Southeast of the French Quarter, past an already eastern neighborhood called Bywater and across a set of disused railroad tracks, there's a levee locals call The End of the World.
It jets into the Mississippi under the shadow of the East Bank Naval Clinic, a set of three hauntingly desolate buildings decommissioned in 2011, and is bordered by Industrial Canal. A tanker is parked at a dock the city's renting out until it decides how to develop the clinic's 23-acre plot.
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There's little public space on the levee, but it's space enough. A narrow sliver of grass determinedly sprouts and cypress trees line the shore, their gnarled roots maneuvering around a rocky riverbed littered with beer bottles and other refuse. A few yards away, under a disused metal radar tower 5 or 6 men and women sit around, looking like they have nowhere else to be and like they're okay with that. A man jogs by with his dog and a group of men and boys, probably fathers and sons, fish a little ways down the 1500 foot levee, closer to civilization.
END OF THE WORLD: ABANDONED NAVAL CLINIC - DRONES OVER NEW ORLEANS
