City Park Avenue Sandwich Shop

The City Park Avenue Sandwich Shop was one of the longest surviving\r\n lunch places in the city. Located across the street from Delgado Community\r\n College, from 1931 until the mid-1990s it served traditional New\r\n Orleans poor boys to students, faculty and staff as well as neighborhood residents. Members of the Heno family ran the shop for its entire existence. Into the early 1990s, it was most likely the oldest continuously operating poor boy shop in the city.\r\n\r\n Family history maintains that during the 1930s, Delgado students would race down the steps of Isaac Delgado Hall at the start of the lunch period in order to get a good spot in line for a poor boy. During the mid-1990s one of the Heno family members transformed the shop into a great coffee house with pastries made on the premises. The first few months following the transition to baked goods found groups of firemen recruits from the nearby New Orleans Fire Department Training Academy entering the bakery and expecting to order poor boys. Encountering coffee and pastries instead, the\r\n mystified firemen retreated and helped to spread the news that a new,\r\n vegetarian Heno family member had made some changes. The coffee shop/bakery closed a couple of years before Hurricane Katrina.

Citation

“City Park Avenue Sandwich Shop,” Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, accessed March 19, 2024, https://hurricanearchive.org/items/show/34328.