Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  Crossing the Fine Line between Natural Catastrophe and War: The Battle for Cabrini Church

  The built environment is at its greatest risk of violation in the aftermath of a catastrophe. When large numbers of residents are dead or scattered widely, as in the post-Katrina diaspora, a city’s buildings and its neighborhoods cannot defend themselves from premeditated, hostile, or covert acts of aggression plotted against them. A building, of course, cannot advocate for itself. This is a key point in the following tale, a story of institutional arrogance and aggression. It is about total dis-regard for a city’s collective memory. It is about local news media capitulating to historically powerful persons and institutions. It is about myth versus truth, about innuendo becoming propagandized and falsehoods coming to be seen as the truth. It is a case study of the condition of catastrophe becoming tantamount to the condition of war.

  The St. Frances Cabrini Church was a masterpiece, designed by the celebrated New Orleans architectural firm of Curtis & Davis. It opened in 1963 in the Gentilly section of the city, only a few blocks south of the Lake Pontchartrain earthen levee. This section of New Orleans had been developed since World War II. Subdivisions had sprouted up on all sides of the twenty-acre parcel of land chosen in the early 1950s by the Archdiocese of New Orleans as the site for a much-needed church and school campus. It was a profitable plan for the Archdiocese, since many inner-city parishes in such neighborhoods as the Irish Channel and the Seventh Ward had begun to experience declines in their congregations and, as a consequence, in donations from these congregations. Most Gentilly residents were World War II vets who had started families. New Gentilly, as some called it, was to be, along with the nearby Lakeview section, which also straddled the lakefront landfill section, New Orleans’s proud counterpart to Levittown and other prototype master-planned suburban communities across the nation.

  According to an official account, the parish’s namesake, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, “was born Maria Francesca Cabrini on July 15, 1850, in Lombardy, Italy. She began her ministry as a teacher, but was soon drawn to religious life. In 1880, she founded the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (MSC), one of the first orders of women missionaries. In 1889, under the direction of Pope Leo XIII, Mother Cabrini traveled to America to help underserved Italian immigrants.” She proceeded to found dozens of schools, orphanages, hospitals, and social services programs to serve the needs of immigrants in New Orleans, Chicago, and other American cities.3

  Cabrini Church was striking in its originality, as indicated in a photo of the final presentation model in late 1959 (Fig. 6.3). Nathaniel (Buster) Curtis, the celebrated design principal at the firm, set out to radically break with the conservative architecture of the stoic, neoclassical, pre–World War II churches that dominated the city’s landscape at the time. Curtis and his design team, along with the parish pastor, Father Fyre, became fascinated with the progressive nature of the Vatican II proceedings in Rome, which had been initiated in 1959 by Pope John XXIII.

  6.3: Architectural model of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1959.

  St. Frances Cabrini Parish had humble beginnings. The parish was founded in 1953 by a group of World War II vets, and at first operated from a metal Quonset hut chapel. The new church was absolutely stunning in its bold originality. It expressed the groundbreaking tenets of Vatican II, especially in the unfettered openness of the interior spaces, its structural dexterity and method of construction, the poetic use of natural light, a choir section and organ located behind the altar, and the decision to face its autonomous marble altar, carved from exquisite Italian Carrara marble, out toward a semicircular in-the-round seating configuration (Figs. 6.4 and 6.5, and Figs. 6.6 and 6.7).4

  In Nathaniel Curtis’s words:

  We designed several Catholic schools and churches … our churches were first: Immaculate Conception Church, Our Lady Queen of Heaven Church, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, and St. Angela Medici Church. Each one of these church buildings was given awards for design excellence. An architectural commission for a Catholic Church presented an ideal situation for good design. There were no committees to satisfy—only the Pastor, who had sole authority. He controlled the budget, and could negotiate loans if need be… . Father Fyre—later to become an Archbishop—was the Pastor at St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, (it) owned a large tract of land … with a young and fast growing population… . there were several considerations that influenced the design … the strongest, of course, was the effect of the decisions taken as a result of Vatican II and its effect upon the plan.

  The priest would no longer have his back to the congregation … there would be a sense of more participation … with the pews being placed in a semi-circle as close to the altar as possible. The spire, or steeple, utilized through the ages to draw attention to it as a place of supreme importance, was placed directly over the altar as the most important element. In fact, the altar was placed beneath the spire that grew up out of the roof as if pointing toward God… . the thin concrete shells … are reminiscent of the shape of the Quonset hut, in accordance with the wishes of Fr. Fyre since he had had a fond relationship with his first building.

  All of the major components of the plan: altar, sanctuary, three-part nave and the baptistery, are enclosed within a fifteen-foot-high decorative brick wall, rectangular in plan. The only openings are at the entrances. The result is an honest expression of the activities that occur within, utilizing a forthright statement of the structural system and the materials employed. It was a church unlike any that had ever been built before.5

  6.4: Interior, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1963.

  Its construction was a feat of originality in structural engineering. Curtis’s initial design sketches depict a series of gravity-defying thin-shell barrel-vaulted lightweight concrete plates (Figs. 6.8 and 6.9) that rested gently upon a cast-in-place concrete baldachin (Fig. 6.10 and 6.11). Max Ingrand of Paris made the intricate stained-glass windows, which were arrayed in thin bands along the barrel-vaulted traceries and at the three vaults’ outer termination points (Fig. 6.12). The ancestors of this same family had made the stained-glass windows for Chartres Cathedral in France more than six centuries earlier. The church cost $929,000 to construct in 1963, and its total replacement value was approximately $28 million in 2007. At its dedication ceremony on Sunday, April 21, 1963, Archbishop John P. Cody referred to Cabrini as “The Cathedral of the Lakefront.” In blessing the church, Archbishop Cody said, “Many times as I knelt in St. Peter’s in Rome during the Ecumenical Council my mind wandered across the sea and I wondered how the Cabrini Church would look when completed.”6

  6.5: Demolition of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 2007.

  6.6: Interior, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1963.

  It was these attributes that impressed me most when I first gazed upon the church’s interior in the fall of 2002. My son’s school (Isidore Newman School) was playing a basketball game at the nearby Redeemer-Seton High School, and I seized the moment. I had heard from my professional colleagues at Tulane of its minimalist beauty for years. From then on I attended mass at Cabrini on Sundays with my two initially reluctant teenagers in tow. They became immediately aware of its unique beauty, particularly when compared to the stoicism of the traditional design of our “home” parish church Uptown (Holy Name of Jesus). After nearly every mass they would ask questions about its architecture. Once, my son asked what the large freestanding circular objects were in the rear of the church, and I informed him they were the confessionals. They asked me questions about the delicate white barrel-vaulted roofs, which gently cantilevered outward high above the entrances, shading the large wooden doors and the stained-glass transoms above (Fig. 6.13). They commented on the slender spire-like steeple situated directly above the altar, perched high atop the baldachin. Cabrini Church quickly became our adopted church. I was now donating to our “home” parish as well as to St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church (henceforth referred to here as SFC or simply Ca
brini Church). We attended mass there regularly for three years before the hurricane because we had become quite enamored with the church and its genius loci—sense of place—both in spiritual and physical terms.

  6.7: Demolition of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 2007.

  In the blur of those first days after the levees broke, my wife, two children, and I arrived in Austin and became mindlessly transfixed by the wall-to-wall coverage on CNN of the horrific events taking place back home. We stared with open eyes at the unfolding chaos. On Wednesday of that first, highly surreal week, my son, Alexander, then seventeen, called out, “Look, Dad, there’s the steeple of Cabrini Church!” Indeed, amid the floodwaters lapping at the eaves and rooflines of the hundreds of homes that surrounded the church, its long slender white steeple and large cross stood out proudly, majestically, as a beacon of hope—a symbol of the enduring spirit of New Orleans at its gravest moment (Figs. 6.8 and 6.9).

  6.8: Early concept sketches of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1960.

  6.9: Early rendering of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1960.

  6.10: St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, construction of baldachin, 1962.

  6.11: Demolition of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 2007.

  6.12: Construction of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1962.

  From this point on, the status of the church became an object of intense curiosity to me and to its long-standing parishioners. Thanksgiving weekend 2005 was the first time my children would be able to return home to their place of birth. The church was among the first places they asked to be taken to, after seeing our flood-damaged home Uptown for the first time since the storm. As the three of us peered through the narrow panes of glass of the large wooden doors at the main entrance, we could see that nothing whatsoever had been touched in the interior, as if it had been frozen in Katrina time. As it turned out, shockingly, no restoration activity at all would occur at the church for an entire year.

  No cleaning, no airing out, nothing.

  Its immense wooden doors remained chained shut. Six feet of floodwater had stood in the church for many days after the storm, compared to the nine or more feet in the surrounding areas (since the church had been built upon a three-foot earthen foundation “platform”), and yet the church was in quite excellent condition structurally. In those first days, soldiers had spray-painted the ubiquitous X marking on the skylight above the baptistery as part of the military’s search-and-rescue mission across the city. Other than this, and the cross that was now leaning at a ninety-degree angle at the top of the slender steeple, there was no visible damage whatsoever to the exterior. My two children and I together suspected that, indeed, something was very wrong, something was amiss.

  In early November 2006, the church was among the agenda items taken up at a meeting of New Orleans’s official landmark oversight agency, the city-run Historic District Landmarks Commission (HDLC). Cabrini was the fifth or sixth item on the agenda. Glancing around the room, I noticed a number of concerned architects in attendance. Arthur Scully, a respected, astute local freelance historian, a week earlier had been the first to sound the alarm, in a letter strongly supporting the HDLC’S granting of landmark status to the church as soon as possible. Scully’s letter was entered into the official record that day, as were letters from the National Trust and the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), all in strong support of saving this landmark.7 A number of the church’s supporters spoke, including me. The seven-member commission proceeded to vote, with little debate, to grant provisional landmark status to the church, despite the fact that it was only forty-three years old. In the vast majority of instances in the United States, landmark status is not accorded until a building is at least fifty years of age. The HDLC vote that day signified that the church was indeed worthy of being entered into the city’s register of architecturally significant buildings. Yet this vote would touch off a major controversy. The stage was now set for the same honor to be bestowed at the national level, which, if it happened, would make Cabrini Church eligible for candidacy and placement on the United States National Register of Historic Places (Figs. 6.13 and 6.14).

  6.13: Exterior, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1963.

  Immediately afterward, a group of energized and outraged friends, parishioners, and architects, including Frances Curtis, the eighty-eight-year-old widow of Nathaniel Curtis, and Arthur Q. Davis, the ninety-two-year-old surviving founding partner of Curtis & Davis, met informally in the public outer lobby of the city hall council chambers. It was then and there I first learned that demolition had surreptitiously begun at the church two weeks earlier and, worse, that many artifacts, including the exquisite stained-glass windows from France, were in the process of being carelessly removed. A thin white asbestos coating on the underside of part of the ceiling was being removed, and the church pews, built with a rare hard-wood, had been mindlessly, callously bulldozed into a pile of matchsticks in the middle of the church’s central interior space, directly in front of the altar.

  6.14: Demolition of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 2007.

  I immediately drove out to see this for myself. Once there, I learned that the situation was far worse than I had expected: the altar was gone, as was the brass communion rail; the wooden doors had been mutilated or removed completely, and were strewn across the lawn as if left for trash; sacred artifacts, including the vestments, were strewn about the lawn; and the marble baptismal font had been carelessly ripped out from its terrazzo pedestal by a Bobcat tractor and was nowhere in sight (Figs. 6.15 and 6.16). An asbestos-abatement crew was at work inside, removing the church’s very small amount of asbestos on the ceiling beams.

  By the end of the week, a group of about thirty people, built around the core group of fifteen supporters who had attended the HDLC meeting, met outside the church to express their outrage that apparently clandestine demolition was underway and that it had started at all. The morning after the HDLC meeting, I wrote a letter to the Times-Picayune. It was published the morning after that as the lead letter to the editor. In it I publicly decried the destruction of an architectural and civic landmark and called for the demolition process to cease at once so that a compromise could be reached with the archdiocese and with a local Catholic school, Holy Cross School, both of which were extremely eager to clear the entire twenty-acre site and demolish the church just as fast as possible so that the Holy Cross campus could be relocated from the Lower Ninth Ward to Gentilly.8 Opponents of the demolition, including me, questioned the possible motives and the need for expediency: Why demolish the church first when there are eight other buildings on the campus? Why the excessive urgency? Within days, the Friends of St. Frances Cabrini Church was formed expressly to save the church from, in the Friends’ view, a brazen take-over end-run move, and its imminent senseless destruction.

  6.15: Baptismal, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1963.

  Holy Cross School was an independent Catholic college-prep middle and high school with deep social and cultural roots in the city. It was founded by the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1879. Before Katrina, grades five through twelve were taught in its historic brick structures on a tree-shaded campus in the neighborhood that had become known as “Holy Cross.” Its campus flooded in Katrina’s aftermath, some of the buildings taking on as much as six feet of water. Since Katrina, the school was operating out of a mixture of FEMA trailers and some of its less-damaged structures. In the 2006–2007 school year, 887 male students were enrolled. Before Katrina, the median household income within its local zip code (70117) was reported as $19,567 a year (versus the Louisiana statewide average of $34,191), and the median value of the housing units was $57,140 (compared to the Louisiana statewide average of $94,303). The percentage of homeowners was only 46 percent (compared to statewide, 61 percent).9

  By contrast, before Katrina the neighborhood where the Redeemer-Seton campus and the SFC school campus were located (70122 zip code) had a median hous
ehold income of $31,104 a year, and the median value of the housing units was $83,400 (63 percent were owner-occupied). From these statistics the picture became crystal clear: Holy Cross was seeking to abandon its older, much poorer neighborhood in favor of far newer and “greener” pastures without having to leave Orleans Parish, its home for the past 128 years. Moreover, leaving Orleans Parish would have been politically incorrect. The school had been experiencing a gradual decline in enrollment before Katrina, presumably because of the unappealing aspects of its environs. The Gentilly site was significantly wealthier and had a far higher percentage of homeowners.

  In short, Gentilly had been the more stable neighborhood and appeared to have a brighter future, according to the school’s future enrollment projections, with or without the Katrina factor. Holy Cross had wanted out before Katrina, and now it had finally found the perfect reason to escape. But why move from one badly flooded neighborhood to another?

  Just after the floodwaters had receded on its campus, Holy Cross began its search to relocate. Its board studied a number of sites during the fall of 2005, and two emerged as finalists: one in west suburban Kenner, near the airport in Jefferson Parish, and the twenty-acre Gentilly site in Orleans Parish. The Kenner site did not have any buildings on it, whereas the Gentilly site contained Redeemer-Seton High School (a school with a predominately African American enrollment), St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Elementary School, the parish rectory, and a multipurpose activity center.10 SFC Elementary had also been designed by Curtis & Davis, and the firm received national and local architectural awards upon its completion in 1955.11 Combined, these two co-ed schools enrolled 592 students just before Katrina (compared to Holy Cross’s enrollment of 887).