Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  6.16: Skylight above baptismal, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1963.

  An article in the Clarion Herald (July 29, 2006) by Peter Finney, Jr. (an unabashed Holy Cross supporter and perhaps not coincidentally a lay member of the SFC Parish Council), announced that the Cabrini-Redeemer-Seton site had been selected as the location of a new Holy Cross School to be built from scratch.12 All existing buildings on the twenty-acre site were to be demolished. The school’s architectural firm, Blitch/Knevel Architects, published a site plan accompanying the article. It showed a driveway and lawn on the 2.1-acre portion of the site where the landmark church presently stood. Meanwhile, the GCIA, the local press, and elected officials were being falsely told the new school would not fit on the site if the church remained. Worse, in a brilliant PR move seen by some simply as a bullying tactic, Holy Cross publicly threatened to move to the Kenner site if the church remained. Alice Kottmyer, a longtime parishioner, sent an e-mail to Bill Chauvin. It read:

  As one of many Cabrini parishioners who are appalled by the plans to demolish our church, please be advised that the “open town hall meeting” at which the “Cabrini parishioners” supposedly “voted” on the sale to Holy Cross was poorly advertised. I saw the “notice” for it. There was no mention that a vote would be taken at that meeting on the future of the Parish (church), and so many parishioners—who at that time still lived at great distance—didn’t feel it urgent that they attend.

  They (including me, my mother, and my entire family, and many, many others) were certainly quite surprised and shocked to hear that “The Parish” had voted at that meeting to sell Cabrini’s land. So do not cite the “town hall meeting” as any legal authority for your actions. That “vote” was a sham and, until a proper vote is taken, no one can assume that a majority … supported the sale, and certainly not the demolition of their church. What has happened up until now in this whole matter has been shockingly irregular, even by post-Katrina standards.13

  In October 2006, Broadmoor Construction Company, acting on behalf of Holy Cross and the archdiocese, quietly applied for and received a demolition permit from the City of New Orleans. The demolition cost for the church was listed as $688,000. When what was happening came to light, the Friends immediately sought to halt demolition. As it turned out, and as clearly written in the parish charter, Cabrini Church and all its physical assets were owned in full by its parishioners—not the archdiocese. Furthermore, it was the parishioners themselves who had faithfully paid the premium on the church’s flood-insurance policy all these years. This same policy had reportedly yielded a $4.2 million payout directly to the archdiocese following Katrina. Many parishioners who were aware of the details of the situation were incensed at having been cut entirely out of the decision-making “process.” Worse, the archdiocese appeared to be well along in the process of formally suppressing the SFC Parish in order to seize its bank accounts together with the alleged $4.2 million flood payment. No mention whatsoever was made of any of this to the general public.

  Cultural Cleansing

  Milan Kundera asserts in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, and its history. Then you have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.”14 Robert Bevan reasoned in his book The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (2006) that the machine-like destruction of symbolic buildings and the physical fabric of cities and civilizations is not merely collateral damage, but a deliberate campaign by attackers to “dominate, divide, terrorize, and eliminate” the memory, history, and identity of the opposing side. Cultural cleansing in times of intense uncertainty and conflict is inextricably linked to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and holocausts.15 The Geneva Conventions forbid churches to be destroyed in times of war, so how was it allowable for a landmark church to be destroyed in the aftermath of a natural disaster? In the rebuilding of cities after a war, Bevan argued, “the pitfalls of reconstruction in circumstances where there has been an attempt at forced forgetting by the destruction of material culture are particularly treacherous.” The Hague and the Geneva Conventions consider the destruction of cultural heritage a war crime unless there is “imperative military necessity.” Bevan argued for international principles to call attention to the importance of safeguarding the world’s architectural record. His is a plea for heterogeneous, pluralist values, for integration and human justice, and for cultural genocide to be made a punishable “crime against humanity.” This scenario certainly made sense in the case of the forcible seizure of Cabrini Church and its assets by an invading force.16

  In war, religious buildings become key targets, as do libraries and museums. In the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Catholic Croatian and Serbian Orthodox structures did not escape targeting, although the Bosnian Muslims suffered the most severe losses. In his book, Bevan included before-and-after photographs showing first mosques and then the ruins or the parking lots that succeeded them. Such acts are far more than mere acts of aggression. The mayor of the town of Zvornik, once 60 percent Muslim with a dozen mosques, declared, “There never were any mosques in Zvornik.”17

  It appeared at this point that the destruction of collective memory was being used as a controlling device in New Orleans. Post-Katrina, cultural conditions in the city were disintegrating. In the past, the communists destroyed churches in Russia, Hitler burned synagogues, and China desecrated and destroyed temples in Tibet. In 1950 there were 6,000 Buddhist monasteries in Tibet. After thirty years of Chinese-government control, only ten monasteries remained. The Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed a pair of colossal 1,500-year-old Buddhas in 2001 after having forced local people at gunpoint to plant the explosives. In the Ukraine in the 1930s, architectural monuments of the Ukrainian baroque were destroyed in the cities, and unique wooden churches were razed in outlying villages. Today, Ukrainians are ashamed to recall this destruction, yet during this period almost every single wooden church was destroyed. Usually, such examples are about one religion or political order conquering another, as in Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalinist Russia.18 Paradoxically, the battle for Cabrini’s survival had intentionally pitted Catholics against Catholics, and elected officials against rank-and-file preservationists and Cabrini loyalists. As for the local politicians, was any sign of “progress” tantamount to civic progressiveness? If so, the political urgency to build anything, fast, had deteriorated to a new low.

  Initially, the so-called “town meeting” was supposedly called merely to discuss the future of “the Parish,” although the meeting was not advertised as an occasion for voting on the future of the church building. Of course, nearly all the SFC parishioners remained in exile.19 When the Holy Cross campus plan was presented at the meeting, no mention was made of any attempt to find a reasonable compromise, i.e., to save the church by building the school around it. The plan was presented as an all-or-nothing proposition. In retrospect, six months later, it appeared that, sadly, the parishioners had for all practical purposes unwittingly voted themselves out of existence that night. All their assets were later seized by the archdiocese, including the flood-insurance payout. Why would the parishioners vote to demolish their own church, using funds from their own flood-insurance proceeds?

  Aside from the architectural significance of the church, the premeditated manner in which the situation evolved raised an entirely new set of questions. The Friends included many baby boomers who had been baptized and married at Cabrini Church and who had attended the parish school. Many were outraged to see their cultural heritage so brazenly dismissed. They tried to awaken and alert the Cabrini Parish Council, and then sought counsel from at least one canon law expert, although the Friends were, without question, most grateful for their talented, stalwart attorney, Jim Logan. Logan could see from the start what was going on, and he did what he could from a legal perspective to aid and guide the work of the Frie
nds.

  The archdiocese and Blitch/Knevel, their New Orleans–based architects, repeatedly exaggerated the true costs of repairing the church and its contents: estimates at first (before the rise of organized opposition) were as low as $1.1 million, but after staunch opposition emerged, they suddenly ran as high as $6.1 million! It was now a matter of gamesman-ship. The Friends argued the church could be fully restored for no more than $2.1 million to $2.5 million (including the tragic post-Katrina human-inflicted destruction caused by the archdiocese itself), leaving the remaining funds for the creation of an operational endowment.

  In response to the outcome of the town-hall meeting and the Clarion Herald article, the Friends produced an alternative site plan for the entire twenty-acre parcel, showing how the Holy Cross campus could fit comfortably next to the church, which would remain intact and fully restored. Holy Cross would hear nothing of it.20 A tragedy was in the making. The church at this point fell prey to intense public verbal attacks.

  Similarly, public housing in New Orleans was under attack at this time. By late 2006, public outrage was growing over the proposed demolition of thousands of Housing and Urban Development–sponsored housing units in the city. Angry former residents charged HUD and the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) with racial cleansing and stealing land in order to resell it to private developers.21 Before Katrina, more than 5,000 families had lived in public housing; two years after Katrina, only 1,000 had been able to return, although during this period rents had increased from 70 to 300 percent in the city. Similar to the by-now-standard Holy Cross party line, the HUD-HANO redevelopment plans were supposedly for the “betterment” of the residents. Both the Cabrini Church and HUD-HANO battles were being fueled by premeditated attacks on a slice of the city’s collective memory.

  Meanwhile, it became publicly known that Holy Cross would receive a massive payout from FEMA in disaster-mitigation funds. The school had managed to get FEMA to declare its historic Lower Ninth Ward campus as more than 51 percent damaged, based on what by that time in New Orleans had become widely referred to as the “Fifty-one Percent Rule.” Here was a school abandoning its historic campus, with the option of selling it later to a developer at a profit, and electing to build a new campus in a newer yet worse flooded section of the city, and collecting as much as $24 million in federal taxpayer funds to do so. As this scenario played out, the church’s comparatively small but determined band of supporters functioned as what the Holy Cross administration and the archdiocese would now label as “obstructionists.” The enemy had been sighted.

  The Upended Press Conference

  By the week of Thanksgiving 2006, each side had firmly established its position. The anti-Cabrini camp had dug in its heels for a fight. It was now time for a direct confrontation. The first attack was launched by the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association, in this case functioning as no more than a mouthpiece for the invaders. The GCIA was one of the aforementioned quasi-feudal neighborhood confederations. Its PR person was the outspoken Angelle Givens, a short forty-something woman with a powerful set of vocal cords. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the GCIA staged a press conference on the neutral ground (Paris Avenue median) across from the church. The sole purpose was to denounce us obstructionists and to extol the virtues of Holy Cross coming to Gentilly. Along the way, the group corralled the support of the district’s beleaguered councilperson, Cynthia Hedge Morrell. Also in attendance was Oliver Thomas, president of the seven-member city council (and currently serving a three-year federal prison term for taking a bribe while in office).

  These were indeed rough times for any elected official in New Orleans, but especially for Thomas and Morrell. Thomas had grown up in the Lower Ninth Ward and had witnessed firsthand the destruction of his old stomping grounds. Morrell, for her part, had lost two-thirds of the constituents in her heavily flooded council district. Thomas, one of two councilpersons-at-large, represented the entire city. To their credit, however, the two had been working tirelessly in crisis-management mode day and night to govern a city that was fiscally destitute, having laid off more than 3,000 city employees in the aftermath of the storm. There was no money to rebuild anything (except, it seemed, the resurrected Superdome for the city’s pro football franchise, the New Orleans Saints). Together, along with the other five members of the council, they latched onto the Holy Cross relocation to Gentilly as a way to show that they were doing something, anything. That morning, they stood proudly side by side on the neutral ground, surrounded by GCIA members and a phalanx of TV cameras, as Givens led the charge. I had prepared large boards showing the Friends’ proposed alternate site plan, with the church and the school on the same site. A handful of Tulane architecture students stood on the sidelines as I began to repeatedly shout “compromise, compromise” while Givens and the politicians took turns at the microphone. They had orchestrated the event for the cameras. I continued, “Why does it have to be either-or? Why can’t Holy Cross and Cabrini coexist side by side in Gentilly?” They were clearly agitated. Members of the Friends stood nearby in a sort of defensive battle-line formation.

  This action was necessary in order to demonstrate that a reasonable and logical alternative existed. Not surprisingly, no Holy Cross or archdiocese officials attended this event. A mêlée ensued, including some physical scuffles. The reporters rushed immediately to interview us, not the politicians. That same morning, an op-ed piece by David Villarrubia was published in the local newspaper. In it, he stated that while the Gentilly neighborhood embraced plans for the new school, many naturally assumed that the church would stay. He questioned the logic of revitalizing the community while tearing down its landmark church, its spiritual heart:

  Why do I speak now? Because there were no public hear-ings—no chance to speak before. I grew up in this church. At the rate of demolition in New Orleans, we’ll soon have nothing of quality left, no memories of preKatrina New Orleans. There is no reason why Cabrini Church, with minimal damage from Katrina, cannot coexist with the new Holy Cross. This magnificent structure could easily be utilized for a chapel or performing arts center … or National Catholic Memorial Shrine named in honor of Mother Cabrini and dedicated to the victims of Katrina … as an adaptive use or mixed use with the church … [Its] demolition is a violent and immoral decision that goes against the emotional and societal fabric that makes us a civilized society. Throughout time, where wars are fought, churches are known as places of refuge, not unlike what is needed in these desperate times in New Orleans. How much loss is enough? The destruction of this church will rank among the worst and most painful post-Katrina decisions forever. How ironic it is that our church was spared by an act of God only to be destroyed by an act of man?22

  The Times-Picayune, the local daily, immediately and repeatedly railed against us “obstructionists” for having waited, in its opinion, too long to protest, and for standing in the way of the city’s rebuilding progress. Immediately, the archdiocese’s PR machine entered the fray, launching its own intense attack campaign to discredit the supporters of SFC.23

  The Questionable Section 106 Review

  The following week, the city council squarely lined up in opposition to the SFC “obstructionists” when it unanimously passed an endorsement of the church’s destruction, proclaiming the council’s full support of Holy Cross’s plans. Besides Morrell and Thomas, the five others who blindly fell into line were Arnie Fielkow, Shelly Madura, Stacy Head, James Carter, and Cynthia Willard-Lewis. To no one’s surprise, Mayor Nagin was nowhere in sight on the issue. Meanwhile, the Friends and our attorney, Jim Logan, had contacted FEMA to inquire if FEMA realized that the church was architecturally worthy of local, even national, landmark status. FEMA, at first flustered, responded by instructing the archdiocese to halt further demolition at the site, and immediately launched what is called a Section 106 Review. This law was enacted in 1966 to provide a reasonable way to determine if buildings less than fifty years old are eligible for placement on the National
Register of Historic Places. Additionally, the National Trust for Historic Preservation weighs in on this process, as does the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) in each of the fifty states. I had never heard of this federal law. Since Cabrini Church was only forty-three years old, FEMA’s decision to now act fueled further loud controversy and yet another round of brutal verbal and written attacks on FEMA, the church, and the “obstructionists,” this time centered even more squarely on the alleged physical ugliness of the church and how it had continued to be an albatross for the SFC Parish to fiscally operate.

  Additional falsehoods about the church were hurled from the Holy Cross camp, not unlike an artillery barrage. Despite all the local hostility, the Friends quietly had garnered the support of the Cabrini Foundation in New York, and donations were beginning to accrue locally and nationally in support of the legal defense of the church.

  This same week we learned that the famed structural engineer John Skilling had worked alongside Curtis & Davis on the design of Cabrini Church. Significantly, it was also learned that Skilling later worked with Minoru Yamasaki on the structural design of the ill-fated World Trade Center in New York City. In other words, Skilling was the structural engineer for the Twin Towers. The unprovoked attack on Cabrini Church was now attracting some national attention on the Internet via numerous preservation blog sites.24

  Quickly, FEMA (under intense political pressure from Holy Cross and Louisiana lieutenant governor Mitch Landrieu) commissioned NISTAC, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, in a joint venture with URS Group, Inc., and Dewberry & Davis, to assess the significance of the SFC. This group in turn commissioned one of the most preeminent American architectural historians of mid-twentieth-century modernism in the United States, Dr. Richard Longstreth, to conduct the field and scholarly research for the report to FEMA. The deadline given to Longstreth was extremely short—little more than four weeks to complete his work. Longstreth, a professor of American studies and the director of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., was eminently qualified for the task. He immediately set to work.