Woman throws ‘birthday’ party for roadworks tearing up her street for a year
New Orleans nurse makes cake replicating the messy construction
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Your support makes all the difference.Most people don’t celebrate when construction work on their street lasts a whole year, but Natalie Naquin Harvey isn’t most people.
When the unfinished road work in front of her Lakeview, New Orleans home hit the one-year mark, Ms Harvey celebrated the “birthday” with a cake and balloons.
“Happy first birthday to our street construction!” she wrote in a Facebook post. “It was one year ago this week when they first began to rip up our street. One year later, half the street is impassable – just last week, we had a massive, 6-foot-deep hole!”
In honour of the anniversary, the young nurse baked a “replica of the street scene in cake form”, featuring two layers of uneven chocolate asphalt, peanut butter pavement, and a crew of Lego construction workers tearing it all up.
Ms Harvey posted photos of the cake on Facebook, along with some shots of herself celebrating at the work site in a party hat with some yellow and orange balloons – colours matching the construction cones and vehicles.
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The post has been shared almost 900 times and received over 1,100 “likes”.
But when WGNO asked the nurse about the construction, she wasn’t celebrating.
“Our driveways on my side were blocked for about three months this summer,” she said of Lakeview’s 20th Street, which is visibly torn up in the photos. “Now the other side is blocked, so nearly every house on the opposite side of the street from mine has their driveways blocked.”
Ms Harvey blamed the seemingly endless construction on the workers’ uneven schedule.
“They’ll work every day for a week, then there will be two to three weeks with nothing,” she told WGNO. “The work has definitely picked up in the last couple of weeks, but you never know when it’s going to stop and when it’s going to start back up again.”
Comments on the Facebook post were sympathetic.
“Will you come celebrate our 1st construction birthday in July? We are just down the road on 14th street,” one person wrote.
“If I were you I’d find out where your mayor and all high ranking city officials live and take pics of the roads in front of their house and post them,” another said. “I’ll bet they’re in perfect shape.”
Few expressed optimism that the work would get finished soon.
“A committee will have to be formed to investigate the delays first...” one commenter predicted.
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