Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  Some weeks after the church was gone, the archbishop had the gall to request a meeting with members of the Friends group, including me. We declined, for obvious reasons. On June 28, 2007, nearly a month after the church was reduced to dust and rubble, the archbishop sent a bland, curt response letter in which he repeated his standard position on the matter.52

  We were from the start always playing catch-up. Always working to string the dots together to make sense of the facts. If not for us, the Section 106 Review would not have occurred. Perhaps most troubling, we learned too late that the congregation had the right itself to initiate the appeals process with Rome, with or without the blessing of its Parish Council. In retrospect, it appeared we had been misled by a local deacon into believing that such action could be initiated only by Cabrini Church’s Parish Council. Worse, an outspoken supporter of the archdiocese–Holy Cross compact sat on the Cabrini Council (it is naïve to assume that no subtle or overt intimidation of the other council members took place).

  Thus, a piece of property the archdiocese did not technically own was sold to Holy Cross School, which insisted that the church must be eradicated in an act of cultural cleansing. This occurred before formal completion of the Vatican’s internal appeals process in such matters under canon law. As for the U.S. courts, at this writing the Friends’ federal suit against FEMA remained open and may or may not be heard sometime in the future.

  Architectural Landmarks, Place Attachment, and Cultural Cleansing

  Voltaire once said that it was dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. Unbridled power is an intoxicant. The Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans behaved egregiously in the case of Cabrini Church and in fact engaged in a conspiracy to eradicate Cabrini Parish and all of its assets, save for a few salvaged artifacts that are now somewhere in storage. The parishioners were told that these artifacts would be incorporated into a new Cabrini Church. But no one is holding his or her breath for that to occur in our lifetimes. Shockingly, all this took place at the parishioners’ expense. Characteristically, the archdiocese and Holy Cross PR machines would later claim they merely had struggled to “do the right thing” in a difficult situation (this rationalization, “do the right thing,” was by this point being invoked ad nauseam in post-Katrina New Orleans). Expediency, however, is an equally dangerous intoxicant, a poor justification upon which to make a claim to rebuild any city, let alone a ruined city as extraordinary as New Orleans. Why rebuild a city by first unbuilding its key landmarks? This, coupled with the denial of tradition, memory, and place, amounted to cultural cleansing. Rumor and myth had raged uncontrollably. For its part, Holy Cross saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Sadly, its abandonment of its old neighborhood was responded to entirely too late by the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association. What was to happen to them? Weren’t they being left by the side of the road? In June 2007, Holy Cross struck a deal to open a state-run recovery district school in its abandoned buildings. This was yet another clever tactic for Holy Cross to get taxpayers to pay for the cleanup of its flooded seventeen-acre campus. Moreover, at the same time it issued a request for proposals to private developers for schemes to profitably redevelop the old campus.

  Cabrini’s senseless destruction was also a win-win for FEMA, as seen from within its ranks. The agency clearly abused its oversight powers in looking for a quick-and-easy PR fix that would turn aside the tidal wave of hostile local sentiment. As for FEMA’s payout to the school, the $24 million question remained, “Why did the unbuilding of a landmark place of worship have to occur?” This debacle proved if nothing else that the art of compromise had been entirely cast aside in Katrina’s aftermath. Watching this, would others now be emboldened to try the same tactics?

  When I returned full time to New Orleans after Katrina, in December 2005, it was not in my plans to become a preservation warrior. Yet a diverse band of knowledgeable and equally determined colleagues and I found ourselves thrust into the front lines. None of us had experience in preservationism per se, but we knew that if we didn’t help, who would? We were the foot soldiers, by default. Social scientists might refer to our field method as participant observation, although to us the alternative was unconscionable. To passively sit on the sidelines would have been spineless in such dire circumstances. Fortunately, Katrina created a small but determined cadre of new street fighters battling for the life of their city. Sadly, these battles require well-trained foot soldiers and new waves of reinforcements periodically because the rate of “Katrina burnout” is high. My fear is that there are too few souls willing to take on the myriad inevitable skirmishes and full-scale confrontations that lie ahead. It is difficult to challenge a political machine as entrenched as an archdiocese, a venerable Catholic boys school, the major local daily newspaper, the federal government, and the lieutenant governor, let alone all five at once.

  The Future

  This sad tale need not repeat itself in future post-disaster rebuilding efforts in twenty-first-century America. Six cautionary provisos briefly outlined below may help guide interested parties toward a simultaneously passionate and compassionate approach to reconstructing ruined cities:

  BE ENGAGED

  It is useless to stand on the sidelines in a time of great urban turmoil and upheaval, especially whenever cultural cleansing rears its ugly head. Get personally involved, if possible, in saving your city, your neighborhood, and places of importance to you. This can be difficult, because in the eyes of many, you are damned if you leave the setting of the disaster (by those who return and stay), and nearly equally damned if you stay (by those who left and never returned). It is an act of civic disingenuousness to expect others to stick their necks out while you stand silently by and watch.

  DO NOT TRUST POLITICIANS TO SAFEGUARD THE BUILDINGS AND PLACES THAT YOU VALUE

  It is senseless and foolhardy to look to your local elected political leaders for rational leadership. This is especially true when it comes to architectural preservation. In post-disaster contexts, nothing is considered sacrosanct, whether the “cleansing” target is a modernist masterpiece or a funky vintage neon sign atop an old brewery. It is probably prudent to expect the worst and hope for the best. It is naïve to expect that otherwise rational people will think and act rationally in uncontrollable, irrational situations.

  BE WARY OF OUTSIDE EXPERTS

  It can be naïve to over-rely on prestigious “experts” from afar, since, first, they do not have knowledge of the inner profundities of the challenges at hand, and, second, they will probably be dismissed by the locals as out-of-touch outsiders (witness Blakely and a parade of others before him, and even Longstreth). In the case of post-Katrina New Orleans (as with the torpedoed BNOB excursion), the term carpetbagger was frequently whispered by locals behind the backs of “just trust me because I am here to help you” northern “experts.” Worse, such experts may unknowingly advocate “cleansing” without realizing it.

  STRIVE TO OVERCOME BARRIERS OF RACE AND CLASS

  Everything in New Orleans in one way or another seems to eventually come down to deep-rooted racial and class inequities. Post-disaster planning can degenerate into a tug-ofwar between the haves and the have-nots, and the “flooded” versus the “unflooded.” In New Orleans’s case, as was broadcast to the entire world, life and death was determined by geography—those who lived on low ground suffered far worse than those who lived on high ground. The “cleansing” of lowlying neighborhoods, whether intentionally through a premeditated process of land reclamation and redevelopment, or otherwise, became a subject of intense debate as the city’s raw scabs continued to be revealed to the nation and the world.

  AVOID COUNTERPRODUCTIVE GRIDLOCK AND PARALYSIS THROUGH OVERANALYSIS

  Conflicting constituencies with conflicting political agendas for rebuilding can and will cancel one another out if allowed the opportunity to do so. This will result in reconstruction gridlock. This pattern dominated the first three years of life p
ost-Katrina and was most often the direct result of the aforementioned acute political-leadership vacuum, particularly at the city and state levels of government.

  BE AWARE THAT RECOVERING FROM A SEVERE DISASTER IS THE SAME AS RECOVERING FROM A WAR

  It is prudent to equate the post-disaster rebuilding of a city with rebuilding after a war. Everything is a struggle, and nothing is built or saved except through the sheer will and determination of someone or some group. In an age of skyrocketing federal deficits, Middle East tensions, and increasing competition from rising superpowers such as China, do not look to the federal government for any type of windfall of post-disaster funds for reconstruction. To some critics, New Orleans was a postindustrial welfare state long before Katrina. However, there is some reason for optimism: since 1990, many Armenian churches in Iran and the Republic of Georgia have been restored using state funds. The Georgian restorations occurred after independence from the Soviet Union, long after Stalin had destroyed eighty churches in the region in a premeditated act of “cleansing.”53

  History’s record of violent acts against architecture and against the survival of historically significant cities has been well documented and remains a catalogue of repeatedly broken sociocultural contracts in which individual liberties are sacrificed to a domineering new order.54 Doctors, lawyers, engineers, pop musicians, writers, historians, and many others have all played a role in helping alleviate the chronic human and physical suffering wrought by the alarming acceleration of wars and natural disasters in recent years. And the recent (July 2007) Live Earth global concert extended this movement into the realm of global warming. But where have the architects been in all this? A focus on aesthetics per se, rather than on ethics and engagement, and on the making of form per se, rather than on any genuine interest in its societal or environmental ramifications, only ensnares us in a self-perpetuating, vacuous architectural discourse that remains dangerously confined to the ranks of a small professional elite class.

  Esther Charlesworth argues that architects miserably failed to provide effective reconstruction strategies for cities polarized by ethnic and economic conflict after World War II.55 She proposes that architects should work as part of interdisciplinary teams (as in the case of the battle to save Cabrini). Second, she urges that any planning processes should be incremental and not governed by abstract, top-down bureaucratic machines. In the case of Cabrini, the core group of activists included an accountant, an attorney, architects, business owners, close relatives of the building’s designers, the surviving founding partner of the firm that designed the building, a journalist, neighbors, parishioners of all ages, a nurse, parish rights activists, and a freelance historian. We were drowned out by a large chorus of ill-informed naysayers uninterested in hearing anything about compromise, uninterested in hearing any both-and possibilities. As for Charlesworth’s second point, the hyperaccelerated pace of the scheme from the start, the reckless FEMA Section 106 Review, the Catholic PR machine, and local and state politicians’ desperation to demolish “yesterday” made meaningful discourse next to impossible. Of course, that had been their intent from the outset.

  What was achieved by working so hard to save Cabrini Church? The church was granted a stay of execution of eight months. Big deal. Yet beyond this, maybe local awareness of the importance of saving the city’s twentieth-century architectural landmarks will be slightly greater from here on out. But it will be a long struggle. The public’s very low level of education on architecture in general was a major impediment in the battle to save Cabrini Church. Neighbors bizarrely thought the church’s value to be less than that of their own ruined homes across the street: “Gee, my house is older than forty-three years old, so why can’t my house also be listed on the National Register?” “It doesn’t look the way a church is supposed to look.” “Jobs and neighborhoods are more important than saving a church.” “People are more important than bricks and mortar.” “Tear down the church and build the school because at least it is more than the government is doing to help us.” And so on.

  Around midnight on the evening of June 6, while standing in front of the church in its then partially demolished state, a group of the Friends formed a new organization, the Council on the Protection of Parishes, or COPP. We vowed to do what we could to make sure this would not happen to other churches in post-Katrina New Orleans or in other post-disaster communities across the United States.

  The both-and possibilities of preservation—versus a knee-jerk tear-down-to-rebuild-fast mentality—need to be positioned front and center in post-disaster architectural discourse. This and other hard lessons learned in Katrina’s aftermath need to be told for the benefit of people elsewhere engaged in the battle to preserve collective memory and to hold onto the meaning of important places. This applies to a landmark modernist church as much as to a vintage roadside diner. The victims of disaster in other places need to know what can happen if no one stands up to fight. Yet how does one decide what to stand up for? In the battle over Cabrini Church, the term silent majority was turned on its head as an army of heretofore “nonexpert” passive observers (preKatrina) were manipulated, post-Katrina, into becoming a lynch mob of misinformed screechers for whom any sort of compromise was wholly unthinkable. Shame on all of you who worked to bring about the senseless loss of Cabrini Church and its parishioners’ cultural and spiritual legacy.

  Conclusion

  This tale has been about how the first three years of life after Katrina were similar to the aftermath of a war. Excessive private and public turf struggles, animosity, mistrust, institutional greed, and the denial of cultural legacies defined the first three years of reconstruction. They were about the eradication of collective memory and the triumph of placelessness over place making. This period was too often about personal and civic loss, institutional arrogance, and blind institutional opportunism.56 As Mat Schwarzman put it: “In an increasingly homogenized, corporatized, simulated world, the extent to which this rebuilding process can save what’s authentic and positive about New Orleans, while improving the circumstances of our residents, will say a lot not only about this city, but the general direction of our society. I hope the world pays full attention.”57

  Buildings are about emotion, memory, and spirit as much as about bricks and mortar. The preservation of collective memory requires a willingness to reflect, recollect, and think rationally. Cultural cleansing denies this. It was no accident that in 2006 the entire city of New Orleans was added to the World Monument Fund’s list of most endangered places on the planet.58

  Even the Internet search engine Google was guilty of attempting to expunge New Orleans’s collective consciousness. In April 2007 the search engine once again was showing the city in ruins in the aerial maps posted on its Web portal. A few days earlier, Google had come under heavy fire for replacing post-Katrina images on its popular site with views of the city and the Mississippi coast as they existed before Katrina. After an Associated Press article highlighted the changes, a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee accused Google of “airbrushing history” and thereby insulting the memory of storm victims.59

  Katrina is perhaps the only national disaster in United States history whose effects may have been profoundly and repeatedly understated, despite virtually wall-to-wall media coverage of its immediate aftermath. The extent of the wreckage—mile after mile of darkened windows and trash-strewn landscapes—was simply too far-reaching to be captured on video, in photos, or in words. The amount of uninsured damage alone topped $55 billion (as of December 2007), greater than that from Hurricane Andrew, the World Trade Center attacks, and the Northridge earthquake combined. More than 124,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged.60 This statistic itself would prove to be an underestimate. By July 2007, more than 150,000 applications were on file with Louisiana’s tedious, much-maligned, federally funded Road Home program.

  Three-plus years out, uncertainty reigned. The flood-protection system remained nowhere near being guaranteed
to hold up in a category 4 or category 5 hurricane. Many experts, both near and far, were convinced that the city’s lack of political leadership and its many false starts in the planning process were the main reasons for the city’s lethargic pace of recovery. The city had truly become delirious, but in the negative sense. In just a single week in May 2007, three examples of this syndrome dominated local conversation. First, NBC aired a national piece on the hazards to human health posed by the ubiquitous FEMA travel trailer, while FEMA itself on the same day publicly offered to sell a used trailer to anyone for as little as $650. That same week, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority was granted unprecedented local power to accumulate and redevelop abandoned homes, but no funds whatsoever were provided by the city or any other governmental source for staffing or property acquisition. Third, recovery czar Ed Blakely was finally lampooned by the local newspaper as being out of touch, arrogant, ineffective, and overcommitted; yet on the day the column appeared, he was out of town (once again) to receive praise at a national planning conference for his heroic “brilliance.”