NEW ORLEANS — A good crawfish boil would stop most New Orleanians in their tracks, but the setup on the 2500 block of Eton Street holds up traffic for a whole different reason.
The sinkhole, which takes up half of a lane of traffic, is one of the most famous pieces of pothole culture in New Orleans.
“So now it's the crawfish hole. It has plans for May. I have a final plan for our jazz funeral when it gets filled,” laughed Shannon Walsh Sanders.
She costumes the sinkhole’s bright orange construction barrel for the season, year-round.
“How can you miss it? And sometimes it's lit,” she said.
Shannon – who, no surprise, is a teacher – has a plan for every season. You’ve probably seen her works on the satirical Instagram account, ‘Look at this F%^&in’ Street’, which documents New Orleans’ infrastructural shortcomings.
She’s dressed up her sinkhole as a leprechaun hat, marching boots for Mardi Gras, Mr. Bingle (straight from the “North Hole”), a Thanksgiving turkey, Charlie Brown on Halloween, a Saints jersey, a Minion, a rabbit, and a snowball. The tarp and cardboard box “generator” she added for hurricane season even got a response from the Weather Channels’ Jim Cantore.
“I just it's fun and the neighbors like it. But the kids on the school bus like it. Grandparents, parents, they walk their kids, they come on the bicycles to see it. Lots of people stop and take pictures with it. So it hasn't done any harm,” Walsh Sanders said.
Walsh Sanders has lived in this neighborhood her whole life. The pothole, she estimates, moved in about five years ago.
“I've been on the street for 24 years. So the pothole showed up one summer,” she said.
You can see the hole on Google Images, captured in October 2019, with just a few cones thrown in.
Eventually, an orange barrel was added, but it was run over by a car and Walsh Sanders felt it needed some pizazz.
“I don't know, it was Christmas time, and I can't really say what the inspiration was…might have been liquid. And I said, I'm going to decorate the pothole, it's going to be, you know, making it a Christmas tree,” she said.
Neighbors pitched in to add flocking, wrapped presents, and remote-controlled lights. From there, things snowballed.
“Then it just sort of became, ‘What's next?’” Sanders said.
What’s next was internet fame, and, eventually, the attention of artist and author Shannon Kelley Atwater.
“It’s really fun when people have a personal connection to a pothole,” Atwater said.
For her recently-released children’s book, Goodnight Pothole, she picked her favorite decorated potholes around the city, including four designs from Eton Street.
“I needed a good balance of holidays and fun things, so just ones that I liked personally, really,” she said.
The book brings levity to the litter and critters, shells and smells of New Orleans, and of course, the many bumps in the road.
“I just think that our city is filled with so much creativity and good humor that even things like our terrible infrastructure can be turned into fun art that we can all bond over, and I love it,” Atwater said.
The “Shannons” even met up after the book was released, and Shannon Walsh Sanders gave Shannon Kelley Atwater a piece of her Thanksgiving turkey pothole.
“She brought me a piece of pothole history – the turkey head – and now it lives in my studio with me and I just love it,” Atwater laughed.
But the story of Eton Street goes much deeper than crumbling asphalt. The City of New Orleans tells us “Eton was a total reconstruction project” at the turn of the millennium.
The subsurface and utilities were replaced and the street was repaved back in 2000.
23 years later, there are lumps and bumps all down the street. Water ponds and stays when it rains, indicating that something has been sinking for some time.
And in the WWL-TV archives, we found a report from Bill Capo in November 2010 about another sinkhole on the street.
The sinkhole from Capo’s report was just a few houses down from our infamous, decorated pothole, and took up the parking lane.
Ann Brett, of the Aurora Civic Association, told Capo then, "We are very upset about it, because it has been over a year, and it is a huge hole. It’s not a pothole, it's not a sinkhole, it’s a dishwasher hole. You could put a dishwasher in it easily."
To this day, you can see the repair made after Bill’s report.
But it begs the question, what has been going on under Eton Street for at least 13 years?
And how does a pothole, now immortalized in a children’s book, not get the kind of attention the neighbors deserve?
“I just think maybe that the asphalt is not holding up,” Sanders said.
The Department of Public Works tells WWL-TV it is “actively looking for a solution to address the problem.”
But Shannon knows, compared to some other infamous road hazards in New Orleans, “it's a very small fish to fry.”
The Eton Street sinkhole may have staying power, but she’s not seeing it as a speed bump.
“There's physically nothing that I can do to change the infrastructure of the city. And a lot of us can't, right? And so, until that gets done, I'd rather just have, you know, I'd rather have this than a nasty pothole.
We’re just not sure if those jazz funeral plans will get the green light any time soon.
“I would hope this one gets fixed. I hope they all get fixed. But in the meantime, I'm going to continue with the ‘holy’ wars,” she said, laughing.
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