Times Square visits Fat City on Friday when a Manhattan urban planner takes a walking tour of Metairie's former entertainment district. Greater New Orleans Inc., the regional economic development group, brought Times Square Alliance President Tim Tompkins to town for help reimagining Fat City. Tompkins is expected to participate in a roundtable discussion Thursday afternoon with Jefferson Parish's Fat...
Times Square visits Fat City on Friday when a Manhattan urban planner takes a walking tour of Metairie's former entertainment district. Greater New Orleans Inc., the regional economic development group, brought Times Square Alliance President Tim Tompkins to town for help reimagining Fat City.
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Traffic flows on 18th Street through Fat City.
Tompkins is expected to participate in a roundtable discussion Thursday afternoon with Jefferson Parish's Fat City Advisory Board and to stroll the neighborhood Friday morning with some of its members.
Once a booming cluster of nightclubs, restaurants and apartments, Fat City's core has become a mishmash of empty buildings, cheap multi-family housing and convenience stores. To be sure, it has attracted a few new commercial properties, and some retail businesses and condominiums thrive on its fringe. But the transformation that the Parish Council envisioned when it rezoned the district two years ago has yet to materialize.
While Jefferson leaders might blanch at replicating Times Square's eye-popping, neck-craning electronic billboards in Fat City, there is little doubt that Manhattan's once-squalid "icon of entertainment, culture and urban life" is flourishing again and could provide some sort of template for new development
The Times Square Alliance, founded in 1992, is a non-profit group that says it works to improve and promote that district. Tompkins, its president since 2002, has a history of working on New York's parks and economic development and is an adjunct assistant professor of urban planning at New York University.
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Times Square Alliance President Tim Tompkins tosses confetti out his office window in Manhattan in 2004, during the annual "air worthiness test" of the confetti for the Times Square New Year's Eve celebration
GNO Inc.'s interest in Fat City is threefold, President Michael Hecht said:
- It seeks to organize business "hubs" for telecommunications, computer, gaming and similar outfits. "We need to develop ever more places where digital companies can locate," he said.
- It wants to support Jefferson Parish's goals of attracting more young people and establishing a unique identity.
- Hecht himself grew up in New York, when Times Square was slowly evolving in the 1980s and 1990s from a "squalid drag" into "one of the great economic attractions in the country."
