Nola Boils and Catering

09/07/2026

Forty three years ago tonight, New Orleans rode the Zephyr for the last time. 🎡

September 5, 1983 was the final day Pontchartrain Beach was open to the public. Labor Day weekend. The lights came on at the end of Elysian Fields Avenue over Lake Pontchartrain the way they had for decades, the Zephyr climbed its lift hill, and then it was over.

Harry Batt Sr. had opened the place in 1928 and moved it to the lakefront in the early thirties. For two generations it was the summer of an entire city. The Zephyr and the Wild Maus and the Ragin' Cajun. The Bali Hai. The seawall steps. The sand that everybody knew was trucked in. The high school nights and the first dates and the smell of the lake.

By 1983 the arithmetic had turned. Attendance was down, insurance had gotten brutal, the lake had pollution problems that closed the swimming, and the World's Fair was coming to the riverfront the next year. The family sold. There was one last private charity night on September 24, and then the rides came down. 🌛

And there is a harder piece of this that deserves saying out loud. For most of its life Pontchartrain Beach was whites only. It did not integrate until 1964. Black New Orleans had its own lakefront park, Lincoln Beach, out past Little Woods, where Fats Domino and Nat King Cole played and where thousands of families made exactly the same kind of memories. When Pontchartrain Beach opened its gates in 1964, the city let Lincoln Beach go, and it closed the next year.

So two sets of New Orleanians are grieving two different vanished summers, and only one of them usually gets talked about.

Both places are gone now. What is left is a stretch of lakefront, a name people still say, and thousands of grown adults who can tell you exactly where they were standing.

The Zephyr came down. Nobody has ever really gotten off it.

09/06/2026

You book it. We cook it. Welcome to Mob Town Boils & Catering

09/03/2026

A twelve year old boy lost both legs under a New Orleans streetcar. More than a century later the city is still buying candy from that family. 🍬

Sam Cortese was the son of Sicilian immigrants. The accident took both legs below the knee, and the schools of that era simply put him out. His father built him a cart pulled by goats, and the boy went to work as a street vendor, selling fruit and vegetables out of it.

What sold best was not the produce. It was the taffy his mother made at holidays, and when the leftovers moved faster than the vegetables, Sam Cortese figured out what business he was actually in.

In 1915, at twenty five, he commissioned a wagon from the wheelwright Thomas Brinker, and what he asked for was not a cart. It was a candy factory on wheels. Windows all the way around so customers could watch. Running water. A marble slab for cooling. A brass hook for pulling the taffy. He could drive it from inside while he worked.

Three flavors then. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. Three flavors now.

He named the company Roman Chewing Candy rather than anything Sicilian, on the theory that Roman would sell to everybody. He worked the wagon himself until a few months before he died in 1969.

In the early 1970s his grandson Ron Kottemann took it over, and he is still out there, in the same 1915 wagon, behind a mule named Miss Mae who knows the uptown routes well enough that he can pull taffy while she walks and steer her by voice. His son Daniel is next.

Kottemann's first day selling was outside Tulane Stadium, where the Sugar Bowl used to be played. That stadium was torn down in 1980.

The wagon that parked outside it is still working.

A hundred and eleven years. No factory, no franchise, no second location. One mule at a time. 🍬

05/06/2026

Just stop it. 🥱
Karl Broussard

David J. Hubbell

03/30/2026