Shoot out a flashing streetlight? Guerrilla electricians eliminate Algiers Point nuisance.
Mother of triplets balks at City Hall's advice to use a gun
A dark streetlight looms over a street in the Algiers Point neighborhood of New Orleans after guerrilla electricians snuffed after calls to the city about its constant flashing, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Nobody’s sure when the intense, LED streetlamp at the intersection corner of Pacific Avenue and Eliza Street in Algiers Point started flashing like a strobe light 24 hours a day. It wasn’t a flicker; it was a throb, like a visual migraine. One resident thought the annoyance began two months ago, another three months, or maybe it was five months ago.
No one suffered more than Drew Main. “It was just beaming into our house,” she said. The front room was “like a nightclub.”
This was especially problematic because Main is the mother of a five-year old, Sydney, and one-year-old triplets. Charlotte, Georgia and Lincoln like to maintain a rigorous routine: breakfast, walk, snack, nap, lunch, walk, snack, nap, supper, bath, bottle, bed.
Drew Main holds 1-year-old triplets Georgia, Charolette and Lincoln Main as Sydney Main, 4, sits next to her siblings and mother by where a streetlight flashed into their windows every night until guerrilla electrician snuffed it out following calls to the city to fix it, in the Algiers Point neighborhood of New Orleans, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Anything that disrupts the pattern - a pulsing municipal disco light, for instance - can cause the whole modus operandi to devolve into pandemonium. Shut-eye is of paramount importance.
“It was getting so annoying that we couldn’t bring the triplets out in the living room,” Main said. Because, if they get awakened unexpectedly, “our babies won’t go back to sleep.”
Ready, aim, fire
Main saw two options. She and her husband, Brad, could invest in a room full of “serious” custom-made blackout curtains, or someone from the New Orleans Department of Public Works would have to fix the light.
The department's website informs the citizenry that there are no fewer than 54,000 streetlights in New Orleans, and its workforce “is currently addressing a backlog of approximately 700 streetlight outages.” According to the website, “repairs typically take 2-3 weeks.”
In some cases, they can take longer.
Main said that when she called 311 to request non-emergency service, she was told, to her astonishment: “We don’t have contractors to come out and fix it.” To her further astonishment, she said, “the random support person on 311 told us to shoot it out.”
But Main is from Oregon, and her husband from Canada. She says they’re just not take-a-potshot-at-the-streetlamp types.
“That’s not going to happen,” she said.
Instead, she took to the neighborhood Facebook page, colorfully titled “Pointe Algerines Unite!!! aka, NOLA Misfits.” On July 20, she plaintively wrote: “I have about had it with the flashing. We recently had our tree trimmed and now it’s even worse… It literally drives me nuts. I have called, emailed, texted for someone to deal with it. They even said to shoot it out … and I am a terrible aim – LOL – so I can’t really shoot it out. And other ideas?”
Existential dread
Main estimates that almost two months elapsed after she first reported the flashing. But as she was edging toward desperation, her neighbor, Tom Roche, was experiencing inspiration.
Tom Roche sits at his computer where he created a video montage of the streetlight blinking along with classic cinematic screams in the Algiers Point neighborhood of New Orleans, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Roche, a seasoned video editor, moved to New Orleans from Atlanta in 2011 to help create Harry Shearer’s Hurricane Katrina documentary “The Big Uneasy.” The strobing light prompted Roche to channel his inner Hitchcock.
Alfred Hitchcock specialized in wringing psychological terror from the mundane. Remember how he turned everyday birds into flocks of murderous, miniature monsters? Remember how he used an ordinary shower drain to show a nightmarish slashing?
Roche did the same thing with the pulsing Pacific Street streetlamp. By blending disorienting camera angles and the insistent song “Strobe Light” by the B-52s, Roche’s YouTube video made the “spasmatic glow” of the streetlamp seem somehow sinister and menacing. The video climaxes with a montage of Hollywood actors shrieking in terror.
Frame Grabs from "ALGIERS POINT STROBE LIGHT"
When he posted the masterpiece to the “Pointe Algerines Unite!!!” page on the afternoon of July 30, it became a neighborhood sensation.
YOUTUBE LINK
"ALGIERS POINT STROBE LIGHT"
Nocturnal electricians arrive
It’s unclear if it was Main’s plangent posting on Facebook page, or Roche’s satiric video or some unknown factor that prompted action. Not official action, but action.
Neighbor Patricia Sperier happened to be returning home July 30 at about 10:30 p.m. when she stumbled on two renegade electricians extinguishing the light. She said they seemed “semi-legitimate.” Their truck had a yellow hazard flasher and a logo on the door, she said, but she couldn’t make out what it said.
One of the dudes, she said, was standing in the bed of the truck “reverse fishing,” in other words, reaching up into the sky with a long pole. “I’m not an electrician, but I asked myself, ‘Are they going to make this worse?’” Sperier said. “I didn’t know if they were going to electrocute themselves."
Unidentified nocturnal electricians extinguish the flashing streetlight at the intersection of of Pacific Avenue and Eliza Street on July 30, 2022.
Sperier, a catering director, said she’s a fourth-generation Algerine. She loves the place, although - like so many who live in New Orleans neighborhoods - she thinks it might be getting a little, you know, precious. For instance, she said, people shouldn’t move to a place that has church bells, then complain about the church bells.
Thankfully, Sperier said, the strobing streetlight didn’t penetrate her house, but “it was a bit spooky every time I drove home at night.”
It was hard enough to be sure you’re not being followed, or to watch out for passing bicycles, she said, without having to do so in the midst of on-and-off shadows.
A tip, a beer
Sperier said that she personally didn’t even try to contact anyone to fix the light. “In New Orleans? Please. They don’t worry about the big stuff, much less the little stuff,” she said.
She said she didn’t interact with the semi-legitimate good Samaritans as they snuffed out the light. Roche, the west bank Hitchcock, clicked a photo from his balcony of the selfless duo as they worked. Roche said he could hear Main, the perturbed mother of triplets, cheering them on. No one knows exactly how the phantom electricians doused the light.
The good news is that the street light at Pacific Avenue and Eliza Street in Algiers Point has stopped flashing. The bad news is that the intersection is now dark.
And no one knows their identities. But - just like when Odysseus blinded the cyclops - they’ve become eternal heroes. Afterwards, Algerines left small gifts for the two men on Main’s front porch: a $5 bill, a $20 and a bottle of beer.
Now there’s no light at the corner at all.
The mayor’s office did not respond to request for comment on this story.
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