Delirious New Orleans
Page 2
My wife, Kindy, or my son, Alex, sometimes joined me on these sojourns, preKatrina. Friends and colleagues offered suggestions once they heard what I was up to. Why was I compelled to do this now, after having lived for twenty years in the city? I still was not really sure, but one thing was certain in retrospect, post-Katrina: Katrina rudely interrupted and yet further rekindled my on-again, off-again love affair with the city. As it was for everyone, my sense of sudden dislocation was real and profound. After a fourteen-hour evacuation car ride–exile march, and three very surreal nights in a Houston hotel with what seemed like multitudes of evacuees (and their pets), my wife and our two teenagers journeyed onward to Austin, Texas. Our dear friends, Charles and Christy Heimsath, provided us with shelter and, a few days later, helped us find a small house to rent until the end of the year, when we could return to repair our flooded home. That first week in Austin, Fritz Steiner, the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, offered academic refuge there. In my delirium (in the most negative sense) brought on by the cataclysmic events of that first week, I had described to him the preKatrina Delirious New Orleans project and its possible ramifications post-Katrina. I am greatly indebted to him and to the faculty, students, and staff of the UT School of Architecture for their support, kindness, and shelter during the fall semester of 2005, while Tulane University remained shuttered. Parts 1 through 4 of this book were largely assembled in Austin.
Professors Kevin S. Alter and Michael Benedikt, codirectors of the Center for American Architecture and Design at the School of Architecture, were important supporters of this project. Their insights, encouragement, and pivotal role in critically and graphically making this into a book are greatly appreciated. Jim Burr, the humanities editor at the University of Texas Press, also was a great source of encouragement at an unstable moment in my life and career. Thanks are also due to Victoria Davis, at the University of Texas Press, and freelance copy editor Kip Keller for their diligent editing and checking of the manuscript. Many thanks to Raquel Elizondo, assistant dean (now retired) of the University of Texas School of Architecture, to Professor Steven Moore and the students in his graduate design studio, and to Eric Hepburn, Tisha Alvarado, Tara Carlisle, Tracey E. McMillan, Christine Wong, and Kerry Coyne. Special thanks to Jason Heinze, my research assistant while in residency at Texas (and later at Tulane), and to Jessica Gramcko, Breeze Glazer, and Dori Hernandez, my research assistants at Tulane. Jason Heinze himself was affected by the tragedy, since his parents lost their home in the Lakeview section of New Orleans. For reading a draft of most of the manuscript, special thanks to Dr. Eugene Cizek. Gene is a close colleague, architect, and preservationist of the highest caliber. Also, thanks to Dean Reed Kroloff of the Tulane University School of Architecture, who understood my decision to remain domiciled in Austin in Katrina’s aftermath. Thanks to St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin and its head, the Reverend Roger Bowen, for taking in my two “Katrina kids,” Alexander and Elyssa Leigh. The St. Stephen’s faculty, staff, students, and parents were a source of kindness and inspiration. Without question, this project is dedicated to my wife, Kindy, for her unwavering support and understanding for so many years.
Thanks also to Sony for inventing the 2 GB memory stick. Following the catastrophe, it was a challenge indeed to photograph a city whose power grid was rendered nearly completely dysfunctional. In between house repairs during the fall of 2005 and 2006, I was in the field, so to speak, on post-Katrina reshoots. I made many day trips to New Orleans from Baton Rouge and the home of the late Reverend Miller Armstrong and his wife, Maryann. To their hospitality and support, I am indebted. Thanks to dear friends Mary Martha Quinn and David Quinn. Post-Katrina, Delirious New Orleans took on new meaning. It was now as much about the dark side of deliriousness, delirium, as about its joyous aspects. Conceived at first as celebratory and upbeat, the project became shadowed by the question whether it would be possible to portray preKatrina conditions in the face of Katrina’s devastation—the massive dislocation, destruction, and upheaval of the storm’s aftermath. Readers should bear in mind that the book’s title is more meaningful and resonant to me now than before the hurricane. In no way is the title meant to be insulting in any way to anyone or to any place.
The city was technically “closed” and evacuated when I first returned to survey the jaw-dropping damage ten days after the disaster. The ruined neighborhoods and the scope of the destruction were shocking. Being there then felt eerily like being thrust into a war zone, and a remnant of that initial feeling stayed with me thereafter, day in and day out. That first visit, however, remained the most haunting. The mold-infested stench of the toxic waters that engulfed everything in and around my home remains vivid to this day. The floodwaters had receded from my neighborhood only a few days earlier. The situation in Mississippi seemed different: the Mississippi coast was wiped clean by an act of nature, while New Orleans sat poisoned by the multiple failures of its poorly constructed government-built levees.
In the weeks and months following the catastrophe, pundits around the globe speculated wildly on the city’s future, including its architecture. There is insufficient space here to refute the various misperceptions widely reported. Suffice it to say, not all the rich people lived on high ground before Katrina, and not all the poor people lived on low ground. In a period of nearly three hundred years, the historical condition that had evolved across time and space was far more complex. It is true that high concentrations of African Americans lived in the lowest-lying neighborhoods, which were the most severely flooded, though middle-class and upper-class whites in other neighborhoods, such as Lakeview, also lost everything. Overall, could more lives have been saved through better predisaster planning? Of course. But it makes little sense here to excoriate those responsible for the total breakdown in leadership at all levels of government that the world witnessed in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. That subject will be left to others to explore in the years ahead.
This book has six parts. In Part 1, pre-and post-Katrina images are presented. The latter images are presented to convey the post-Katrina delirium that so forcibly transformed the city, literally overnight. It is a set of complex conditions, including starkness, desolation, sadness, loss of place and collective memory, and the rising public anger as it became clear that the disaster was largely man-made. Part 2 examines the language of commercial vernacular architecture in New Orleans. Part 3 extends this language to embrace vibrant, expressive folk architecture—the soul, funk, and hiphop expressions—in the African American neighborhoods of the city. Pre-Katrina, a compelling, culturally resonant, and provocative “on our own” architectural dialect had begun to flourish and inform placemaking in these neighborhoods. Part 4 attempts to examine the causes of the complex and contradictory conditions that resulted in the bifurcation of New Orleans’s contemporary architectural traditions. These conditions are viewed largely in relation to institutionalized racism and racial intolerance, class inequalities, clandestine political maneuverings, and how these determinants are expressed in the Mardi Gras subculture. Part 5 looks at the aftermath of Katrina, especially the armada of FEMA trailers that descended upon the city and its suburbs and invaded the commercial vernacular landscape. Part 6 describes the intense battle I became very closely engaged in to save a National Register–caliber landmark modernist church from 1963 by Curtis & Davis: St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, in Gentilly. This was an intense, pitched battle between an invading force bent on total destruction and those who saw the loss of the church as a critical setback for the rebuilding of the city. Sadly, the church was destroyed in early June 2007 after the failure of an eleventh-hour effort to save it for future generations of New Orleanians.
I am indebted to the Friends of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church (the ad hoc organization I helped form) for its intense devotion to saving this masterpiece. This group includes David Villarrubia, Robin BrouHatheway, Patricia Schreiber, Arthur Scully, Jim Logan,
Frank Silvetti, Maurice Malochee, Frances Curtis, Arthur Q. Davis, Nell Curtis Tilton, Walter Gallas, Karen Gadbois, Mark Folse, David Gregor, Elliott Perkins, Stephen Braquet, Breeze Glazer, Steve Dumez, Fritz Suchke, Georgi Anne Brochstein, Lois Frederick Schneider, Kendall Frederick Pron, Barry Bergdoll, John Hildreth, Pete Rizzo, Michel Ragon, John Klingman, Steve Dumez, Ellen Weiss, Grover Mouton, the hundreds of loyal Cabrini parishioners who did not want to lose their beloved church and parish, and a handful of brave students at the Tulane School of Architecture. Thanks to my son, Alexander, who fearlessly navigated the rubble of the church to document its demise.
I am also grateful for generous support from Clemson University, my new academic home after more than two decades of teaching at Tulane. My leaving Tulane for Clemson had absolutely nothing to do with the church controversy, contrary to rumors spread by uninformed antichurch blogger-agitators. A grant from Clemson helped pull the project through the home stretch to completion. I joined the faculty in the School of Architecture at Clemson in 2007. Thanks to the Clemson Advancement Foundation and its director, LeRoy S. Adams; to Ted Cavanaugh, chair of the architecture program; to Esther Kaufman and Brandon Walter for their support; and to Jan Schach, former dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Humanities at Clemson.
Delirious New Orleans has been a fascinating and daunting project, and no one should make the mistake of underestimating the challenges that lie ahead in reconstructing New Orleans. These include global warming and its effects on rising sea levels and the increasing ferocity of hurricanes; determining how to protect a city that lies below sea level and is subsiding significantly in many areas; the severe loss of coastal wetlands because of shortsighted human interventions over the course of many decades of environmentally irresponsible development; and the urgent need to repair long-entrenched and fragile racial, social, class-based differences within the city and its metro area.
New Orleans is a city living on a knife’s edge. Sadly, two years out, the rebuilding process remains stymied by a severe leadership vacuum. New Orleans suffered as nearly a fatal blow as any American city has ever experienced. A tremendous percentage of the city’s housing stock was decimated. Countless homeowners and renters have been locked out of returning to their homes. The city’s population has dropped by half. Insurance problems are worsening. Without a place to live, who can come back? The reconstruction of buildings alone will not bring New Orleans or New Orleanians back home, although this is of critical importance in the recovery process. A city is about its spirit, grit, and soul as much as its physicality. This book is therefore as much a cautionary tale as it is a call to arms to protect, rebuild, and preserve the architecture and cultural heritage of a truly extraordinary American city.
AUGUST 2007
Stephen Verderber
New Orleans
Delirious New Orleans
DELIRIOUS
NEW ORLEANS
1
A Delirious Landscape
What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
08.26.05
3:35 PM
Baumer Foods (Crystal Preserves), Tulane Avenue Overpass
Baumer Foods was founded in New Orleans in 1923. The plant was located on Tulane Avenue in Mid City. This colorful, intricately detailed billboard was a fixture in New Orleans from 1954 to 2006. Motorists on their way to and from downtown viewed a worker stirring a large vat of spicy red sauce. The production plant over which the sign rests was heavily damaged by Katrina’s floodwaters. Before Katrina, three million gallons of Baumer’s Crystal Hot Sauce was shipped around the world every year. The sign sat atop the shuttered plant beside the Tulane–I-10 interchange. In 2006 the plant was destroyed to make way for a housing development.
09.17.05
4:35 PM
06.12.06
3:40 PM
08.15.05
11:47 AM
Coliseum Theatre, Camp and Thalia
Built in 1938, the Coliseum Theatre was considered the city’s premier art-deco-era movie palace. Its beautiful architectural motifs included an illuminated spire of rings that ascended upward directly above a circular street-level ticket booth. Its exterior was sleek and streamlined. The circular glass-encased ticket booth and the neon tracing along the main canopy at the entrance were among its most memorable architectural features. A few years ago, an unsightly freeway-access ramp that had blocked views of the theater and cut it off from its neighborhood context was demolished. Fully restored in the 1990s, the theater then served as a media production studio. Katrina tore off its roof; later, the entire theater burned to the ground because of a careless construction worker. An ad hoc community shrine, placed by admirers amid the ruins of this “cathedral” to cinema, conveyed the neighborhood’s sadness and grief.
11.08.05
11:50 AM
05.18.06
2:20 PM
05.18.06
2:35 PM
06.26.05
5:45 PM
09.15.05
4:45 PM
South Claiborne Hardware, South Claiborne and Napoleon
This sign, on a small independently owned neighborhood hardware store in the Broadmoor section, features a larger-than-life girl straddling an immense adjustable wrench. It has been a source of some distraction to motorists for decades. Her 1950sera Vargas-like Playboy pose and coy smile are pure vintage cheesecake and, together with her perfect white gloves, ballet slippers, and perfectly primped hat, serve to accentuate her more alluring attributes. Feminists in most large American cities would most likely have long ago demanded the removal of a sign like this; its longevity in New Orleans might best be explained by the storeowners’ being Harley-Davidson motorcycle aficionados. Katrina filled the store with six feet of grimy floodwater; it reopened nine months later. It is now closed.
06.14.05
12:17 PM
Jackson Food Store, Jackson and Willow
The Jackson Food Store mural was a tribute to the members of 4 Kings Entertainment, an on-the-rise rap-music promoter in preKatrina New Orleans. Curiously, only two of the three people depicted were identified by name on the mural (Ronald and Chev). The background depicted a street scene from the nearby, partially demolished (2004) C. J. Peete housing project. Pre-Katrina, this mural was noteworthy for its large scale and graffiti-like artistry. In the post-Katrina photo, the tears shed by Ronald appear in retrospect to be for Katrina’s victims. Soon thereafter, unfortunately, this mural was completely eradicated.
10.08.05
11:15 AM
05.18.06
11:45 AM
06.12.05
9:35 PM
Lenny’s Piccadilly Lounge, University Place near Canal
Lenny’s Piccadilly Lounge, a popular watering hole in the central business district for six decades, is located across the street from the grand entrance to the Roosevelt Hotel (the Fairmont Hotel before Katrina). It was located midway between New Orleans’s two most opulent vintage live theaters, the Orpheum and the Saenger, and the now-shuttered large movie palaces on Canal Street (the Saenger Theater and the State Palace). Lenny’s exuded a Cotton Club–like, New York-in-the-1940s ambiance. It was the place to be seen among the late-night after-theater crowd. The place somehow preserved and maintained its Sinatra-esque after-hours smoke-filled feel in the age of MTV and the Internet. Lenny’s personified New Orleans cosmopolitanism at its best. One can only hope it will reopen.
10.06.05
1:10 PM
06.13.05
4:27 PM
LJ’s Body Shop, Oak Street
The day of the first shot (preKatrina), the owner told me the bright red car on the sign was a replica of his own fully restored vintage 1949 Lincoln coupe. This stretch of Oak Street, in the historic Carrollton neighborhood, was built in the mid-nineteenth century, and many of the original frame commercial establishments (with apartments above) still remain, as is the case here. This section of Carrollton did not
flood, because it was so near the Mississippi River levee. In the unflooded neighborhoods, property values escalated dramatically in the first months after the storm along what is now routinely referred to as the “sliver by the river.”
09.16.05
6:05 PM
06.12.05
5:38 PM
10.06.05
6:05 PM
WOW Café and Wingery, Magazine and State
The WOW Café is one of a small chain of eateries. The juxtaposition of its neon sign and the pointed ballet slippers of the New Orleans Dance Academy sign across the street was haunting. The lean-to frame façade bordering Magazine Street conveyed the impression that the building itself was swaying to the movement of the dancers within. Post-Katrina, the boarded-up entrance to Reginelli’s Pizzeria conveyed the owner’s desperation to locate his dispersed staff so he could reopen as soon as possible. This was the first restaurant I dined in in the city post-Katrina, and it was an emotional experience to witness so many friends and strangers alike swap war stories.
06.14.05
11:05 AM
Burger Orleans, South Claiborne and Harmony
Burger Orleans was a chain founded in New Orleans in the late 1990s. Like Rally’s, another locally based chain, Burger Orleans featured walk-up and drive-through windows, but no indoor seating. A pair of colorful jazz murals adorned the façades. One depicted a jazz band with brass and rhythm sections. The mural on the other side of the building depicted tourist-postcard-like images of the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line and a sax player whose melody wafted through the air along with the aromas from a plate of crawfish étouffée. The murals, signed “Angela 250 Draw,” disappeared in Katrina’s aftermath.