Raising the Ante With Liquor Sales Bid

NEW ORLEANS — The Mardi Gras Zone started life around 2000 as a carnival-trinket warehouse on the edge of the Faubourg Marigny, the slightly scruffy, sometimes funky area just downriver from the French Quarter.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Lee Celano for The New York Times

Many neighbors welcomed the Mardi Gras Zone as a grocery but are not happy about its plans to sell liquor. The owner, Benny Naghi, center, with customers, Carva Layani and Howard Allen.

At first, it held the usual gewgaws: feather boas, Mardi Gras masks and bead necklaces festooned with things like the flag of Israel and fake marijuana leaves. But at some point, the owner, Benny Naghi, started carrying a few local foods favored by tourists, like chicory-flavored coffee and hot-sauce-enhanced potato chips.

Then, after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Naghi somehow managed to reopen, and started stocking milk and microwave snacks in a small space at the front of the Zone, as it is known to habitués. His store, on the first floor of a 7,000-square-foot industrial building, was one of the few to keep extended hours, and eventually groceries elbowed out most of the beads.

Now Mr. Naghi finds himself facing off with neighbors in his new quest, for permission to sell liquor. His struggle to expand his business tells a larger tale in a city still trying to return to normal, as neighborhoods decide whether they are still desperate enough to pay any price to accommodate a store willing to sell a few staples.

The Marigny neighborhood, with its variety of quaint cottages, is on high ground and did not flood after Hurricane Katrina. Nonetheless, only a few grocery stores reopened in the area after the storm, and those that did return kept limited hours.

Not the Zone. “I usually work real late at night,” Mr. Naghi said. “I would go out and there would be absolutely nothing out there.”

Other night owls — including police officers and members of the National Guard — stopped in to buy midnight snacks. A deli case and tables appeared. And the Zone started to stay open round the clock, every day except Yom Kippur, which he observes. (Mr. Naghi was originally from Iran but has lived in Louisiana since he was a teenager.)

Gradually, the Zone evolved into one of those “only in New Orleans” joints, where customers can buy organic butter, squeeze-bottle margarine, a hookah, frozen kreplach, even a seven-pound can of vanilla pudding. There is a piano for use by anyone musically inclined, and one recent evening the cashier was William Madary, who under the name Miss Billie performs the music of Peggy Lee and Patti Page at local clubs.

Many neighbors were delighted by the Zone, and still are. “Benny was a lifesaver,” said Howard Allen, who made a point of saying how much he liked the place, which has become a local hangout. If it were to close, Mr. Allen continued, he would have to drive miles to go to a supermarket in the suburbs.

To such admirers, Mr. Naghi is a symbol of the sort of scrappy, can-do attitude that has kept this city going, even when the government and big businesses failed to help or pulled out entirely, a sort of foodstuffs version of the storefront health clinics that sprang up after the storm.

Other neighbors, however, say Mr. Naghi took advantage of the post-hurricane chaos to open a new business without getting the proper permits and following the rules. And some whose houses are right across Royal Street from the Zone say they are awakened at 4 in the morning by slamming car doors and loud music echoing in the narrow street.

Now Mr. Naghi has applied for a zoning change that would allow the Zone to sell liquor. His customers have been demanding it, he said. Also, he said, the store has not been making money.

But the prospect of a 24-hour liquor store in their midst has infuriated some residents.

“The neighborhood really does need a grocery, so we figure we would put up with it,” said Marie K. Erickson, a law librarian whose two-story house fronts Royal Street. “It’s the 24/7 liquor license which has got us all cranked up.”

Ms. Erickson and other neighbors fear that as more regular retailers return to New Orleans, there will be less demand for Mr. Naghi’s quirky and not-inexpensive goods, and that the Zone will turn into the sort of all-night liquor store where the cashier sits behind a plexiglass safety shield.

If that happens, nobody will want to buy a nearby house — like hers, said Maggie Marx, a waitress.

“It’s all the money I have in the world,” Ms. Marx said of the investment in her home. “After 45 years, that’s schlepping a lot of dishes.”

Chris Costello, president of the Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association, said the neighbors were right to worry. Before the storm, a convenience store on a busier street that sold liquor round the clock was blamed for a lot of problems, including muggings, shootings and lots of late-night noise. Now the store closes at 10 p.m., he said, “and we have no problems.”

That is why, Mr. Costello said, the civic association opposed Mr. Naghi’s zoning change, which was then rejected by the City Planning Commission in late March, even though the commission’s staff had supported the change.

Mr. Naghi has vowed to fight on, and plans to take his case to the City Council.

Buying vegetarian dog biscuits for his pets one evening at the Zone, Mr. Naghi said he believed that most people in the neighborhood supported his 24-hour operation.

“Where else can you go at 4 o’clock in the morning,” he asked, “and be safe?”