Bridge City Grill opened in the spring of 2018, less than a mile from the West Bank ramps of the Huey P. Long Bridge. In a brick-fronted former coffee shop, the new proprietors served breakfast, lunch and supper. At midday, the fried catfish plate, with green peas, mac ‘n’ cheese and potato salad, sold for $6.99, and the air was pregnant with promise.

Upriver a bit, a buyer had recently come forward for the dormant Avondale Shipyard. The bridge itself was rebuilt five years earlier, in 2013, a pharaonic $1.2 billion achievement that left politicians gushing it would spawn growth and development in Jefferson Parish’s last frontier: Bridge City, Avondale and the rest of ZIP code 70094.

Upper West Jefferson: 10 years after the Huey P. Long Bridge was widened, growth has been slow on this side of the Mississippi River.

Within three years of the restaurant's opening, however, it went out of business. A few weeks ago, vultures were perched on the roof, picking at carrion in the road. On Thursday, just up the street, Mildred S. Harris Elementary closed for good, as did Joshua Butler Elementary downriver in Westwego, both shuttered because of low enrollment.

Such losses illustrate how the bridge, despite politicians’ predictions of a boom, has failed to deliver on the forecasts.

Vehicle counts down

To be sure, the widened bridge is an engineering marvel, now with shoulders and six 11-foot-wide lanes replacing four shoulderless 9-foot lanes that left motorists clenching their teeth, hunching the steering wheel and praying.

And yet traffic counts on U.S. 90 over the Mississippi River are actually down, from about 49,000 vehicles per day before the bridge project began to less than 41,000 since it finished.

Empty frames for business signs are seen on Bridge City Avenue in Bridge City on Friday, May 26, 2023. Of the 24 commercial buildings on the street, 15 are vacant. STAFF PHOTO BY DAVID GRUNFELD

So is the population of upper West Jefferson, from 34,150 in 2000, to 31,669 in 2010 and 30,638 in 2020.

Business occupancy licenses in Avondale, Bridge City, Nine Mile Point and Waggaman also have declined, from 368 in 2015 to 326 this year.

In retrospect, this area has never recovered, economically, at least, from the closures at the Avondale Shipyard, a process that began in 2010 and ended in 2014, and the Knight-Celotex fiberboard plant. Once the site of 2,100 jobs in Westwego, Celotex shuttered in 2009.

“These were solid, blue-collar communities. They were all employed by Avondale, Celotex or National Gypsum,” said the Rev. Emile “Buddy" Noel, pastor of Our Lady of Prompt Succor Roman Catholic Church in Westwego and the Holy Guardian Angels mission church in Bridge City. “There’s certainly economic decline, but at the same time there is local pride and a sense of hopefulness, and certainly tenacity.”

'It hasn't happened'

Hope soared in the fall of 2018, when a joint venture led by T. Parker Host Inc. bought the shipyard property. Host began converting it into a logistics and manufacturing hub, Avondale Global Gateway, that eventually was supposed to employ 2,000 people. As of this spring, about 300 worked there, and Host is now trying to sell the property to the Port of South Louisiana.

Along with Avondale Global Gateway, the widened bridge was to be a panacea. But thousands and thousands of acres to the south and west remain undeveloped, the only growth being trees or grass.

“It hasn’t happened to the extent we would like,” said John Alario Jr. of Westwego, the retired Louisiana legislator who was one of the politicians keen on the bridge project’s economic development potential. “I hope to live long enough to see things a little better.”

Alario is 79 now, and just one of the leaders who, along with the major landowners, remain optimistic that growth will someday come.

“The bridge was not the catalyst event we needed,” said Mike Sherman, a land use lawyer for several big stakeholders in the area. “It was, however, the building block.”

Depression-era bridge

The original Huey P. Long Bridge opened in 1935, two railroad tracks flanked by traffic lanes to replace the ferries on which motor vehicles and disassembled trains crossed the river. It touched down on the West Bank in an area mostly undeveloped.

File photo: December 1, 1935 The New Huey P. Long Bridge across the Mississippi River When this $13,000,000 structure is completed December 1, 1935. It is located a mile and a half above New Orleans at Nine MilePoint; a combination railroad, vehicular and pedestrian crossing, toll free. From the top of the steel superstructure at the center to the bottom of the central pier, the bridge measures more than 400 feet high; having two railroad tracks (for use by Southern Pacific trains); two 18 foot concrete roadways and two sidewalks. With the approaches it is 4.4 miles longand extends 3,524 feet across the Mississippi at a height of 135 feet above the high water level. Modjeski, Masters and Case are the designers. The Huey P. Long forms part of the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad system and is municipally-owned. The bridge forms a juncture for U.S. highways 90 and 61 as they approach New Orleans. ................. All rights released. Credit optional McDaniels, Bureau of New Orleans News New Orleans Association ofCommerce, P.O. Box 1460. FILE ART

Louisiana approved the widening project in 1989 and work finally began in 2006. It took seven years, in part because the contractors were required to keep the train tracks, highway and shipping channel open as much as possible.

But upper West Jefferson did not blossom, except through public spending. Between Lapalco and Nicolle boulevards, after the bridge project began, taxpayers funded new offices and a conference center for the Jefferson Economic Development Commission, the Patrick F. Taylor Science and Technology Academy and Delgado Community College’s River City campus. They joined the Tournament Players Club Louisiana golf course, which had opened in 2004, and now await construction of the John Alario Jr. Sports Complex.

Catalysts for growth

These projects were seen as potential catalysts for dozens of office and multi-family residential buildings in what urban planners call a “live-work-play” cluster, in the Churchill Business and Technology Park, and for an overall population in the broader Fairfield area of 50,000 – more than double the current population of the entire ZIP code 70094.

The only notable private investment along Nicolle has been the Nola Motorsports Park.

The railroad in the middle of the Huey P. Long Bridge is reflected in an Elmwood building at Mounes and Clearview Parkway on Wednesday, May 24, 2023. STAFF PHOTO BY DAVID GRUNFELD

Ahead of the bridge opening, some predicted that warehousing and light industry in the Elmwood Business Park, on the east end of the bridge, would be rebuilt on cheaper land on the west side.

It was not. Henry Shane, the apartment magnate and real estate developer who lives in Kenner, said individual warehousers need small pieces of land but can’t find them west of the bridge.

Sherman, the land use lawyer, said large-scale warehouse developers don’t yet foresee a reasonable rate of return if they buy West Bank property.

Indeed, since the bridge was widened, property values across upper West Jefferson have risen about 40%, twice the increase for Jefferson Parish as a whole, according to assessor’s office estimates.

Oil, ammonia, houses

Other predictions for the west side of the bridge were major residential and commercial projects. What the area got was a $70 million Fuji Vegetable Oil Inc. plant in Avondale, an $850 million ammonia plant in Waggaman and a few residential subdivisions.

On the horizon is Loop Linen Service, which plans to spend as much as $22 million buying six acres and build a commercial laundry fronting Louisiana 18 south of Bridge City. It’s a loss for Westwego, however, where Loop Linen has operated since 1929.

Why didn’t the bridge widening deliver more? Stakeholders point to swings in the oil and gas industry, hurricanes, the COVID-19 pandemic and the rising costs of fill dirt for the low land, construction materials, property insurance and flood insurance.

Bridge City Avenue, with the Huey P. Long Bridge railroad at rear, is quiet on Wednesday, May 24, 2023. STAFF PHOTO BY DAVID GRUNFELD

Then there’s the chicken and egg question: Is the first step building and selling houses to attract people, or building stores, restaurants and shops to serve them? Or building offices and industry to employ them?

“You’ve got to start with something, get a gas station or a Burger King,” Shane said.

For an Avondale resident, the nearest supermarket these days is four miles away, the Piggly Wiggly in Westwego. But it’s almost as easy and faster to drive across the bridge to the Elmwood Walmart.

Avondale residents are still hopeful. In October, they started an online petition to lure Ideal Markets.

"With the lack of restaurants, quality fast foods and food resources, this would be a great addition to our community,” says the petition, which had 662 endorsements as of Wednesday.

Two land sales

Sherman, the land use lawyer, is also hopeful. He said the Alario Sports Complex, which is intended to attract out-of-town teams and the players’ families to long weekend youth tournaments, could help.

And he said he and two partners are putting their money where his mouth is, buying about 31 acres in the southwest corner of U.S. 90 and Segnette Boulevard for mixed-commercial use.

Similarly interested is developer Ryan Powers, who bought 55 adjacent acres on Segnette about a year ago and had it rezoned for 290 single-family house lots. He has no immediate plans to start work.

"We kind of saw it as speculative development," he said.

Loop Linen’s president, Scott Burke, said he’s excited about moving into a new, bigger plant south of Bridge City, on a tract that the company is buying from one of the biggest players in the area: Marrero Land and Improvement Association.

Related

Loop Linen supplies table linens, aprons and floor mats to restaurants, and medical linens to physicians’ offices, in two states. The company’s new site near the bridge will ease its trucks’ access to the Bayou Parishes, Metairie and customers in New Orleans and all along Interstate 10 between Lake Charles and Pascagoula, Mississippi.

“This could be Elmwood 2.0,” Burke said of upper West Jefferson.

Richard Campanella, associate dean for research in Tulane University’s School of Architecture, saw it differently in his 2020 book, “The West Bank of Greater New Orleans.”

“The last frontier may yet realize such ambition, but history — and geography — are not on its side,” he wrote. “The last frontier could become the next mistake, a replay of New Orleans East fifty years ago, only now in an era of climate change and utter uncertainty in coastal areas.”

Email Drew Broach at dbroach@theadvocate.com.

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