NEW ORLEANS — It has been pinned in place with plastic wrap and replaced with a hand-painted doppelganger.
Now, neighbors are hoping they will not need any more creative solutions for their stop sign after a city crew replaced its pole Wednesday. The district’s City Council member credited a popular Instagram page for bringing the stop sign to her attention.
Three weeks ago, Look at This F**** Street posted its first picture of the stop sign, which sits at the corner of Prytania Street and Lyons Street Uptown. It showed the sign on the ground with a hand-painted replica standing in its place.
Later, it posted another update showing the stop sign back up. Hours later, it posted one with it leaning into the street.
Then this week the stop sign was featured in yet another post, this time held in place against a nearby newspaper box with layers of plastic wrap.
“I have no idea who the creative person was that Saran-wrapped it,” said Lesley Nash, who painted the replacement stop sign seen in the first post, “so that’s the stop sign we have now.”
Nash owns the studio and gift shop Fly Right Galaxy, which sits opposite the block from the stop sign. For months now, she has watched the sign fall down and get fixed repeatedly, with many close calls in between.
“Prytania Street is a very busy street and people that don’t live in the neighborhood would fly down, we were sitting outside there’s always horns and you can hear the screeching,” she said.
Nash and her neighbors are the ones who have been sending the pictures to Look at This F**** Street, in hopes they would get the City’s attention. Wednesday, it finally did.
Not long after WWL Louisiana showed up, a city crew began pulling up the old stop sign pole and installing a new one. District B City Councilmember Lesli Harris arrived at the intersection a few minutes later.
She said she had called the Department of Public Works many times about the stop sign after following the saga on the Instagram page. “This morning, we awoke to ‘Look at This Effin’ Street’ again, showing this stop sign and the pole actually Saran-wrapped around the paper distributor,” she said, “so we, yet again, informed DPW and asked them to come out to make a permanent fix.”
The crew pointed out to WWL Louisiana that there were two holes in the cement, and the old pole was installed in one very close to a parking spot which may have been why it was knocked down so many times. They installed the new one in the other hole, which is about a foot further away.
Later that afternoon, Look at This F**** Street posted an update to its story showing the pole standing up once again, in what is hopefully the last of the sign's celebrity.
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