Brothers.”