Just One More Thing To Save

Last night I got a call from my friend Mary in New Orleans. She was calling to tell me that The Coliseum Theater had burned down yesterday.

I spoke about The Coliseum Theater on this blog the night before I left New Orleans, just over a week ago,as I walked down Coliseum Street on my accidental tourist day. I've been watching people working on bringing it back from Katrina for the last two months. Now it seems like a melancholy opportunity to have seen that lovely building one more time before it's demise.

The report I saw said that fire crews responded to the blaze, but couldn't get enough water pressure from the lines (a problem that led to the fire devastation all the way back in San Francisco's 1906 earthquake) so helicopter crews had to fly in water from the river. That's a pretty good example of the way things ARE NOT working in New Orleans yet.

David Torkanowski, keyboard player extraordinaire, and pianist for Astral Project (and many others) had recently "almost" bought the building for a scoring studio. In fact, I had read that he had purchased it the week before Katrina (there are sure a lot of THOSE kind of stories floating around). In a news clip from WDSU, David says that he wants to bring it back.

I hope so... it was a great building, one of those places that always made me smile.