Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  Fats lived in a comfortable but modest home on Caffin Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward. In the early 1960s, he began work on his home-studio-office compound, which consists of his home and two other structures adjacent to his original house. These structures now house a recording studio, a business office, and a shrine of his personal artifacts and mementos.30 Throughout the years, he acquired additional adjacent property for his compound. He never left the neighborhood he grew up in, and for this he is greatly admired locally.

  One of the buildings, facing Caffin, is an adapted double-shotgun house. It now serves as his business office. The roofline was altered to add a second gable, thereby making the front more closely resemble a bungalow. Above the steps leading to the porch and front door is a neon sign: Fats Domino Publishing. A single black star is displayed above this sign. To the right is a modified eave, sheathed in Plexiglas, with the initials F D in black letters. The structure is cream colored with conventional face brick, and the roof eaves are painted black with yellow inset panels (Fig. 3.27). He lives in an adjoining three-level pink-roofed house.

  Fans from around the world visit Caffin Avenue to pay homage to Fats, just as Elvis Presley’s devotees flock to Graceland. (Fats was a close friend of Presley, his peer atop the pop charts.) It is a testament to Fats’s personality that he never sought to capitalize on his private residence by turning it into a folk “shrine,” although it certainly could have become a highly profitable tourist attraction. Its architecture remains modest and completely authentic, just like its owner.

  Domino elected to remain at home with his family because of his wife’s poor health as Katrina loomed in the Gulf of Mexico. The Ninth Ward was heavily flooded when the levees broke, and his compound took on nine feet of water. On September 1, 2005, Domino’s agent reported that he had not heard from him since the week before the hurricane. CNN reported that a coast guard helicopter had rescued Domino, and his daughter, gospel singer Domino White, corroborated the authenticity of a photo shown on CNN during the same evening broadcast. It was not publicly known at the time that the Domino family had been taken to a Red Cross emergency shelter in Baton Rouge. JaMarcus Russell, the starting quarterback of the Louisiana State University football team, graciously allowed the family to stay at his apartment. The family first returned home on Saturday, October 15; their house had been looted twice in their absence.31

  3.26: The mural Fats Domino, by Atlantis Domino (2002), Claiborne Underpass, Tremé, 2005 (post-Katrina).

  Grieving fans, upon hearing he was missing, had spray-painted “Rest in Peace” and “You Will Be Missed” on the upper-right front façade. Fats’s compound sustained less damage than the surrounding houses, and he did his best to keep his battered spirits up after seeing his devastated neighborhood for the first time. “I’m still here, thank God. I’m alive and kicking,” the seventy-seven-year-old musician said with a laugh. Domino’s son-in-law, Charles Brimmer, helped the legendary musician salvage mementos from a career spanning over fifty years. The artifacts were quietly loaded into a car and taken away. The three surviving gold records (out of twenty-one stored in the house before Katrina)—for “Rose Mary,” “I’m Walkin’,” and “Blue Monday”—were found in very poor condition because of extensive mold and mildew damage. Domino said, “Well, somebody got the rest of them… . I don’t know what to do, move somewhere else or something … but I like it down here.”32 In February 2008, Domino received the first “Hero of the Storm” award from the national civic-booster group Friends of New Orleans. The award was given to Domino and the Tipitina’s Foundation for their efforts in the aftermath of Katrina to preserve New Orleans’s unique culture.

  The folk and pop-culture shrines of Ernie K-Doe and Fats Domino contribute much to New Orleans’s soulful funkiness and charm. Each place has transcended its architectural limitations, becoming far more significant as funk and soul architecture than when they were first built. Both walk that fine line between self-conscious and unself-conscious architecture. These places completely personify the personalities of these two legends, and in the process have become extensions of their owners’ idiosyncrasies and “outsider” aesthetic tastes. Though damaged by the brackish floodwaters, both shrines survived Katrina, and both will endure as urban folk-architecture icons.

  Shrines to musical legends in some ways differ little from shrines devoted to religious icons. Such was the case with the United House of Prayer for All People (2001), located on the corner of Jackson and Willow, Uptown. This church was scaled similar to Fats’s and K-Doe’s shrines. It appeared, in scale and composition, like a large double-shotgun house that had been adapted into a church. The composition was symmetrical, with stairs leading to an entrance flanked by a pair of glass-block columns. A pair of majestic white lions guarded the stairway. The inscribed entablature above the doorway bore the name of the congregation. Above this were three crucifixes. The exterior was of brick masonry of varying types. The brick coursing was variegated: red brick interspersed with beige soldier-course bands (Fig. 3.28). The most noteworthy architectural feature was the pair of ascending black angels draped in robes (Fig. 3.29). The church immediately became a landmark in the neighborhood. It was located diagonally across from the Jackson Avenue Grocery, the site of the 4 Kings Entertainment mural (Part 1). Suffice it to say, the hip-hop mural stood in sharp juxtaposition to the United House of Prayer for All People.

  3.27: Fats Domino’s residence-studio-office, Lower Ninth Ward, 2005 (post-Katrina).

  The geographic and racial lines of demarcation that exist between adjoining neighborhoods dramatically influence how a city is perceived and conceptualized by its residents. A neighborhood, defined as a discrete entity within a city, is composed of edges, landmarks, grids, grains, figure-ground relationships, age and condition, and boundaries. Some of these features are purely spatial, some are architectural, and others are purely cultural. All the elements of this spatial syntax are nonetheless intertwined. Often, a neighborhood’s expression vis-à-vis this syntax is very subtle. For instance, how does someone know when he or she is leaving one area and entering another? If a freeway bisects two neighborhoods, one residential and the other industrial, there may be little question about which is which. Similarly, it may be simple to discern a residential neighborhood that is directly across the street from an auto-assembly plant. One is perceived as a workplace, the other not.

  3.28: United House of Prayer for All People, Washington Avenue, Uptown, 2005 (preKatrina).

  The functions of race, class, income level, and social structure are detectable in a city if one takes the time to observe closely enough. In New Orleans, one can learn quickly in most cases whether one is in a black, white, or mixed neighborhood by reading a combination of blatant as well as subliminal codings in the vernacular of its soul, funk, and hip-hop urban folk architecture. The black angels adorning the United House of Prayer for All People might lead one to infer that that neighborhood was primarily comprised of black residents. The congregation’s church was not so subliminally coded to reinforce this fact: “for All African American People.” Similarly, in the case of the Budda Belly Bar, on Magazine Street no more than a mile away as the crow flies, all the patrons depicted in the exterior mural are white (Fig. 3.30). Is this mural’s not-so-subliminal message the same, only in reverse: “Budda Belly Bar is for Caucasians”? Another example, on the side façade of a masker building also not very far from the church, the Bluebird Café, a logo of a “white” bluebird is painted on the side of the mask-façade (Fig. 3.31). Is this coding entirely a coincidence? In these two examples from Uptown, one may infer that some degree of subliminal coding is in effect. Coding in the urban landscape is used in many ways everywhere, although it may perhaps be deduced that the last two examples, one a bar and the other a diner, are, by and large, by and for whites.

  3.29: Black angel on the United House of Prayer for All People, Uptown.

  Architecture and Insularity

  In New Orleans, the r
esidents of the poorest neighborhoods have been shown here to produce architectural narratives of significant ingenuity, vibrancy, and resourcefulness. It is a body of work, unfortunately, that has evolved nearly entirely outside the notice of the architectural mainstream. And because it is considered “untrained,” outsider vernacular architecture—folk architecture—it naturally has failed to garner serious attention from either the local professional architectural establishment or its regional and national counterparts. Ironically, the world of popular culture—music in particular—beyond New Orleans has by no means dismissed these shrines of urban folk and popular culture. This has certainly been the case with regard to the musical devotees of the folk-pop shrines of Ernie K-Doe and Fats Domino, and to a lesser extent, the bars and outdoor places where the Mardi Gras Indians have gathered for generations to engage in their fascinating rituals. The evidence for this rests in the tens of thousands of Internet inquiries, post-Katrina, regarding the status of New Orleans’s pop-music legends, the city’s musical traditions both new and old, and the state of the physical shrines associated with these creative artists. This alone is irrevocable proof that black popular and folk culture continues to endure, continues to remain relevant.

  3.30: Mural on the Budda Belly Bar, Magazine Street, Uptown, 2005 (post-Katrina).

  Unfortunately, the soulful, funky, and hip-hop architecture and artworks in black neighborhoods remain unknown for the most part beyond the black community, yet this condition cuts both ways. In these places, the architectural landscape remains a narrative about neglect, suppressed rage, rage itself, tempered hope, despair, and, above all, intense fear and uncertainty. At the same time, it is an urban culture increasingly centered on striving for empowerment and self-actualization. The inspirations for these creators’ places and artworks were deep-rooted and at the heart of the black experience in New Orleans, dating from the period of slavery and, later, Reconstruction. Restaurant owners, corner-grocery-store owners, bar owners, proprietors of sno-ball stands, church groups, rappers, members of the social aid and pleasure clubs, and others all have continued, each in their own way, to find a way to do so much with so little through sheer will and determination. Resources have been scarce for architecture per se. Moreover, financial limitations have been real: property owners have been very limited in what they could afford to build on their own. Private investment from outside the black community has been little to nonexistent, and public-sector grants have usually been too few and too small. As a result, seldom has it been possible to hire an architect, and there are only a handful of black architects in the city to select from anyway.

  3.31: Mural on the Bluebird Café, Prytania Street, Garden District, 2005 (preKatrina).

  Meanwhile, on the high ground in the oldest sections of the city, and in particular on the strip of dry ground referred to earlier as the “sliver by the river,” an almost paradoxical attitude of racial indifference prevailed prior to Katrina. New Orleans had indeed reached a critical turning point, and the Mardi Gras establishment had reached its apotheosis in many ways. The subculture of Carnival was showing signs of stagnation as the demographics of the city shifted to a black majority and the long-dominant white-centered power structure showed signs of waning. Perhaps the defining moment—the high point, architecturally—for this subculture of the Mardi Gras elite was the period immediately preceding the 1984 World’s Fair. Not surprisingly, the fair’s central aesthetic themes were rooted in the annual rituals of white Mardi Gras. In addition, the Piazza d’Italia, an internationally praised work of urban design and architecture when it opened in 1978, next to the fair site in the booming Warehouse District, had fallen into ruin; the city and private civic groups, although they had tried from time to time, were unable to afford its upkeep, and it subsequently suffered from looting and vagrancy (see Part 1 and Part 4).33

  3.32: Katrina’s devastation, Lower Ninth Ward, 2005.

  Throughout New Orleans’s history, when whites were in the majority, they assimilated only those aspects of the local black culture that they found particularly entertaining or rewarding, i.e., music, food, and dance. It was this process that made the place so fascinating. Katrina, however, exposed the other side of this coin, and architecture was not immune to these critiques. In contrast to this broader tradition of selective appropriation, why did so few white architects meaningfully assimilate key aspects of New Orleans’s black folk culture, specifically its Mardi Gras and hip-hop subcultures, into their own work? The city’s elite white architects (and their clients) dismissed outright folk, funk, and hip-hop expressions of urban culture. Worse, as already noted, the white architectural elite’s dismissiveness remained off the radar screen of civic discourse. This lack of interest further insulated this group of professionals from the changing demographic and cultural realities of the city. The notable exception to this elitist attitude was perhaps the populist sensibilities in non–New Orleanian Charles Moore’s Wonderwall at the 1984 World’s Fair (see Part 4). There, Moore sought to appropriate, assimilate, and draw from divergent sources, and not to isolate or perpetuate false social or racial myths.

  Katrina’s floodwaters exposed much. The catastrophe afforded a rare chance to pause and take note of why so little serious attention had been devoted to diversity or to the function of race and class in New Orleans’s insider architecture and urban design. Direct references made by insider architects rarely sought to draw parallels between racial subcultures, and usually occurred only when referring to the decades-long migration of whites out of the city for the blissful, supposedly tension-free (i.e., safe) pastures of suburbia. The problems caused by unabated suburban sprawl and its corrosive effect on the urban neighborhoods of New Orleans were unwittingly foisted upon those (the poor) who were left behind.34 Meanwhile, any fissure between white and black subcultures was the last thing the tourist industry wished to discuss, either pre-or post-Katrina. This is because it remained an industry that relied on large numbers of low-wage workers—the urban poor—a sizeable percentage of whom lived in the now-destroyed Lower Ninth and in nearby neighborhoods.35

  It took a national catastrophe for Americans to wake up to the social and racial condition of America’s cities, and New Orleans became the poster child for this realization. The devastation in the Lower Ninth Ward instantly conveyed this reality to the world (Fig. 3.32). The sudden dislocation of an entire city and metro area, nearly a million people, would have profound outcomes and ramifications that would be felt for decades (Fig. 3.33).

  Unfortunately, even after Katrina too many in the wealthy white establishment (architects included) quietly went about their own business in an often-desperate personal search for normalcy. And to some extent this was understandable. On the other hand, once again the danger lurked that they would ignore the burst of visual creativity taking place in the poor black neighborhoods, if and when they revived and creative activity resumed in earnest. The possibility of the resumption of this cultural disconnect remained real, and glaring. Would the white and black creative communities grow even more distant from each other, sharing even less common ground than before? The case could be made that a further drift would have occurred even if Katrina had not occurred. As mentioned, racial and cultural alienation was being fueled by a crime epidemic. The continuing crime problem, post-Katrina, served only to further confuse matters that threatened to polarize repopulating neighborhoods.

  3.33: Walking to New Orleans, September 1, 2005.

  In recent years the crime epidemic had thrown the city’s neighborhoods, both black and white, into a state of delirium. Perhaps whites’ fear of crime influenced their decision not to go out and learn about the positive attributes of black urban culture.36

  Despite the persistence of race-and class-based inequalities, benign urban neglect, and rampant crime, residents of poor black neighborhoods endeavored to accomplish what they could on their own, by themselves, for themselves. Usually, as mentioned, funds allowed for only superficial interventions—
the repainting of an exterior façade of a frame structure, or a hand-painted sign or mural on the side of a corner grocery store or tire-repair shop (see Part 5). An ad hoc construction and renovation work crew—consisting of cousins, parents, friends, and church groups—typically donated labor and supplies. Before Katrina, the everyday commercial and residential vernacular architecture in the black neighborhoods was vibrant and vital. The city’s folk, funk, and hip-hop expressions in the built environment had reached a turning point—the question now was whether roots architecture could survive in post-Katrina New Orleans.

  4

  Illusion, Delusion, and Folly

  Nobody around here wants to talk about the really important things, but if you’re gonna make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs.

  —VINCE MARINELLO, 2006

  A Seductive yet Perilous Place

  AS ONE APPROACHES NEW ORLEANS FROM the east or west via I-10, or from the north via the twenty-four-mile Causeway Bridge, the skyline of the city appears above a carpet-like expanse of water, live oaks, and, finally, rooftops. There is something almost surreal about the city’s skyline, as if these high-rise structures should be someplace else, such as Houston or Atlanta. It is as if one expects not to see any architectural references to a modern American city, although the majority of the skyline was built during the oil boom of the 1970s or during the frenzy of speculation before the World’s Fair of 1984. The mind’s eye of tourists, anticipating vistas of old New Orleans, may attempt to suppress the gleaming towers from view. Even the living and the dead occupy their strata in New Orleans differently from the way they do elsewhere. Since corpses buried in the city’s spongy, moist soil tend to rise to the surface, the dead are interred aboveground in conspicuous necropolises; these are often referred to as cities of the dead, and thus always appear to reside next to the living as their neighbors. Even these lifeless neighborhoods are highly conscribed by race, religion, social class, and, to some extent, political ideology.