Spanish Town’s Costello Lane calamity – Ugly Award

Spanish Town is known as a sweet, eclectic neighborhood whose residents are quick to rise up against what they view as assaults on its architectural character.

Yet it’s not uncommon to find rental houses in disrepair and yards in various stages of neglect.

On the heels of the neighborhood’s recent up-in-arms response to a proposed apartment development, we decided to find one such property to get the story on the neighborhood’s existing blight.

A New Orleans left turn onto an alley in the heart of the historic neighborhood led us to a conspicuous example: a Costello Lane cottage duplex that’s seen better days.

A mishmash of disregard littered the property: golf clubs, crutches, blackened and mangled pipes and littered bottles of gas and fertilizer. Old mail was strewn about the sidewalks and bulged out of the over-stuffed mailbox, while broken blinds poked from broken windows. The front screen door was useless, entombed within a small jungle of foliage.

Newspaper clippings graffitied the back door, along with a wooden board near the back steps, the words “REVOLUTION” and “God will cleanse the earth of ľ of the population” written on it.

Landlord Molly Middleton seemed as surprised as we were about the condition of her rental property. In fact, she said, another tenant had phoned her about the rental’s conditions just a day earlier.

“I haven’t been down there in a month,” Middleton said. “The guy that lived there was doing the yard work, and I even gave him a list (of what he needed to do). I guess he didn’t do what I asked.”

Middleton insisted she’s a good landlord, and she planned to proceed with all haste to have her recalcitrant tenant evicted. She may press charges.

“I can’t say I haven’t seen it before,” Middleton said with a laugh. “I’ve seen it all. There’s nothing we can do except clean it up and keep on going.”