Burnell's Lower Ninth Ward Market

For those that were glued to their TV screens in the final days of August in 2005 as New Orleans was overtaken with raging floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina, they were likely being shown the images of the city’s ninth ward. The neighborhood adjoining the city’s southeastern border was virtually decimated as an 18-foot-high wall of water enveloped nearly 4 miles of land. Homes in the first nine blocks from the industrial canal  (the site of the levee’s were knocked off their foundation. What was once one of the region’s most stable communities for lower-class homeowners had been decimated in an instant. For those that chose to return to rebuilt homes, one of the largest problems was that the infrastructure for a healthy community wasn’t there. Burnell Cotlon was an army veteran working his way up the fast-food industry when, like so many other of the city’s residents, his world got turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At the urging of his mother, he made a last-minute decision hours before the levy was breached to bring his family and mother to a military base where at least some of his extended family could be safe. A lifelong resident of the neighborhood, Cotlon eventually returned to a lesser version of the Ninth Ward with the collective trauma and was determined to find ways to help the communities. Nine years later in November of 2014, he poured his life savings to open a grocery store when he saw his neighbors take three bus lines just to get groceries. He soon got the attention of media outlets and eventually landed on one of New Orleans’ most famous daughters, Ellen DeGeners. On her show, DeGeneres agreed to fund a laundromat for Burnell’s store which has now been named the Ellen DeGeneres laundromat. He has also had the rapper T.I., Mark Zuckerberg, and NBC’s Lester Holt as visitors to his store and he proudly greets visitors with pictures of the people he’s met through his store. As of 2021, Burnell’s has expanded into a candy store, a barbershop, and a deli that serves some of the only chef-prepared poboys in the area. It still remains the only grocery store in the neighborhood and he invests most of the profits into expanding the store’s inventory.

During the Pane