Big Easy Blog - Now Open: Magazine Row
By PABLEAUX JOHNSON

November 23, 2005

A few weeks after New Orleans started repopulating, the resident hipster crowd sported new T-shirts with an appropriately activist message: Make Levees, Not War.

To visiting media types, it was a sign that the hippies had retooled their message to respond to current events. To locals, it was a sign that shops on Magazine Row were back in business.

The funky tees are a product of boutique Metro Three, and its locally famous New Orleans-themed clothing lines. Previous printings included appealingly retro neighborhood shirts (Uptown, 9th Ward, LGD), but the post-hurricane lines include "Nagin for President" and "Go with the Contraflow" designs; puzzling to outsiders, but for locals, the ultimate in post-storm street cred.

Magazine Row, a Lower Garden District commercial strip filled largely with locally owned boutiques, rebounded quickly from the storms. The funky stretch of colonnaded stores--former auto parts shops, general stores and furniture warehouses--now houses everything from upscale barber shops (Aiden Gill for Men) to new-jack home furnishing establishments (Cameron Jones). The artsy/funky crowd heads over to Winky's for nuevo baby clothes and to Trashy Diva for those all-important corset and vintage couture binges.

Neophobia provides appropriately retro offerings (kitchsy vintage furniture from the 40s to the present) while Relics and Bush Antiques bring you a wide range of antique furniture, decorative art and religious antiquaries.