Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  4.27: Doullot House (Steamboat House #1), Lower Ninth Ward, 2005 (preKatrina).

  4.28: Doullot House (Steamboat House #2), Lower Ninth Ward, 2005 (preKatrina).

  Meanwhile, Louisiana remained, in the view of outsiders, backward. African Americans lived in neighborhoods where it remained common to see buildings completely overgrown with vegetation. These odd places were taken for granted because “That’s just the way it is,” in the words of Bruce Hornsby from his 1993 hit song of the same title (Fig. 4.29).42 In 1993, when the old-line white Mardi Gras krewes reluctantly agreed “to seek to become racially and ethnically inclusive in their membership policies and not to discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed, or religion,” the effect of the city council ordinance was the reverse of what had been intended. Unfortunately, the white Uptown social elite was by then more isolated than before.43 A climate of mutual mistrust prevailed. The civic pride based on being “different” has unfortunately been the city’s undoing, for it cuts both ways—cultural uniqueness too often impedes economic advancement. In the case of New Orleans over the past twenty-five years, and especially since the 1984 World’s Fair, these two civic goals have often been contradictory.

  As discussed previously, the social status, race, and political orientation of an architect in New Orleans determined the course of his or her professional career. These factors figured prominently in what might be referred to as an architect’s acceptability factor in the eyes of potential clients. This has also been true, of course, in other American cities, although in New Orleans this pattern appears to have been more pronounced because of the Carnival syndrome. Not surprisingly, the old-line Uptown social order that historically dominated Carnival also dominated architectural commissions. This continued to be the case in both the private and public sectors, as it had been since the antebellum era of the 1850s, the halcyon period of the architect James Freret and his contemporaries. In the private sector, white clients tended to hire white architects, usually men. In public-sector commissions, joint white firm–black firm ventures came to be undertaken more and more frequently, and this was a sign of progress, although the results met with varying degrees of success.

  Caucasian architects, a significant percentage of whom were raised in the area and had studied locally, provided a core group of architects who met these criteria.44 Many of the post–World War II generation of young architects, having been fully inculcated in the International Style, and led by the talented firm of Curtis & Davis, returned to work for their clients on a wide variety of building types, ranging from small private residences and oceanside villas to churches to public libraries—including the main library in the central business district (1955–1957)—to the New Orleans City Hall, the State of Louisiana Office Building and state Supreme Court Building complex at Duncan Plaza (1955–1957, both scheduled for demolition in 2008; see Part 5), and the Louisiana Superdome (1972–1977). The modernist Rivergate Convention Center in the central business district (1963–1965), also destroyed (1996), was perhaps the most noteworthy postwar downtown civic building; it even housed an anticipated (but uncompleted) four-lane highway beneath. In New Orleans, large-scale federal public-housing experiments, many of them inspired by Le Corbusier’s iconoclastic plan for Paris, La Ville Radieuse (1922), and his later Unité d’Habitation housing block in Marseilles (1945–1947), were nearly always built in or adjacent to traditionally black neighborhoods. The Guste housing project was a prime example of the latter.

  Overall, however, the black community in New Orleans was left to its own devices when it came to architecture. After white flight reduced the economic bases of many neighborhoods to vestiges of their former selves, the new residents of these old neighborhoods were poorer and less educated than their predecessors. They inherited a vernacular building stock that was, by and large, built by whites for whites. By 2005, the pool of licensed black architects could not come close to meeting the demand in a city that was by now 68.7 percent black.45

  The treatment of blacks by elite white architects was based, for the most part, on noblesse oblige. This code of genteelly patronizing the “less fortunate” was bound to fall short as the level of meaningful social engagement remained superficial, by and large. It remained, in many ways, an intractable situation for everyone involved. The relatively few architects who seriously engaged black clients’ and community groups’ neighborhood redevelopment goals and agendas often felt bewildered and betrayed whenever their efforts were received with skepticism by black community groups. To the white architect, it was as puzzling as a string of beads tossed from a float during a Mardi Gras parade being thrown right back.46

  As discussed in the previous chapter, with comparatively few economic resources at its disposal, the black community was reduced to a limited range of architectural options. Tight construction and renovation budgets usually allowed for only the minimal reworking of a structure, limiting the scope of intervention. Intervention consisted mostly of modest facelifts—although many a white-built and formerly white-occupied dwelling was culturally recoded in this manner. This pattern was shown to be particularly evident among locally owned commercial establishments in black neighborhoods, such as masker buildings and corner food stores (see Part 3). Architectural interventions, folk or otherwise, remained illusive, impermanent, and fleeting, lacking a strong sense of place proprietorship due to financial constraints, but certainly not because of any lack of will. African Americans nonetheless would continue to struggle to achieve self-actualization in post-Katrina New Orleans, especially when measured against the taste standards of the entrenched mainstream establishment.

  4.29: Central City “vegi-tecture,” 2005 (preKatrina).

  4.30: Fleeing the Great Flood, 2005.

  Before the diaspora caused by Katrina, much remained unsettled in New Orleans. In the 1980s and early 1990s, as mentioned, the city underwent a metamorphosis in the political balance of power. This balance had precariously held the city’s business and social fabric together. In this era of transition from white to black political control, long-established power bases were dislocated. In an expanding economy, the fallout from such changes can often be absorbed successfully, even transparently, since alternative means exist to compensate for such losses of control. But in a shrinking economy, as was the case in New Orleans, forced dislocation from the status quo was of vexing concern and anything but transparent. Racial, social, and political tensions therefore remained high right up to the morning of the hurricane.47

  In Katrina’s aftermath, comparisons between the Iraq War and the crisis in New Orleans were inevitable, and the city’s mayor, C. Ray Nagin, openly decried the distorted priorities of the Bush administration.48 Soon thereafter, T-shirts appeared in the city with the slogan “MAKE LEVEES NOT WAR.” As the city sat flooded, its exiled residents could only watch the horrific events on TV, shocked to the core by the vastness of the destruction. The unfortunate souls left to fend for themselves were reduced to living on freeway overpasses (Fig. 4.30). As the scope of the devastation unfolded, it became clear that the rebuilding of New Orleans would be long and arduous. The flood-level-depth maps released by the U.S. Geological Survey were bone chilling, especially when rendered in full color (Fig. 4.31). Tens of thousands of ruined refrigerators were discarded on the streets, soon becoming blank canvases for witty slogans, most of which were painted with epithets lambasting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson, President Bush, and various local officials. Others simply forewarned looters of the consequences of their actions (Fig. 4.32). In the most deeply flooded sections of the city, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, the situation was a matter of life and death. More than 200,000 vehicles were ruined citywide, including those at this used-car lot on Airline Drive (Fig. 4.33).

  4.31: The worst-case scenario becomes a reality: USGS map, post-Katrina, 2005.

  As for the fate of the city’s historic inventory of twentieth-century commercial vernacular archit
ecture, signs, and artifacts, it was hit as hard as everything else. The “big guys” did all right, but the little guys suffered: many of the largest national chain hotels, such as Marriott, Hilton, and Sheraton, possessed the fiscal resources to quickly make repairs and get back online. This enabled them to house first-responder disaster workers and various federal officials, often for months. Establishments featuring vintage commercial vernacular architecture did not escape flooding, and these places were left to fend for themselves. Mom-and-pop businesses such as the vintage Capri Motel (1952) on Tulane Avenue were ruined (Fig. 4.34).

  It was bound to happen. Disaster planners had considered two specific scenarios: a major hurricane with a twenty-foot-plus storm-surge inundation affecting the Gulf Coast region, or a hurricane-induced levee failure in New Orleans. Hurricane Pam, a fictional FEMA-funded emergency exercise for federal, state, and local officials in Louisiana, was conducted just one year before, in 2004, and planners tested both scenarios. Katrina, sadly, played them out in real life.49 The negative outcome of poor decisions by the federal government would prove much worse in New Orleans than in other places ravaged by hurricanes in the nation’s history. This is because the city was below sea level, virtually surrounded by water, and because the federal levee system was unsustainable. With 80 percent of the city under water, tragedy swallowed the privileged and the poor alike as well as persons of all creeds and races.50

  Status hierarchies persist in the built environment, and the landscape of social inequality continues to further divide rich and poor in America. The increasing vulnerability of the urban poor, especially those who live in hurricane alleys, is but one outcome. Strained race relations and the skewed responses to the disaster suggest that in planning for future catastrophes, Americans need to look not only to the natural environment in the development of mitigation programs, but to the social environment as well.51 It is these transactions between nature, humans, and place that result in the vulnerability of places.52 Most experts agree on the fundamental measures needed to encourage the rebuilding of New Orleans: functional levees and drainage systems, affordable housing, jobs that pay a living wage, a functioning public school system, the availability of shopping and services, and the assurance of safety and public services.

  4.32: “I Will Shoot Looters,” 2005.

  Mardi Gras versus Remembrance

  The push to celebrate Mardi Gras only a few months after Katrina prompted angry outcries from displaced residents around the nation. An op-ed piece in USA Today underscored the costs and benefits as well as the possibility for civic folly that a delirious New Orleans confronted in Katrina’s aftermath:

  The Place. In the French Quarter, the ridge of high ground that made New Orleans famous, you can almost pretend Hurricane Katrina never happened. The smell of chicory coffee wafts onto the sidewalks. Jazz spills from the clubs. The storied streets bustle. But that veneer of normalcy is deceiving, even dangerous, to the city. With its short attention span, the public could easily latch onto this portrait of plenty and forget that large and less-visited swaths of New Orleans remain without. Without light and power, without jobs and a tax base, without inhabitable homes and without working schools. The city also lacks a singular vision of how to rebuild and a take-charge leader. The chaos of Katrina has given way to a different kind of turmoil, a desperate and fragmented push to rebuild. There is the Governor’s Louisiana Recovery Authority, appointed to set the course; the Mayor’s Bring New Orleans Back Commission; and a myriad of civic groups teeming with proposals. President Bush has named Texas banker Donald Powell as a sort of federal recovery czar. But no one is in charge … the American Institute of Architects recently recommended that New Orleans’ rebuilding effort “speak with one voice” through a consolidated entity. That’s good advice. If the French Quarter’s glimmer is ever to spread, New Orleans needs a vision.

  The People. Three months ago they were on the run from Katrina’s winds and surges, watching as water swallowed up their pasts. Now, they are the future… . The fate of the Big Easy depends on where ordinary people … decide to live. For New Orleans, characterized even more by its twenty-five percent poverty rate than by its Cajun flare, how many return and who they are could influence the city’s fate more than all the planners combined. New Orleans can rebuild, but they might not come.

  The Party. Some folks scoff that a city in ruins, mourning hundreds of deaths, has no business throwing a bash. But Mardi Gras is New Orleans’ essence and its chance to shine. The 2006 Mardi Gras (marks) the 150th anniversary of this preLent bacchanal. It was been cancelled for only thirteen years, and then generally when the nation has been at war. There is a practical draw—the tourist revenues. City studies have shown that Mardi Gras produces $900 million in annual spending and nearly $50 million in tax benefits. And an emotional one: residents need this one for themselves. Think of New York City celebrating New Year’s Eve in Times Square less than four months after 9/11 … perhaps this undertaking provides a model for the city’s (New Orleans’) more daunting challenges. Scale back on dreams of recreating a preKatrina city. Seek creative financing. Be flexible. Above all, don’t lose what is quintessentially New Orleans.53

  4.33: Quality Used Cars, Airline Drive, Metairie, 2005. Demolished, 2008.

  To proponents, this striving to move forward was far preferable to striving to remember. Some argued that it would have been wiser to take the Carnival investment and build a memorial to the more than 1,800 who died because of the more than one dozen major federal levee breaches.

  Since communities across the country were so welcoming and generous to Louisianans displaced by the storm, it remained bizarre that anyone in New Orleans could be any less so.54 The key to drawing people back is based on reestablishing the social connections that had held together neighborhood, kinship, religious, and ethic networks. Long-simmering institutionalized inequalities in New Orleans indicate this will be an uphill struggle. People naturally connect to the place where they live, emotionally as well as pragmatically, and the experience of place—its genius loci—gives meaning to life. In New Orleans, it is arguable that place attachment is significantly stronger than in most other parts of the United States. However, critics howled that the federal bureaucracy overlooked this reality. The higher up the food chain of government bureaucracies, i.e., HUD, FEMA, the SBA, and others, and the farther decision makers were from the daily rhythms of the city, the harder this illusive connection would be to attain.

  4.34: The devastated Capri Motel, Tulane Avenue, 2005. Rebuilt, 2007.

  Cities have proved to be resilient after disasters only if they have the resources at hand to lift themselves up. An example of the wrong approach was the delusion and folly exhibited by FEMA’S ill treatment of New Orleans’s Vietnamese community. As the first few hundred Vietnamese returned to New Orleans East, they relied on local institutions such as Mary Queen of Vietnam Roman Catholic Church as a base around which to reorganize their lives. They requested FEMA assistance to set up trailers in their neighborhood, hoping to create a core group of settlers who would encourage others to return. But FEMA is used to dealing with individuals, not communities. FEMA gave priority to people in shelters. For local leaders, it made more sense to take exactly the opposite approach—to seek out and support the neighborhood associations, ethnic institutions, and other organizations essential to community life. These are the networks through which absent residents can be reached, and they are the support structures they will rely on to reestablish themselves if they opt to return.55 When churches, athletic leagues, and other associations show signs of life, this is a strong signal that recovery is under way.56 This will be of utmost significance in New Orleans.57 Americans must not be allowed to forget either the horrific images of the tens of thousands of people fleeing rising floodwaters, or the abject poverty so many left behind.58 Generations of racial-and class-based wounds were laid bare by Katrina.59

  As the hurricane raged through the night and early morning of Augus
t 29, the monsignor assigned to guard St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square witnessed what to him was a magnificent sight. He watched in awe as one large tree after another slammed to the earth in the courtyard immediately behind the cathedral, each accompanied by a loud thud. Somehow, the destruction in that courtyard spared the marble statue of Christ, atop a pedestal, at its center; it sustained the loss of only two fingers. To the monsignor, this was a divine sign of hope for the future of New Orleans.

  5

  Roadside Nomadicism and a City’s Rebirth

  The better question is whether New Orleans has the will to recover. Business as usual—even disaster relief as usual—will not suffice.

  —WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI, 2005

  IN THE FIRST YEAR AFTER KATRINA, LOCAL LEADERS in New Orleans experienced problems in rising to the challenge of the large-scale urban planning that would be essential to the city’s resurrection. Mayor C. Ray Nagin formed his Bring New Orleans Back civic commission in the weeks immediately following the catastrophe by assembling an impressive array of specialists and community and business leaders. By January 2006 this multiracial body had drafted a multivolume set of reports on issues encompassing urban planning, education, tourism, and health care. The various reports were presented in public forums, and by far the most controversial report was the one that focused on urban planning and redevelopment.1