A New Orleans Memory August 22, 2009

The Blue Plate Mayonnaise factory in New Orleans

This Friday will the be the fourth anniversary of the day I fled my home in balmy, beautiful New Orleans- just hours ahead of Katrina’s devastating assault. In honor of this day and the city that I love, I offer my fellow New Orleanians (and the world) a remembrance, a thin sliver of life before the storm. A landmark that is no more: The Blue Plate Mayonnaise sign.

The Blue Plate Mayonnaise factory was located on Jefferson Davis Parkway in a neighborhood called Gert Town (according Wikipedia, where I also got this picture). I never knew anything about Gert Town, or that when I passed the factory at night, spellbound by the towering blue-bulbed letters,  I was passing through such a place. All I could do was marvel at the beauty of that sign.

Why was the sign so beautiful? The answer to that question is a bit of a mystery. Even though I buy Blue Plate mayonnaise (they still make it – in Tennessee) and wouldn’t dress a sandwich in anything less, the sign’s power wasn’t as an icon of quality. It was more than that- a little twinkle in the city’s eye.

It was old-fashioned looking, proud and industrial in that first-half-of-the-twentieth-century kind of way. The letters complimented the building’s art-deco architecture, but the sign’s appeal transcended merely being retro or quaint; there was something downright magical about it. If I passed it during the day, I regretted the very sun in the heavens for darkening the letters and revealing the scaffold to which they were secured. Sometimes, I felt myself drawn down the parkway at night, just to see it. Against the heavy, wet-velvet sky, the letters hovered, luminous, beaming down benevolent blue light onto the dark city streets. In a car full of people, all conversation would suddenly come to a stop as the car passed the sign, and invariably there was at least one wistful sigh as each passenger was momentarily enchanted. It was a New Orleans icon, just as sacred to us as any grottoed Virgin or Joan of Arc.

After the storm, the sign went dark. Even after power was restored and the city began flickering back to life, The Blue Plate Mayonnaise plant stayed closed and the benign blue beacon abandoned us. The hurricane left the sign intact, but the letters were like bones hoisted into the sky on pickets. I asked the friends who moved back home for updates- for any news about the sign- but there were no reports of  illumination.  I have searched online and can not find a single image of the sign at night. Maybe the divine cannot be digitized. I have read that there are plans to build an apartment complex in the old factory, thereby preserving “the historic Art Deco landmark and its neon Blue Plate sign.” The blurb doesn’t say whether the building’s new owners plan to kindle the gasses within the bulbs and set the sign ablaze once more, but I really hope that one day it glows again.