Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  Part 6

  The epigraph for this part was taken from K. Brad Ott, “A Healthcare Activist in New Orleans Tells the Story of Charity Hospital,” Breaking Ground 3 (Winter 2007): 22–24.

  1. City of New Orleans, Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Final Report, January 2006. Also see the Greater New Orleans Foundation, Unified New Orleans Plan Final Report, January 2006. The latter report yielded for the first time a set of somewhat clearer goals and priorities for infrastructural improvements, such as the city’s decrepit sewage and water system, subterranean gas-line system, roads, and the restoration of essential city services, including schools, fire stations, community libraries, parks, police stations, and the like. The price tag was nearly $13 billion. No concrete method for financing the plan’s recommendations was put forth, but the good news was that at least a citywide wish list had been articulated for the first time based on a (although appearances were deceiving in some instances) genuinely bottom-up, grassroots participation and the “buy in” of hundreds, even thousands, of New Orleanians, rather than the top-down methods that had permeated the earlier Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) planning process. The Greater New Orleans Foundation was the clearinghouse for this second planning process. Along the way, a report called the Lambert Plan, started under the direction of the city council as a reaction to the BNOB report, was also worked on, but this in-between effort left out many “dry” neighborhoods, and so it too was denounced. The Unified New Orleans Plan’s teams began their work in September 2006. More than a dozen teams of planners and architects were hired to carry out the planning process. The teams themselves were a loose confederation of local firms paired with national architectural and planning firms.

  2. Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility, “ADPSR Katrina Task Force Statement of Principles,” http://www.adpsr.org/ (accessed January 17, 2008). In its Katrina manifesto, this organization argued for five planning and rebuilding principles: “establish community participation and control in the reconstruction processes; preserve communities; reconstruct a more equitable economy and grow social capital; design for long-term ecological stability; and act as public advocates and responsible professionals.”

  3. “Mother Cabrini,” Cabrini Mission Foundation, New York, http://www.cabrinifoundation.org/About/cabrini.html (accessed January 17, 2008). According to the Web site: “Despite poor health and frailty, Mother Cabrini crossed the ocean 25 times during 29 years of missionary work, and with her sisters founded 67 institutions in nine countries on three continents—one for each year of her life… . Her message [was] ‘all things are possible with God.’ … She was a progressive, strategic visionary, willing to take risks … In recognition of her extraordinary service to immigrants, Mother Cabrini was canonized in 1946 as the ‘first American saint,’ and was officially declared the Universal Patroness of Immigrants by the Vatican in 1950.”

  4. Gary Hymel, “St. Frances Cabrini Church Plans Dedication Sunday,” New Orleans States-Item, April 19, 1963. See also “New St. Frances Cabrini Church to Be Dedicated,” Times-Picayune, April 20, 1963; and “Cabrini Church Dedication Set April 21,” Clarion Herald, April 18, 1963.

  5. Notes from the personal diary and sketchbook of Nathaniel Curtis, 1964.

  6. “New Cabrini Church Gets Cody’s Praise,” New Orleans States-Item, April 22, 1963. The photographer who took the interior photos, Frank Lotz Miller, remarked, “The lines of Cabrini Church are such that a whole book of pictures could be done on the church.” Also see Bodil W. Neilsen, “Curtis & Davis,” special issue of Interiors, February 1967, 101–134. Dozens of articles appeared in national professional publications on the work of Curtis & Davis in the 1960s and 1970s. The firm also won dozens of major design awards during this period and operated offices in New York and Berlin in addition to the base office in New Orleans.

  7. In 2006, the HDLC received letters from, among others, Walter W. Gallas (National Trust for Historic Preservation, dated November 7), Stephen Braquet (AIA New Orleans Chapter, dated November 8), and Arthur Scully (freelance New Orleans historian; two, dated November 3 and November 17).

  8. Stephen Verderber, “Landmark Gentilly Church Deserves to Be Saved,” Times-Picayune, November 10, 2006.

  9. “Holy Cross School,” http://www.privateschoolreview.com/school_ov/school_id/11605 (accessed January 17, 2008).

  10. Leslie Williams, “Study Sought for Church Being Razed for Holy Cross,” Times-Picayune, November 10, 2006. The next day an editorial appeared, headlined “Too Late to Interfere.” The day after that, a reporter whose ruined house was across the street from Cabrini and Redeemer-Seton High School again weighed in with a negative piece: Jarvis DeBerry, “Now You Tell Us? Controversy Over Razing 1963 Church Comes Out of Nowhere,” Times-Picayune, November 12, 2006. A few weeks later, James Gill weighed in with an antipreservation piece on Cabrini, including a thinly veiled attack on me: “FEMA Swift to Gum Up the Works,” Times-Picayune, November 26, 2006. In the previous two weeks, a barrage of anti-Cabrini letters, but only a smattering of pro-preservation ones, had been published (only a small number of the “pro” letters sent to the editorial page were ever published).

  11. “The No-Corridor School,” Architectural Forum 98 (April 1955).

  12. Peter Finney, Jr., “Cabrini Parishioners OK Holy Cross Talks,” Clarion Herald, July 29, 2006. This propaganda article stated that parishioners of Cabrini Church voted “overwhelmingly” for a proposal that would allow Holy Cross to purchase the land occupied by the church. It was also publicly announced in this article that Holy Cross would demolish all buildings on the site. Also see “New Orleans Modern,” Fortune 52 (April 1955); “New Orleans Architects Given Citation,” Times-Picayune, October 10, 1956; “Schools Lead List of Design Awards,” New York Times, June 17, 1954.

  13. Alice Kottmyer to Bill Chauvin, November 13, 2006.

  14. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Knopf, 1980).

  15. Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press / Reaktion Books, 2006).

  16. Ibid., 43.

  17. Ibid., 51.

  18. Ibid., 64. Also see Reinhold Martin, “Architecture at War,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 9 (August 2004): 217–225.

  19. No announcement of a vote on the fate of the church was publicized before this meeting. However, and to the surprise of many in attendance, a vote was announced—with a yes vote apparently indicating archdiocese approval to demolish the church, and a no vote indicating opposition to demolition. The suddenness of this ad hoc straw vote stunned many in attendance. Eyewitness accounts corroborated the Friends of SFC’s position that the vote was a “done deal” long before that day, and the intent of the meeting was to surreptitiously obtain rubber-stamp approval in order to proceed with demolition posthaste. However, many who were not there disputed these facts or opted to ignore them. See Carolyn Lousteau’s letter to the editor, headlined “Parishioners Were Consulted in Church’s Closing,” Times-Picayune, November 17, 2006.

  20. Mark Schleifstein, “Church Is Designated as Historic by FEMA,” Times-Picayune, November 21, 2006. The headmaster, Charles DiGange, and the head of the board, Bill Chauvin, led the charge by falsely claiming there was absolutely no practical way to incorporate the church into the Holy Cross campus plan. Reasons given were that it would be too expensive to repair and too expensive to maintain; it was ugly; Holy Cross had no daily programmatic use for it; and their campus plan simply could not be reworked at this “late date.”

  21. Matt Olson, “Resistant as Brick: Months of Covering Public Housing,” Breaking Ground 3 (Winter 2007): 25–31. Also see Brendan McCarthy, “Bloodshed Greeted with Outrage, Apathy,” http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-8/1176271533107970.xml&coll=1 (accessed January 17, 2008). As in a time of war, the citizens of the city had become desensitized to bloodshed. A culture of complacency had become culturally ingrained regarding the horrific po
st-Katrina crime epidemic. People did not describe it openly as war, but we all were aware. If violence “don’t hit your block, nobody cares,” said one attendee at a recent funeral.

  22. David Villarrubia, “In Katrina’s Wake, How Much More Loss?” Times-Picayune, November 21, 2006. The reaction to the upended press conference was swift: about twenty-five hostile letters were sent from GCIA members—a campaign entirely orchestrated by Angelle Givens—to Dr. Scott Cowen, president of Tulane University. The university did not deserve nor wish to be attacked on this issue. Regardless, our action was a success, even if we had to employ quasi-guerrilla media tactics. It was the only way to delay the church’s razing. Otherwise, it would have been completely destroyed by early December 2006. That night, members of the Friends of SFC, including me, were on every evening newscast, and numerous blog sites discussed the controversy. The following days included our appearances on local radio talk shows, including an on-air verbal battle on WWL-AM that I fought with diehard Holy Cross banner carrier Clancy Dubos, an alumnus, former board chair, and key disseminator of the Holy Cross propaganda line (and also editor of the local free weekly paper Gambit), and Bill Chauvin, the current board chair.

  23. Stephen Maloney, “Sacred Ground: FEMA Blocks Holy Cross Plans,” New Orleans CityBusiness, http://www.neworleanscitybusiness.com/viewStory.cfm?recID=18451 (accessed January 17, 2008). Father William Maestri, the acting superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, had little choice but to go on the attack, because the Holy Cross initiative in Gentilly was largely his brainchild. His style was intense, caustic, and confrontational. His public encounters with the Friends frequently disintegrated into personal attacks on us. For instance, he told me on a 10:30 evening news program on WGNO, in a voice that was only a shade this side of a yell, that “I was not a [Cabrini] parishioner, and therefore I had no business getting involved!” Each time I politely countered that I had attended mass faithfully at SFC church for three years with my children before Katrina. Regardless, his attacks continued unabated. He was a controversial figure in his own right, having only recently stirred up the hostilities of neighbors and parents alike in the case of Archbishop Hannan High’s planned expansion of its football stadium. He stepped down from his post in early 2007. See “Maestri to Resign as School Leader,” Times-Picayune, January 31, 2007; and Bruce Nolan, “Maestri Holds Many Jobs at Archdiocese,” Times-Picayune, February 1, 2007.

  24. Blog sites advocated sparing the church from attack. These Web sites included the New Orleans–based Squandered Heritage (http://squandredheritage.com) and the Washington, D.C.–based Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space (http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com).

  25. Richard Longstreth, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, New Orleans, Louisiana: Assessment of National Register of Historic Places Eligibility Report (Gaithersburg, Md.: NISTAC—A Joint Venture of URS Group, Inc., and Dewberry & Davis, January 2007). Also see Protecting Historic Properties: A Citizen’s Guide to Section 106 Review (Washington, D.C.: Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, 2002). At the time, we feared vandalism might occur at the church site, so I met with the local commander of the Louisiana National Guard to ensure that nightly patrols were stepped up in the vicinity of the church.

  26. Karen Kingsley, Buildings of Louisiana (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003). Kingsley herself was in the midst of writing the first career-spanning book on the work of Curtis & Davis. Kingsley provided Longstreth with many scholarly sources about Cabrini and other Curtis & Davis buildings.

  27. Longstreth, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1–2.

  28. Ibid., 2–3.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid., 3.

  31. Bruce Eggler, “Hundreds Weigh In on Demolition of Church,” Times-Picayune, February 9, 2007. On February 1, James Stark, director of the FEMA Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office, sent out a letter regarding the public comment period (February 5–26) and the public meeting on the evening of February 26. Contact information for Nancy Niedernhofer, FEMA deputy environmental liaison officer for historic preservation in New Orleans, was provided in the letter.

  32. Leslie Williams, “Cabrini Hearing Draws Big Crowd,” Times-Picayune, February 27, 2007. Worse, later that night my wife received a series of threatening phone calls at home from what sounded like high-school-age boys. The propaganda machine that was instigated, perpetuated, and creatively spun by the conquering Holy Cross together with the quasi-feudal Gentilly-area neighborhood group clearly had triumphed.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Schleifstein, “Church Is Designated as Historic.”

  35. Susan Finch, “Architect Says Church Should Be Preserved,” Times-Picayune, November 22, 2006.

  36. “Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu Announces Resolution in Holy Cross–Cabrini Issue,” press release, Baton Rouge, March 21, 2007. Landrieu made certain there was no opportunity in the Section 106 Review to debate the issues rationally or to discuss the $4.2 million in flood-insurance money and the many millions in FEMA federal-taxpayer mitigation funds. Hedge Morrell, a Cabrini parishioner herself for many years, had mixed emotions about the issue, yet she capitulated.

  37. Frances Curtis, the widow of Buster Curtis, was in the second row with two of her daughters that night at UNO, and we all became concerned for her health because she was visibly shaking throughout the unruly spectacle that somehow passed for a “meeting” that night. Control was barely maintained over the boisterous crowd. A week later, the actual “agreement” was titled Memorandum of Agreement Among the Federal Emergency Management Agency, The Louisiana State Historic Preservation Officer, The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, The Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, Holy Cross College, Inc, and the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans regarding the Construction of Holy Cross School in New Orleans, Louisiana.

  38. Leslie Williams, “Cabrini to Make Way for Holy Cross,” Times-Picayune, March 22, 2007.

  39. Jim Logan, unpublished letter to the editor of the Times-Picayune, March 23, 2007.

  40. Frances Curtis, “The Former Cabrini Church,” Times-Picayune, March 31, 2007.

  41. Adam Nossiter, “In Tale of Church vs. School: A New Orleans Dilemma,” New York Times, December 18, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/us/19orleans.html (accessed January 17, 2008).

  42. Lois Frederick Schneider, unpublished letter to James Amoss, editor, Times-Picayune, April 11, 2007.

  43. Georgi Anne Brochstein to the Reverend Mauro Piacenza, April 13, 2007.

  44. E-mail correspondence received from Robin BrouHatheway, April 22, 2007. In point of fact, that church sustained far less flood damage and only about thirty percent of the people in that neighborhood were back in their homes or in their FEMA trailers. Meanwhile, SFC parishioners were being told they would from now on be worshiping at neighboring churches (Pius the X, or St. Leo the Great).

  45. Tom Murphy, “New Orleans: Where Are the Leaders?” Urban Land, February 2007, 47.

  46. Jarvis DeBerry, “It’s Slow, It’s Imperfect—It’s Democracy,” Times-Picayune, April 1, 2007. In the next sentence in this article, he actually compared the Cabrini battle with a then-ongoing trashcan-maintenance-contract controversy in the French Quarter.

  47. Bruce Alpert, “FEMA Jumps the Gun, Landrieu Says,” Times-Picayune, April 7, 2006. More than 101,000 FEMA trailers were deployed after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Also see Alpert, “Memo: FEMA Ignored Its Own Advice,” Times-Picayune, April 25, 2007. Mississippi got 72.5 percent of the $400 million that Congress appropriated to help FEMA develop alternatives to trailers and mobile homes. Louisiana received only twenty percent, although Louisiana sustained much more damage to its housing stock. Under the FEMA consultant’s recommendation, Louisiana would have received 39.3 percent, and only 36.7 percent would have gone to Mississippi.

  48. Frank Donze, “City’s Redevelopment Plan Unveiled,” Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com/newslogs/tpupdates/index.ssf?/mtlogs/no
la_tpupdates/archives/2007_03_29.html (accessed January 17, 2008). It was most puzzling that no mention of neighborhood churches was made in Blakely’s presentation. The sole emphasis appeared to be commercial hubs at major intersections. The sole exceptions were the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East. Also see James Gill, “Jet-Lagged Savior: Ed Blakely Flies In, Out and Flies Off the Handle,” Times-Picayune, May 20, 2007.

  49. Daniel Monteverde, “Gentilly Church Demolition Proves Bittersweet for Many: Parishioners Keep Bricks as Mementos,” Times-Picayune, June 6, 2007. Also see Monteverde, “Faith in Gentilly: Holy Cross School Is Breathing Life into its New Neighborhood, but Its Longtime Home in the Lower 9th Ward Is Feeling the Loss,” Times-Picayune, July 8, 2007. On May 14, 2007, Pamela Dashiell, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, wrote to James Stark, director of the FEMA Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office in New Orleans. She decried the harmful loss of Holy Cross School to her neighborhood and called for a reopening of the FEMA Section 106 Review process. Her intent was to see to it that her neighborhood was included in any mitigation actions that involved allowing Holy Cross to relocate to Gentilly. Curiously, her organization declined to join the Friends’ two lawsuits aimed at saving Cabrini Church.

  50. The appeal procedure in canon law was described in correspondence dated June 6, 2007, from Sister Kate Kuenstler and Chris Schenk, national advocates for the rights of Roman Catholic parishes (http://www.futurechurch.org), to Georgi Anne Brochstein: “The suspension of administrative acts pending appeal is as follows: An appeal to the Archbishop shall be understood as also petitioning for the suspension of administrative action which has occasioned the dispute (Canon Law 1734.1), and automatically suspends the execution of the administrative decree (Canon Law 1736.1) until a definitive decision is passed by the Vatican. Appeal to the Congregation for Clergy may give a negative reply but the Parish is then permitted to file an appeal to that decision to the Signatura. Nothing is to be done in the diocese until all steps of the administrative recourse process have been attempted and the final appeal to the Signatura is given.” Also see Christine M. Roussel, “1911 Vatican Directive to Bishops of the United States Concerning Church Property” (2003), an unpublished translation by Roussel and others from the Latin original published in Ecclesiastical Review 45 (1911): 596–598.