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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Verderber, Stephen.
Delirious New Orleans : manifesto for an extraordinary American city / Stephen Verderber ; foreword by Kevin Alter.
p. cm. — (Roger Fullington series in architecture)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-292-71753-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-292-74366-3 (e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-78564-9 (individual e-book)
1. Vernacular architecture—Louisiana—New Orleans. 2. Outsider art—Louisiana—New Orleans. 3. Urban renewal—Louisiana—New Orleans. 4. City planning—Louisiana—New Orleans. 5. Hurricane Katrina, 2005. 6. New Orleans (La.)—Buildings, structures, etc. I. Title.
NA735.N4V47 2009
720.9763′35—dc22
2008031036
Photo and Illustration Credits—2.1–2.3, 2.13, 4.1–4.3, 4.11, 4.14, 4.16–4.18, 4.24: Courtesy, United States Library of Congress; 2.12, 2.24, 4.4, 4.5: Courtesy, The Historic New Orleans Collection; 2.19: Alphonse Goldsmith, Photographer. Courtesy, The Historic New Orleans Collection; 3.32, 3.33, 4.30: Courtesy, Worldwide Photos; 4.6–4.10, 4.12: Courtesy, Leonard V. Huber, and Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna; 4.13: Courtesy, Allen Freeman, Photographer; 4.15: Alfred Ward, Illustrator. Courtesy, New Orleans Public Library; 4.19: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Courtesy, New Orleans Public Library; 4.20, 4.21: Courtesy, New York Historical Society, and Pelican Publishing Company, Gretna; 4.22, 4.23: Courtesy, New Orleans Public Library; 4.31: Courtesy, United States Geological Survey; 5.3: Courtesy, The Times-Picayune; 6.3: The Estate of Nathaniel Curtis. Courtesy, Southeastern Architectural Archives, Tulane University; 6.4, 6.6, 6.13, 6.15–6.17: Frank Lotz Miller, Photographer. Courtesy, Lois Frederick Schneider; 6.5, 6.7, 6.11, 6.14, 6.18: Alexander G. Verderber, Photographer; 6.8, 6.9: Courtesy, Frances Curtis; 6.10: Courtesy, Arthur Q. Davis, Curtis & Davis, and the Southeastern Architectural Archives, Tulane University; 6.12: Courtesy, Southeastern Architectural Archives, Tulane University
All other photos by Stephen Verderber. © Stephen Verderber, 2008.
Delirious New Orleans
Manifesto for an Extraordinary American City
Stephen Verderber FOREWORD BY Kevin Alter
Roger Fullington Series in Architecture
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN
Delirious New Orleans
Contents
COVER
COPYRIGHT
FOREWORD by Kevin Alter
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART 1
A Delirious Landscape
PART 2
Commercial Vernacular Architecture in New Orleans
PART 3
Soul, Funk, and Hip-Hop
PART 4
Illusion, Delusion, and Folly
PART 5
Roadside Nomadicism and a City’s Rebirth
PART 6
Architecture Under Siege: A Lesson from Katrina for Twenty-First-Century America
NOTES
INDEX
Foreword
Kevin Alter
PERUSING THE PAGES OF CONTEMPORARY journals and books on architecture, the architectural observer is struck by the innovation and dynamism of an array of individual buildings. Typically portrayed as stand-alone edifices, architecture is generally communicated in terms of an easily consumable object and valued by the degree of formal dexterity and innovation that it might display. Much harder to grasp are the vicissitudes of place and culture in which a building finds its place, and more generally, its meaning. In contrast to the implications put forth through these publications, the keen observer finds that a building’s ultimate meaning and power lie not in understanding it in isolation, but rather in the context of the various conditions of its circumstance—physical, climactic, cultural, and social. Moreover, many of the most powerful examples in the field are firmly rooted in their situation, and a deep understanding of that situation is paramount in posing a poignant and meaningful piece of architecture. Indeed, there are celebrated architects such as Glenn Murcutt, whose work is published internationally, but who also categorically refuses to build outside of the realm in which he is intimately familiar. Rather than accepting the implied meaning of his work, which might be transmitted through the glossy pages of a journal or monograph, the value of his buildings is rooted to a deep understanding of, and intervention into, the context of which the buildings are a part.
Beyond a visceral knowledge of a given place, borne of many years of living and working within it, architects often-times search for ways to achieve deep insight into the places in which they might propose working. Interrogations of place abound, and regularly form the basis of meaningful architectural interventions. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are studies such as Rem Koolhaas’s seminal 1978 book, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, to which Delirious New Orleans owes its title and desires a conscious comparison. Koolhaas’s book reveals New York City in a brilliant new light, and in the process identifies and underlines those aspects of the city that he finds valuable. In addition to the insight it has provided into the field, the book is a roadmap to those aspects of the contemporary city to which his much-celebrated work relates. The notion of cross-programming that he identifies as particularly poignant in Manhattan, for example, resounds everywhere within his own work.
Turn now to another great and beguiling American city, New Orleans. While teaching at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, Stephen Verderber set himself on a project of photographing poignant examples of local vernacular architecture as a means of identifying those aspects of the physical culture of New Orleans that do not often make it into academic discussions about the city. After Hurricane Katrina changed the face of that city forever, Verderber, one of the many refugees of the storm, found himself with an awesome opportunity: to bring into focus the invaluable collection of vernacular architecture that graced the city, and was, along with its attendant culture and values, in very probable danger of disappearing altogether. Armed with the photographs taken just prior to Katrina, Verderber returned to these same places to document their post-hurricane state. The comparison speaks for itself, and the potential loss is compelling. From this basis, Verderber proceeds to write his own manifesto for the city of New Orleans, and offer his insights into the dangers, dilemmas, and culture of the city.
Delirious New Orleans begins as a poignant photo-essay and personal reflection on a particularly outspoken collection of vernacular architecture in New Orleans. In a variety of ways, the book points to the importance of these representations of culture, particularly in distinction to their high architecture counterparts. The photographs especially capture a vibrant culture, and in pairing images taken both before and after the hurricane, leave open the question about the role (or lack thereof) of such artifacts in the rebuilding of the city. The images taken before the hurricane document the rich life of New Orleans in ways
not present in the arguments currently being made for rebuilding strategies, and the images taken after make vividly clear another devastating chapter of loss for the city. Delirious New Orleans makes the argument that this collection of vernacular architecture serves as a cultural touchstone, and that its presence is a necessary component to the great American city of New Orleans.
Delirious New Orleans promises to be a contribution to the field: it documents an important collection of cultural artifacts and it enters into the debate about the rebuilding efforts of the Gulf Coast—something that heretofore had gone without much attention. Because of J. B. Jackson’s seminal works, attention to vernacular architecture is hardly new to the field. However, focusing our attention on these artifacts over a time period that spans the disaster of Hurricane Katrina is profound. Delirious New Orleans records the hurricane in an unexpected and intimate fashion, marks the importance of vernacular building stock vis-à-vis the culture of which it is a part, and makes the argument that this kind of authentic cultural artifact must be present in any effort to rebuild. Speculating on the various ways in which this rebuilding might be made manifest is the pleasure that follows the book’s conclusion.
I hope that Delirious New Orleans will be useful to design professionals in general, and urban designers and planners in particular, as they plan and project the future of our cities and coastal regions.
05.02.08
Kevin Alter
Sid W. Richardson Centennial Professor in Architecture
Director of Architecture Programs
The University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture
Preface and Acknowledgments
I WAS RAISED IN A CHICAGO SUBURB A MILE FROM the world’s second McDonald’s. As the years passed, and my life and culinary tastes evolved, I witnessed the destruction of its initial spirit—its sense of place. That location was used as a testing site for new architectural concepts, and it was constantly being renovated and expanded in an unending cycle of change. Much later, the work of nonarchitects, particularly Herbert Gans’s seminal writings on the dialectic between high and popular culture, influenced me greatly. I had been taught in architecture school up to that point to reject the everyday vernacular because it was contaminated and therefore unworthy of serious study by an aspiring architect. These so-called contaminated building types—gas stations, drive-ins, motels, neon signs, free-form rural churches, and amusement parks—fascinated me. These places reminded me of the sense of liberation I had felt while sitting many an afternoon on that shiny red and white tile bench at McDonald’s when I was a kid.
My perspective of “acceptable” versus “unacceptable” in architecture was permanently altered. Everyday vernacular architecture remained outside the margins of theoretical discourse to most purists in Chicago, my place of birth and the domain-stronghold of modernist Miesian discourse. These buildings and places were viewed as no more than idiosyncratic “outsider” buildings, as unself-conscious artifacts. To me, however, these outsider buildings and places were the analogues of my experience with the then-exploding language of pop music—rock in particular—and the evolving language of pop(ular) architecture. Their packaging and marketing were analogous as well: communicating with a mass audience through the use of memorable visual, spatial, and sonic “hooks” not unlike a melody or chorus you can’t shake from your head. Both were centered on mass consumption, immediacy, and associated products consumed in multiple places simultaneously. It was about being fully immersed in popular culture as a way of taking part in a civic dialogue. Here, everyone was invited—invited to experience “the latest,” “the new and improved,” be it the Beatles’ latest number one hit or a new hamburger variation, such as the Big Mac—only all at once.
Over time I built up a sizeable collection of images of these places, and the growing number of books on this unorthodox subject came as little surprise. I came to realize that many others shared this same passion for the vernacular of the ordinary, everyday realm. Soon, the National Trust for Historic Preservation was carrying the banner in grassroots campaigns to save vintage movie theaters, gas stations, neon signs, early McDonald’s restaurants, and so on. Remnants of the vanishing inventory of the architecture of the road—including the earliest McDonald’s restaurants—were now taken in some quarters as serious “works.” Interest had grown in Japan and Europe in this quintessentially American phenomenon.
By 2005, I had lived in New Orleans for twenty years, and because of other professional pursuits and priorities, I had not devoted much serious attention to the city’s wealth of unique twentieth-century commercial buildings, signage, and artifacts. New Orleans is undoubtedly among the greatest American cities for the study of architecture and urbanism. I continued to be fascinated by the city’s relative compactness, enforced by the geographic limits of its location and its being surrounded by water on all sides. By compactness, I am referring to the core city and its interwoven inventory of colonial, Greek revival, Victorian, modernist, and unself-conscious, everyday building types and artifacts.
Throughout the nearly twenty-two years I lived in New Orleans, I became embroiled in certain preservationist battles in the city and its suburbs. These occurred, preKatrina, when particularly insensitive developers or politicians tried to ramrod particularly miserable proposals through the review processes, and I wrote (published) letters to the editor at the Times-Picayune. Perhaps the most flagrant example I witnessed during the two decades I lived in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was the senseless destruction of the Rivergate Convention Center, designed with bravado by the very talented New Orleans firm Curtis & Davis. Designed in the early 1960s in the International Style, the Rivergate had been highly regarded by historians and architects far beyond New Orleans. Its destruction in 1996 was tragic. Unfortunately, in retrospect, I felt I did not help enough in the cause. I promised myself to not stand on the sidelines the next time a similarly important modernist civic landmark was threatened with destruction.
In my own neighborhood, in the Uptown section, I fought to save a vintage mom-and-pop grocery located a short walk down the street from where I lived. It had changed hands three times in recent years, and yet the newest owners persevered. They continued to sell sno-balls and po-boys to the kids of the neighborhood, delectables for which the place had been known for six decades.
Katrina changed just about everything in New Orleans. A few days before the storm, I had casually convinced the owner of a nearby 1950s drive-in (Frostop) to dig through the cache of personal photos he had collected of the place from its inception. In the back of my mind, I had hoped to convince the owner to fully restore the place. They were stored in old boxes in his attic, and he told me he hadn’t gone through them in years. The Friday before Katrina he brought a handful of the old photos and offered them to me. The drive-in would take on five feet of Katrina’s floodwaters, and the materials he had brought to show me that day were completely destroyed.
New Orleans’s role was central in the history and development of American outsider, or folk, vernacular building types, including the gas station, the fast-food franchise, the movie palace, the roadside motel, the sno-ball stand, and the post–World War II commercial strip. But it was just as important as a place where important American modernist works by firms like Curtis & Davis were built. My appreciation of the dialectic between elite and everyday, popular architecture in New Orleans would ultimately be driven by my close involvement in trying to spare yet another modernist masterpiece by Curtis & Davis from senseless destruction. This dialectic would inadvertently come to function as the operative bookends of this project, post-Katrina. It would also for me provide insight into the mysteriously intersecting functions of race, class inequalities, aesthetic tastes, the art of politics, and the peculiar, below-sea-level geography of the place.
New Orleans’s indigenous culture remains complex and contradictory. Two of its most celebrated annual events are the world-renowned Mardi Gras spectacle and the some
what lesser-known but equally important New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Locals refer to the latter as simply Jazzfest. Locals and visitors alike become enrapt in the spirit of these two events. Each expresses a collaged visual and sonic landscape. Both are temporal, fleeting, here then gone. Each lasts two weeks. Mardi Gras, tied to the Lenten calendar, usually falls about eight weeks before Jazzfest.
Jazzfest is very much ingrained in the neighborhood where it is staged, and it touches the Esplanade Ridge, Gentilly, and Mid City neighborhoods. On the final Sunday of Jazzfest in 2005, as I walked from the New Orleans Fairgrounds (where Jazzfest is staged each year), people were playing chess on tables on the street corner, and impromptu pickup jam bands were wailing away on sidewalks in front of the rows of shotgun houses. We (David Quinn and I, plus our two teenage sons) came upon iconic Liuzza’s Restaurant, in operation since the 1920s. There, a street party and crawfish boil was happening on this near-perfect afternoon. To me, this scene epitomized the good side of life in New Orleans. It was a positively delirious, upbeat scene. That next week I began to document via photos the offbeat places, buildings, and artifacts I had grown to love over the years, all over the city, with a passion I could neither explain nor fully understand myself.
From east to west, suburb to swamp, sampling this visual landscape itself was, for me, a genuinely delirious (in the most positive sense of the word) experience. The traditions of escapism persisted. I hold many fond memories of riding the roller coasters with my two young children and their friends at the Jazzland (later Six Flags New Orleans) amusement park in the years just before Katrina. It is now in ruins. Delirious behavior—and by extension, delirious places—after all, had always been elevated to the status of civic virtue in New Orleans. For this reason, Delirious New Orleans became the obvious choice for the title of the project. It was chosen four months before Katrina, and was influenced by Rem Koolhaas’s inspiring book Delirious New York (1978). Twentieth-century architecture amid New Orleans’s inimitable cultural gumbo would be the central focus. By the weekend Katrina struck, over one hundred buildings, places, and artifacts (such as signs) had been documented. In many cases, the same subject matter was reshot at different times of day in an effort to capture its expressively delirious qualities.
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