Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  A deeper reading of New Orleans’s urban vernacular landscape and its commercial architecture requires one to explore its necropolises as well as its living neighborhoods, from uptown to downtown, from Kenner to New Orleans East, from present to past to future, from white Uptown enclaves to Vieux Carré and Bywater retreats, to the street corners, bars, clubs, and small grocery stores in the black neighborhoods of Gert Town, Carrollton, Mid City, central city, and the Lower Ninth Ward. Although the essence of truth remains elusive, the essence of Carnival is expressed in these places—the commercial establishments—where people congregate on a steamy summer night because they cannot afford to air-condition their cramped apartment or shotgun house.

  New Orleans, constructed between a lake and a river, with swamps on the other two sides, is situated in a precarious—even perilous—location. Its citizens drink reprocessed water flushed from the entire Mississippi Valley. Yet many consider it a cultural mecca. As the Vieux Carré goes, so goes New Orleans.1 This has been the case since the city’s inception. Other white neighborhoods built on the high ground along the Mississippi—notably the Garden District, in the American section; Uptown, farther upriver; and the faubourgs built on the downriver side of the Vieux Carré—were traditionally the domains of the city’s ruling cognoscenti.

  Whites had begun to migrate decades before Katrina struck. Census figures from 1990 showed that whites composed only 34.9 percent of the population of Orleans Parish, compared to 42.5 percent in 1980 and more than 50 percent in 1970. In the 1960s, when the city desegregated its schools and lunch counters, the white population had been nearly 70 percent. New Orleans, which ranked in 1900 as the nation’s fifth-largest city, had fallen to twenty-fifth by 1990, and thirty-second by 2000.2 By 2000 the city’s population was nearly 70 percent African American. New Orleans’s population shrank by 150,000 between 1960 and 2000, and preKatrina, 28 percent of its people lived below the federal poverty line. Before Katrina, 89 percent of black New Orleanians were native-born.3 The city’s preKatrina population stood at 484,000 and was neither holding its own nor attracting many transplants.4

  In New Orleans, appearances are almost always deceiving. The city’s bifurcated cultural traditions manifest in a layered, fragmented, and illusive physical landscape rarely found in other American cities. It is nearly impossible to understand the complex meanings embedded in the everyday vernacular architectural landscape of New Orleans without some understanding of the critical functions of race, class, and politics.

  New Orleans is ancient by American standards. It will not suffice for one to look merely at the surface of anything; deeper investigations are necessary to uncover the prior “lives” of a given site or building as well as its genius loci. Archeological approaches to urban and architectural inquiry in New Orleans often yield a wealth of information about previous incarnations of various buildings and places, commercial and otherwise, and their past inhabitants. New Orleans is a center for the study of the deep cultural significance of architecture in the truest sense.5 It offers opportunities for in-depth fieldwork, and much can be learned from archival sources, such as the history of land transactions, as well.6

  The swampy land near the mouth of the Mississippi River was a harsh, forbidding place to build a city. It was on average six feet below sea level, squeezed between a giant river and a huge lake. Some of the French engineers who advised the city’s founder, Bienville, told him, in vain, that his vision of a future settlement on this spot would be no less than an act of folly (Fig. 4.1). The French initially called this location Le Flottant—the Floating Land. Others named it La Prairie Tremblante—the Shaking Prairie. And the English dubbed it the Wet Grave. Incredible quantities of water proved a double-edged sword. The place was strategically located at the general confluence of three navigable waterways: Lake Pontchartrain, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Mississippi River. Important primarily as a trading depot for French fur trappers, the city evolved into one of the most significant ports in America, providing a gateway for the nation’s agricultural and, much later, petrochemical industries.7

  4.1: Panorama of the Vieux Carré, 1906.

  Water was and remains the source of the city’s predicament, but also its raison d’etre and the means of its salvation, since the Mississippi is the most vital water transportation link in the United States (Fig. 4.2).8 Human transformation of the physical environment enabled the city to grow and prosper. To reduce the risks of episodic flooding, the physical environment was reengineered, spawning an era of river-control interventions designed, implemented, and overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This system eventually proved unsustainable, even feeble, when judged against best practices internationally in the field of civil engineering.9

  4.2: High water at Mississippi River levee, Vieux Carré, 1903.

  Against this geographic and civil-engineering backdrop, the privileged class in the city, from its inception, sought to set itself apart. Separation was achieved by means of position, lineage, education, political orientation, and race. This last factor would become predominant in shaping the built environment throughout the twentieth century and up through Hurricane Katrina’s devastating outcome. The ruling classes, so to speak, sought to construct barriers marked off by these factors, the result being acute class inequalities fueled by a lingering racism, and the decline of a separate-but-equal (meaning unequal) political order.

  According to LaNitra Walker:

  When Hurricane Katrina bombarded the Gulf Coast … she blew open a Pandora’s box of race and class issues that Americans thought they had packed away. In the wake of the destruction of the hurricane, we simply weren’t prepared to see how poor Americans in the South really are, and how many of the poorest are black. The media focused on the tired and desperate victims in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center pleading for aid in the hours after the storm, and television audiences could see that they were almost all black … after much footage of Army helicopters plucking entire black families off of rooftops, the questions turned to whether or not the victims’ race played a role in the slow relief response … the amount of poverty in New Orleans is astounding … the median family income in New Orleans is estimated to be just two-thirds of the national average. An estimated 80 percent of those living below the poverty line are black.10

  In the South, poverty transcends racial lines, to be sure. But the 2005 catastrophe once again reminded Americans that poverty is an unforgiving reality for a disproportionate number of blacks. The dual southern legacies of slavery and segregation mean that it remained difficult to talk about class without also talking about race. As noted by Walker, many of the interviewed hurricane victims, black and white, denied that their suffering was solely due to their race, but claimed that it was rather due to their class. As the hurricane approached, wealthy blacks, like wealthy whites, were able to flee the city in their cars. Sadly, most of those who stayed behind stayed because they were poor, and so many also happened to be black.

  Geography has also mediated this relationship between class and race throughout the city’s history and its patterns of growth. Specifically, land elevation has always determined one’s susceptibility to flooding, and Katrina proved no exception. The flooding of 80 percent of the city in Katrina’s aftermath revealed much about the city’s history and geographic landscape. From the city’s inception, most of the wealthiest inhabitants have always lived on the highest ground. Over time, a combination of racism, classism, and the need to be close to jobs led to the draining and settlement of large tracts of unsustainable land. Because of this, the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, much of Gentilly, and virtually all lowlying districts of the city, which had a high percentage of minority residents, were devastated by Katrina’s flooding. Of course, this was not an absolute pattern: the hurricane destroyed white neighborhoods of all income levels as well, including Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish, and the Lakeview area of New Orleans proper. And the policies of private-sector institutions
were at the root of the problem. For generations, land covenants restricted the sale of property to “coloreds,” meaning that the land could not be sold to coloreds, and real estate firms practiced a form of discriminatory selling known as redlining.

  The earliest settlement by Europeans was the Vieux Carré. This area was the highest ground, built up from silt deposited by the Mississippi over the course of nearly seven thousand years. Soon, canals, including Bayou St. John, were built to connect the downtown with Lake Pontchartrain. Residences and business were built out on the water until this practice was outlawed by twentieth-century zoning laws and public health statutes (Fig. 4.3). The river’s natural levees and their associated high ground extended upriver and downriver to a certain extent. As the number of settlers increased, they built first on this relatively high land, creating the neighborhoods known as the central business district, the faubourgs, the Garden District, and the early sections of Uptown. It logically follows that these neighborhoods would constitute the 20 percent of the city’s east bank that did not flood after Katrina. In a view of Milneburg from the air, a photo from 1921 shows about one hundred camps built on stilts out over the water. This Little Venice was demolished when lakeshore development took place in the 1930s (Fig. 4.4). It had been a sign of wealth and social status for a family to own a camp of this type.

  4.3: Living on Bayou St. John, New Orleans, 1910.

  By the late nineteenth century, development pressures resulted in the draining of swamps further from the Vieux Carré and the naturally elevated areas, while others had already built out in such adjoining neighborhoods as Tremé. As discussed in Part 2, Tremé is one of the oldest black neighborhoods in America, and was the first place where blacks were allowed to own land and build homes while slavery still existed. Adjacent to Congo Square, it later became the birthplace of jazz, as discussed in the previous section. This was an area where slaves working on the river would congregate during their off time. Rich blends of diverse cultural influences—dances, food, and music—were eventually assimilated into the dominant Anglo-European culture, yet kept at arm’s length.

  In the Tremé and the adjacent neighborhoods along St. Claude Avenue and Rampart, these streets marked a division between the higher, more valuable ground closer to the river and the lower, less valuable ground on the “lakeside” of St. Claude. Affordable land, housing, and access to jobs were of utmost concern. The area’s propensity for flooding mattered far less. People were more concerned with destruction by wind or fire than by floodwaters. Nonetheless, the structures in this area were built on “raised” foundations. The architectural ramifications of this were numerous. They were elevated as much as five feet above the ground on proportionally spaced masonry piers. From the nineteenth century up to World War II, white residents generally continued to build on the highest, most secure ground. Correspondingly, blacks lived in communities nearby in order to be near their workplaces. And black cemeteries were mostly built on the lowest ground. Even the better-off black business owners, who catered to whites, often operated in the lower-lying areas. Poorer blacks built in neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward because land was cheapest there. The city’s vernacular architectural landscape was driven by these determinants.

  This pattern gave rise to the checkerboard city, where segregated white neighborhoods, differentiated by geography and architecture, were positioned close together, yet were interspersed with black enclaves. But most importantly, this pattern gave the city its cultural vibrancy. As white residents fled the core city that hugged the river’s natural levees, they too moved to undeveloped areas on highly vulnerable land. These areas included Metairie, in neighboring Jefferson Parish; Lakeview, in Orleans Parish; and Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish. All three areas are low lying; Chalmette is the lowest. Worse, in an unimaginable display of collective urban topographic amnesia, the homes built in these areas in the post–World War II decades were usually built directly on a concrete slab at grade. It seemed that all the lessons learned from previous floods in the city, including one from the wicked 1915 hurricane whose eye-wall passed just twelve miles west of the central business district, and especially the devastating 1927 flood, had been forgotten.11 There are two possible explanations: the developers’ greed, or the opinion that it was unnatural to be able to look under a raised house clear to the other side. The attraction of these neighborhoods, and of the earlier-developed Gentilly neighborhood, was their convenient proximity to the central business district and the port, where many of the highest-paying jobs were.

  4.4: Milneburg “aqua-hood” on Lake Pontchartrain, 1920s.

  By the time a sizeable portion of black residents in New Orleans arrived at something beginning to resemble equal economic footing with the white middle classes, in the 1970s, they looked for new areas in which to build their own homes, schools, and other civic institutions. The only remaining undeveloped land was in the far east end of the parish. This area soon prospered and became known as New Orleans East, or simply “The East.” Metairie and Chalmette, the white communities, are at about the same low elevation as The East, but The East is on far riskier land. It projects out into the end of Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Bourne and their large marshes. It is therefore surrounded by water on three sides, and therefore immediately became the most vulnerable, unsustainable part of the entire city. This, in turn, rendered it cheaper land and allowed upwardly mobile black residents the opportunity to build relatively large homes on larger lots, including in upscale neighborhoods, where more than 90 percent of the structures were built on slabs. In 2005, cultural artifacts of great historical significance within the African American community were lost when The East took on as much as fifteen feet of water in some areas.12

  A Paradoxical Place

  Order and decay are inherent dichotomies in any built environment, although these attributes are especially pronounced in New Orleans. It is a place in a perpetual state of physical decay. This has been due to the climate as much as anything else.13 What many outsiders view as picturesque, romantic, and even poetic are qualities, for locals, impossible to comprehend in the same terms. After the Civil War, which left New Orleans demoralized and defeated, the Reconstruction era was painful. The city’s civic architecture suffered from benign neglect. In 1884, less than a decade after the end of Reconstruction, the city attempted to restore its honor as “Queen City of the South” by hosting an extravaganza known as the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition (cotton had first been exported from the United States in 1784).14 The fair was touted by its backers as the dawn of the economic renaissance of New Orleans, but the exposition, not unlike the World’s Fair a century later (held in 1984), turned out not to be the answer to the city’s problems. Visiting reporters mocked the slapdash exposition buildings and exhibits, which included a Statue of Liberty made of corn, a cathedral made of cracker boxes, and a large wreath woven from the hair of Confederate generals, and they ridiculed in print the city’s muddy streets and primitive sanitation system.

  The main building covered thirty acres; the Horticultural Hall, a 600-foot-by-194-foot house of glass, was the largest conservatory in the world. There were a number of other buildings, and for the first time at a world’s fair, electricity was used to light the buildings and grounds. In the Horticultural Hall were displayed more than twenty thousand pieces of fruit in a setting of tropical and semitropical plants, flowers, and shrubbery. The hall is shown in a sketch by T. de Thulstrup and Charles Graham (Fig. 4.5). Partly because of the bad press, less than one-fourth of the expected six million visitors attended.15 When the exposition was over, the city was left with losses of nearly half a million dollars, and the flamboyant, politically connected director of the fair, Major E. A. Burke, slipped out of the country. Shortly thereafter, the state treasury, of which he had been in charge, was found to be short $1.7 million.16

  4.5: Horticulture Hall at the World’s Exposition in Audubon Park, 1884.

  4.6: Comus Parade, 1867.


  Oddly enough, it may well have been follies such as the city’s two world’s fairs and their unfulfilled illusions of grandeur, as well as its overall poetic decadence, that have preserved the city’s unique culture and ambiance. Since the 1850s, New Orleans had experienced a glacially paced decline, buffered from reality by a combination of self-depreciating humor, illusion, and delusion. It has somehow shielded itself from the mainstream of American progress, for the most part, while concurrently exerting a profound influence on mainstream American culture. The city, encased like a cocoon in its Old World Napoleonic legal code, perceives itself to be an outpost in a Yankee republic. Throughout its history, the city has observed its own rites, moved to its own syncopated rhythms. As with any city, its cultural attractions—the food, rituals, music, and architecture—remained vulnerable to external influences.17

  Time was not on New Orleans’s side even before Katrina. Delusion, disillusion, and civic uncertainty existed long before the recession that followed the oil boom of the 1970s and early 1980s, long before the folly of the 1984 World’s Fair, long before the U.S. government deferred maintenance on the metro area’s levee system, long before the rise of the drug epidemic that threatened the city’s neighborhoods, and long before the invasion of the Formosan termites in the 1950s. Many born-and-bred locals and adopted transplants openly admit to an irrational attachment to the place, regardless. This is the common ground that attracts returning natives and visitors alike, because for all its flaws, its distinctive culture remains its most alluring and enduring contribution to America.