Olde Towne Slidell Doesn't Take the Umbrellas Down Anymore

Walk First Street on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon in Olde Towne Slidell and you will still walk under eighty umbrellas. They hang open above the sidewalk between Erlanger Street and the triangle where Front Street meets Fremaux, and they are not there for an event. They are there every day, all year, whether anyone downtown is wearing white linen or not.

That detail matters more than it looks like it should. For years, the mental map most Slidell residents carried of their own historic district ran on an events calendar: antique fairs in spring and fall, a festival night here, a holiday market there. Between those dates, Olde Towne was the place you drove through, not the place you stopped. The Umbrella Alley installation, and a run of restaurants that have opened their doors on ordinary weekdays rather than just festival weekends, are quietly rewriting that calendar. The district that used to come alive for one night a year now has enough going on that the one night barely stands out from the rest of the month.

The Night Everyone Still Talks About

Slidell's ninth annual White Linen & Lagniappe lands on Saturday, August 8, from 6 to 9 p.m., and it is still the marquee event of the Olde Towne summer. The City of Slidell presents it with support from the Slidell Commission on the Arts, admission is free, and the evening runs on the same formula that has worked for nearly a decade: after-hours shopping at the antique and boutique storefronts, live music from bands announced closer to the date, and a stretch of First Street packed with people in white summer clothes eating and drinking outdoors. This year's official poster, a watercolor called Vintage Soda Shop, comes from Slidell artist Victoria Brand, who will be on hand selling signed copies during the event.

If you only knew Olde Towne from this one night, you would assume the umbrellas above First Street were part of the White Linen production, something the city strings up for the occasion and takes down after Labor Day. That assumption is the thing worth correcting. The Main Street program installed Antique Umbrella Alley in partnership with the Slidell Historic Antique Association and the city as a permanent piece of public art, not event décor. White Linen & Lagniappe simply gives it its biggest audience of the year. The rest of the calendar, it just hangs there, doing the same job on a random Wednesday that it does on the one Saturday everyone photographs.

The Week That Bookends It

This year, White Linen & Lagniappe isn't the only date on the August calendar. The city's End of Summer Fest ran at Heritage Park on Sunday, August 2, starting at 10 a.m., putting a family daytime gathering at the start of the same week that closes with an adults-leaning evening downtown. One draws people to Heritage Park's spot on Bayou Bonfouca in the morning hours. The other draws them to the sidewalks of First Street after dark. Six days apart, on either side of the same week, they show two entirely different registers of the same neighborhood.

That kind of back-to-back scheduling isn't new for Slidell's cultural calendar. What is new is that the businesses sitting between those two dates no longer treat the gap as downtime.

What Changed on the Blocks In Between

For most of Olde Towne's recent history, the storefronts on Robert, Carey, and First streets were built around a predictable rhythm: busy during a scheduled event, quiet the rest of the week. A Times-Picayune feature on the district, published late last year, ran under the headline "Olde Towne will never die," and the businesses it photographed make the case better than any tagline could.

The evidence for that isn't just sentiment. It's in who has opened, and what they're open for.

Saint August Maison, run by owners Jeremy and Natalie Meeks, sits at 153 Robert Street inside a historic building with a wraparound porch, and it functions as three businesses at once: a plant-based breakfast and lunch spot, a home for Saint August Brew Company's craft beer, and an event venue for private gatherings. It's open Tuesday through Saturday, which means it's part of the ordinary week, not just the festival calendar.

A few blocks over, KY's Olde Towne Bicycle Shop Restaurant, opened by Kevin Young, keeps its old name even though it now serves burgers, po-boys and sandwiches to a lunch crowd that has nothing to do with bikes. Down the street, Naulty's Shoe Repair, run by Allen Naulty, is still doing the same boot and heel repairs it has done for years, a legacy business that gives the newer restaurants a neighborhood to open into rather than a blank block to colonize.

Layer in the businesses that have anchored Carey Street for longer: Olde Towne Pizza Company, The Brass Monkey Draught Emporium, Roots Plants & Coffee, and Green Oaks Apothecary. Add the Old Towne Slidell Soda Shop, which makes ice cream fresh every week and still runs its arcade games and mini golf, and Audibert's Bistreaux, which serves dinner, weekend brunch and live music on its patio. None of these depend on a festival to fill their tables. They depend on Tuesday.

Here's the shift in one frame:

What This Actually Means for a Weekend

If you're planning around White Linen & Lagniappe on August 8, the smart move is to treat it as the loud version of something you can do quietly any weekend this month. Grab lunch at KY's or breakfast at Saint August Maison before you ever think about the evening event. Walk First Street under the umbrellas on a Wednesday just to see what the crowd sees on the one Saturday everyone shows up. Stop into Naulty's if you've got a pair of boots that need attention, not because it's festival season but because the shop is there every week, the same way it has been.

The old version of Olde Towne asked you to plan your visit around the city's calendar. The current version has enough going on between events that the calendar stopped being the point. White Linen & Lagniappe on August 8 will still be the loudest night of the month, with the music and the crowds and the white linen everyone shows up in. But the umbrellas will be there the Tuesday before and the Tuesday after, and increasingly, so will a reason to be downtown.

If you're weighing what it actually feels like to live near a district like this, that daily rhythm is the part that doesn't show up on a map or a festival flyer. It's worth experiencing on an ordinary weekend before you ever plan around an extraordinary one.

For anyone thinking through what it means to call the Northshore home, Patricia Conaghan has spent years watching neighborhoods like Olde Towne Slidell change shape in exactly this way. Let's talk about your next move.