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For 300 years, the marshes between the Mississippi River and the shores of Lake Pontchartrain have been filled with mysteries of all kinds.
The strange green boulders that line the sidewalk at the corner of Cohn and Lowerline streets near East Carrollton are one of them.
Made of poured concrete and painted a gangrenous olive color, it’s about the length of a pickup truck, but probably half as tall. From the Lowerline it looks like a porch detached from the former home. Viewed from another angle, it suggests a parade-style viewing platform.
But there’s a manhole-sized hatch at the top, along with a pair of vents and an antenna on a pole that can reach more than 20 feet into the air, like something out of Lost.
It turned out to be a Sewerage and Water Board project.
a bit of a waste of history
Specifically, it’s the entrance to Underground Sewer Lifting Station 1, a 120-year-old underground facility designed to pump waste from low-lying areas of the city where gravity is unfavorable.
In fact, it can boast of being one of the oldest S&WB facilities still in operation.
Founded in 1899, the agency merged with the city’s Drainage Board only four years later, bringing all of New Orleans’ sewer, sewer, and water duties under the purview of a single agency.
Prior to this, in the late 1800s, city sewers—so far as they existed—were almost entirely surface (i.e., manure ditches).
This is not ideal.
“In the late 1770s, a major hotel in New Orleans regularly dumped sewage into an open drain in front of its premises at midnight, and the night watchman on duty nearby was bribed to leave, and this transgression was a promise,” Historian Writer John Smith Kendall in his 1922 History of New Orleans.
a slow road
In 1880, the owners of the trendy St. Charles Hotel took it upon themselves to build a private sewer between their St. Charles and Common Street buildings and the Mississippi River. “This,” Kendall wrote, “was the first main pipeline laid in New Orleans.”
Around that time, a private company—the New Orleans Drainage and Sewerage Company—was formed to take on what was known as the “New Orleans Sewer.”
According to The Daily Picayune, the company was responsible for building “a small watertight sewer system to receive sewage; water line.”
Work got off to a slow start, but the company made remarkable progress, laying approximately 5 miles of sewer in a few years. Unfortunately, the cost of this work was much higher than anticipated. By 1895, the company was in financial trouble, prompting the city to purchase its assets and take over the project.
At this point, New Orleans’ sewers became a municipal project.
a hasty reason
Things became even more urgent in 1897, when yellow fever returned after a nearly 20-year lull. That led to a reinvestment in sanitation, and the city’s voters approved a fund to fund it.
By 1901, Cohn and Lowerline’s Sewer Lifting Station No. 1 was in place, and sewage flowed into the station from underground reservoirs as far away as St. Charles and Carrollton Avenues, where pumps lifted it 7 feet out of the city.
According to newspaper reports, further improvements were made in 1905. More were filmed in 1933.
It still operates today as part of a network of 1,450 miles of sewers running beneath the city, all served by 82 pumping and pumping stations. Seventy-nine of these stations are unmanned, including the Cohn Street facility.
However, the plan is to replace it with modern above-ground facilities.
Work officially began in mid-2022 when S&WB awarded a contract to demolish two buildings on the corner of Cohn and Lowerline to make room for a new pumping station.
One of the buildings planned for demolition, a 99-year-old building affectionately known as the “corner store,” has sparked no shortage of protests. Useless. The building has been modified several times, is crumbling from years of neglect and is considered to have no historic value.
Today, it is gone and turned into a vacant lot, waiting for construction to start. Upon completion, the lines powering the 120-year-old underground facility will be rerouted and the old manure pumping station will be decommissioned and removed.
The mystery of Carrollton’s sidewalk boulders will be gone.
Sources: Times-Picayune Archives; New Orleans Sewerage and Water Commission; “A History of New Orleans” by John Kendall; CCAnola.org.
Know a New Orleans building worthy of this column, or just curious about one?Contact Mike Scott at moviegoermike@gmail.com.
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