The Long Road Back
Good old days. Freret Street today is a far cry from its heyday. So says Nash Barreca, anyway, but he should know, since he has lived here since he was born, back in 1928. He grew up above his father's restaurant, Frank's Steakhouse, just across the street from his grandparents. In the heart of Freret's business district, Barreca and all his seven kids attended primary school--"the short grade," he calls it--at Our Lady of Lourdes, the Roman Catholic church on the corner. Today, the archdiocese is trying to decide whether to reopen the school or close its doors once and for all.
For 42 years, Barreca was the Mardi Gras krewe chief of the Freret Business Association. The parade used to come right down Freret in the old days, and Barreca would stop his float out front of his parents' place and hoist a glass in their honor. Today, Barreca's son, Nash Jr., is the chef at the highly regarded Nash's restaurant up in Broussard, but he recalls as if it were yesterday learning to cook at the knees of the Creole ladies who worked at Frank's and buying frosty-cold snowballs from the old men who ran the stands that used to line Freret. Then there was the Freret Jet, the rattletrap bus that ran the length of the street, carrying screaming kids and sweating adults to sporting events over at Tulane, rumbling past the sidewalk shops stacked with cages of live chickens and turkeys. Order a bird for dinner, and the proprietor would wring its neck right then and there, then pluck the carcass clean.
That was then, though. More recently, after the neighborhood struggled with white flight and the murder of a beloved business owner, an infusion of government cash helped revitalize homes and businesses up and down Freret, to the point where some residents even began worrying about fast-buck investors flipping properties, driving prices beyond the means of longtime residents, says Glenis Scott, president of Neighbors United, the neighborhood association. "We grappled with that," he says. "We didn't want to discourage investors, but we didn't want to see our own folks price-gouged out of the neighborhood." Today, such worries seem a distant memory.
From the outside, Dunbar's Creole Cooking was never much to look at. Inside, though, it was a neighborhood institution, the kind of place where the campaigns of promising black politicians got launched, where deals that sealed careers got hatched. When Dunbar's celebrated its 20th birthday last year, the Rebirth Brass Band played. Mardis Gras Indians and longtime customers danced outside the doors.
The shop had come a long way from its modest beginnings, when Celestine Dunbar carried steaming plates of food from her home across the street to the little sandwich shop she took over. When customers started lining up out the door, Dunbar's daughter, Peggy, came to help out. Now, after the floodwaters virtually destroyed the place, Dunbar is back to cooking meals in her home. Unable to get a small-business loan, she's doing catering to raise money to get the restaurant fixed up. It's hard work. "You cry sometimes, when you're having a bad day,"Dunbar says. But the trick, she adds, is "to make it look like you're crying for someone else."
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