played with really struggle with their second career choice,” Hester said. “What do I want to do? It’s really not about the money part of it … It’s about having a purpose – something that drives you every single day. The last thing I wanted to do was sit at home and not have a career in mind, and just exist.

“My paintings don’t come from me – they come through me,” Couch, a Tibetan Buddhist, said. “The way I work is that I open myself up to the environment and the emotions I have. It’s just like breathing. You are breathing in the environment. That’s reflected in my interpretation of what that feeling is about.

“We don’t curl up in a ball and cry about the situation,” said the executive director of Prize Foundation, which oversees Prize Fest. “We make lemons into lemonade. We immediately started to do that. There was never a consideration – ever – that we would be skipping a year.

Three generations of the Sparke family have overseen operations here. The latest is Anna Maria Sparke, no kin to the island. “My grandfather [H. A. Sparke] had it from 1956 until he died in 1984. And my father [R. W. Sparke] took over in 1984, and he ran it until his death in 2020.

He recalled meeting a graduate of the re-entry program on the streets of New Orleans. The man told Boone that his re-entry class had built a metal building from the ground up during the program. When the man was released, he moved to New Orleans, where a friend needed a metal building.

C & C Electric and Lighting had been at 2430 Line Ave. for years. The mom-and-pop shop was a go-to for lighting fixtures and repairs. This was still not a place to which you would go and hang out. Lingering was not what customers tended to do after purchasing.