38
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2014
the
Outdoors
issue
T
hirty years ago this summer, I took
a job in the West Bank Bureau of
The Times-Picayune. I was 24,
raw, willing and eager to earn my journalism
stripes. And if there was ever a time where
the cliché, “seems like only yesterday” did
not apply, well — this would be that time.
Because the West Bank in 1984 was a
land out of time, out of mind, out of
sync. Everything was different back then.
Everything
, starting with the name of the
newspaper that hired me.
Back in 1984, it was still called The Times-
Picayune/The States-Item, the product of a
merger between the last two surviving daily
newspapers at that time, in a city that once
boasted more than a dozen.
If you tacked the cheery addendum—“West
Bank Bureau!” — onto your greeting, it was
an unwieldy mouthful every time you had
to answer the phone. We used to joke that
we were the only newspaper in the country
whose business cards needed to “jump” to a
second page just to fit its entire name.
At the time, the Bureau was located at 16
West Bank Expressway, directly across the
roadway from X-Press Books, a notoriously
dark and seedy peep show and porn
emporium. It was a venue where lonely men
went to satisfy their primal urges and the
Gretna Police went to employ periodic sting
operations, plucking the lowest hanging
fruit of society’s criminal element.
As the Bureau’s police reporter, the prurient
duty of publishing the names and lurid
offenses of the men caught in flagrante
WEST BANK
by
Chris Rose
