It was about 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the dashboard thermometer read 97 degrees, and the iPhone weather app was topped with an extreme heat warning notification. Yet Fred Sipp seemed content as he tended his garden in the milky sunshine on the Lafitte Greenway. The veins in his muscular arms shone like silver under a slight sweat.
Sipp was in the spotlight back in mid-June when city agencies showed up at the hand-built shack he called home on the Lafitte Greenway. The makeshift shelter had been declared a fire and health hazard, and after several notifications, it was clawed down by a backhoe and hauled away.
It was probably for the best. Sipp, 82, agreed to move into a modern apartment provided by the city’s Office of Homeless Services and Strategy. Now, he said, “I got a kitchen, got a bathroom, I got a living room, a place to keep my trash, and a big, wide porch, and some neighbors who are pretty nice to me.”
He said he feels safer.
Fred Sipp relaxes in his garden plot on the Lafitte Greenway in November 2024. The plywood shack he lived in, seen in the background, was removed by city authorities for safety reasons on June 11, 2025
(Photo by Doug MacCash,NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
In a way, Sipp was like a castaway who’d been rescued from a desert island where he’d learned to endure and make a life for himself. But in his case, he gets to visit the island anytime he’d like.
City authorities allowed him to keep the patch of land where he’s grown vegetables since before the area was converted from a railroad corridor to a recreational park in 2015. The plot of land is within walking distance of his new home.
Sure, Sipp said, his new home is air-conditioned. But that’s not going to keep him from his plants, even on a brutal afternoon in late July.
“Out here, I know how to take this heat,” he said. After all, he grew up on a farm in sultry Mississippi.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” he said. “The Earth has got to have the heat.” Otherwise, the whole place would be “like the North Pole.”
Sipp seemed very zen about the tropical weather. He seemed very zen about almost everything. True, his shack had been torn down, but “it gave me more room to plant that stuff,” he said, meaning the grid of okra, turnip and tomato plants he put in where his salvaged-wood dwelling once stood.
Sipp demonstrated that you don’t need to separate the seeds from the pods when planting okra. You just lay the dried pods down in a shallow furrow and the seeds will sprout just fine. When okra pods are too big and tough to eat, they can be planted, or “you boil them and suck the juice out of them,” he said. “The juice is milk.”
Not many people know that, he said. Not many people these days maybe, but extracting nutrition from an inedible vegetable seems like the kind of knowledge that goes back to tougher times. No question Sipp could out survive most of us.
Fred Sipp poses with okra he harvested that morning on the Lafitte Greenway in New Orleans, Friday, Aug. 12, 2022. (Photo by Sophia Germer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate)
Sophia Germer
Asked if he felt he was better off before or after the disruption of his life last month, he paused before saying, “It’s a big question right there.”
Instead of discussing his own situation, Sipp diverted into a lament about violent crime and how it seems to rise in the summertime, and how it violates God’s expectations. Though New Orleans recently touted some of its lowest murder rates in nearly five decades, Sipp said with finality: “We’ve got no business having no kind of crime going up or down.”
Asked how he felt about the wave of public interest in his well-being that rose last month, he said to “thank people for being concerned about me. You know, that’s the way good people do.”