Demolition on the long-abandoned Lindy Boggs Hospital in Midcity will soon begin.
The New Orleans City Council finalized the funding to demolish the hospital, which has been vacant since Hurricane Katrina, during its meeting on Thursday.
However, the process to redevelop that land won't happen overnight.
"The demolition is going to take a while," Mid-City Neighborhood Association Board secretary Michelle Schafly.
According to Schafly, the demolition process will involve "clawing away" at the building, tearing down the hospital piece by piece until it ain't there no more.
"It will be a very slow demolition and a very deliberate demolition where they will start on the Conti Street side of the building," Schafly said. "They're going to take down the little power plant building first."
That work, she says, will begin after contractors take care of some preliminary work.
"First they do have some assessments remaining, and they do have some abatement to take care of before actual demolition can commence," Schafly said. "I think they estimated abatement to be anywhere from two weeks to up to a month, and then we'll probably start seeing some real progress."
Schafly told WWL's Newell Normand that the developers are still working to figure out what they'll build on the property.
"I think Woodward is proposing something along the lines of mixed-use development where there are businesses and some housing, restaurants, (and) things of that nature, but it has to make sense to them financially. That's what we've been told," Schafly said. "We hope whatever they do build is not just necessarily beneficial to the neighborhood but to the city as a whole."
