The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  “Get in the boat,” he said. “We’re going home.”

  She started crying and hugged his neck; then she whispered in his ear.

  “I can’t leave,” she told him, and he understood, so they started running rescue missions, and he called a friend in the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, who brought the fan boats to take the patients to higher ground. That all happened a few blocks from the courtroom where the Benson family tried to figure out how $2 billion might make five people happy enough to get along.

  * * *

  —

  Out at the Saints’ facility on Airline Drive, there’s a sense of remembering prompted by the approaching anniversary, along with the humbling experience of last season’s 7–9 record. Each passing year in the NFL is a reminder that everyone and everything has an expiration date. It’s been almost six years since Sean Payton coached the best team in the league. Payton watched the Warriors win the NBA championship and the Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup, and he focused on the flash of joy in the seconds after the deciding games ended. He wants to feel that again, which becomes more and more unlikely every year. Drew Brees must also be considering the end of the most important relationship in his professional life, the undimming love affair between his family and the city that took them in. Both of them exist around town as pop-culture deities: T-shirts for sale that read “Free Sean Payton” or “The Krewe du Drew,” or the signs pledging faith to “Breesus.” These days of hero worship are numbered. One day, someone else will own the team, and Brees will live in San Diego, and Payton will be replaced by a new coach with the energy and hunger he used to have. He’ll be content living on the coast of Florida, remembering when they were all young and invincible.

  * * *

  —

  The hearing ends and, when the elevator doors open, Tom Benson passes security guards and takes a left, stooped and slow, an octogenarian helped into his car by his attorney. No less a moral arbiter than the archbishop said Benson’s mind remains sharp, and Tom jokes with reporters. He carries a black-and-gold walking cane.

  “I can’t talk about nothing,” he says before leaving. “I just feel good.”

  Renee, Rita, and Rita’s brother, Ryan LeBlanc, come down next, their attorney, Randy Smith, answering a few questions. Rita has a thousand-yard stare, audibly scoffing when one of the Saints beat reporters asks a question. She looks exhausted.

  “We want the best for Tom Benson,” Smith says.

  The three of them walk down the steps, across Loyola Avenue, disappearing into the Central Business District. Watching the two sides go in opposite directions, as if the photo of them on the field in Miami were being ripped in half, feels like the end of something. Only five players from the Super Bowl remain. The Saints’ front office has the highest amount of cap space taken by players no longer on the team, the barometer of a front office’s ability to spend money smartly. It’s all coming undone. The third day of the trial occurs on the 30th anniversary of Tom Benson buying the team, and now he’s an 88-year-old man who will never see his daughter and grandchildren again, at least outside a courtroom. In a few weeks, Renee will try to call Tom on Father’s Day and instead will get a letter from his attorneys, telling her to stay away.

  III. THE DOWNSIDE OF BUILDING BACK UP

  New Orleans has never been one static thing. The city has both died and been reborn with every agent of change that lands on its shores, immigrants and floods alike. Its people fled revolutions and dictators and famine, arriving in waves from Haiti and Ireland, Italy and Vietnam. The immigrants re-created the city, as did the levee breach of 1849, the flood of 1927, and Hurricane Betsy in 1965. That’s how it’s always been. New Orleans is a port city, a slave market, a river town, and, since an assistant engineer of Sieur de Bienville’s laid out the French Quarter’s grid almost 300 years ago, a place that has never been sentimental about what it was. Ten years after the flood of ’27, the local papers did not run a single anniversary story. Anniversaries are a modern invention, as is the idea of holding on to one New Orleans instead of just embracing whatever rises in its place. Katrina lives, and so does the New New Orleans, until another agent of change comes to erase them both.

  The only television show to ever really get the city, David Simon’s Treme, revolved around a theme common to Simon’s work, that people in urban America aren’t Shakespearean characters with free will but actors in a Greek tragedy, all subject to the whims of postmodern gods: cops, mayors, schools, newspapers, oil company CEOs—and in New Orleans two more, Rebirth and Recovery, the most powerful local gods of all. They bless some lives, curse many others, controlling the future of people who are rebuilding what was taken away.

  * * *

  —

  One morning, a rapper and producer named Nesby Phips says there’s something he wants to show me. He’s from Hollygrove, a poor 17th Ward neighborhood stretching between Uptown and the Jefferson Parish line. He has a Mayan amulet on his necklace and the word PATIENCE tattooed on his arm. He says he can reduce the entire ecosystem of New Orleans to one street corner. Academics quote statistics about the inequality of the city, the extreme prosperity so close to extreme poverty; a study last year puts New Orleans’ wealth gap on par with Zambia’s. Katrina didn’t create this problem, but it did make it worse.

  Phips can do better than calculating the Gini coefficient.

  “I want to show you how much it changes within a turn,” he says.

  He starts to laugh.

  “Because right behind this neighborhood is a fucking country club.”

  He points at a chain-link fence on Hamilton Street covered in some green cloth or nylon so nobody can see inside the New Orleans Country Club. There are three lines of barbed wire on top. “This here’s the golf course,” he says. “Them covering the fence like that, it’s basically out of sight, out of mind. We don’t cross that line. They don’t cross that line.”

  Driving west, past the corner of Mistletoe and Peach, he winds around toward the clubhouse. Grass grows up around abandoned houses. There’s an empty foundation, all facing the golf-course fence. The entrance to the club is at the intersection of Quince and Last Streets. The security guard eyes Phips as he drives through the gate into the parking lot to turn around.

  “Once you go past the golf course,” he says, “they’re selling drugs. Welcome to New Orleans, man. Everything is right up on each other. Same zip codes. Same street names. Country club right here.”

  He points back toward the neighborhood and the people who live there. “I guarantee you,” he says, “these kids over here have never seen a golf tee, let alone the ninth hole.”

  From the club’s parking lot, he sees some young white kids in polo shirts and khaki shorts, waiting between the clubhouse and the putting tee. Phips is sure they know every lyric on Tha Carter but have no idea Lil Wayne grew up in the neighborhood on the other side of the fence, the green shade blocking the poor kids from seeing in and the rich kids from seeing out.

  * * *

  —

  Since Katrina, life on the wealthy side of that fence has improved. The New New Orleans really is a safer, wealthier place with more responsible institutions. “Almost everything’s better,” Chris Rose says. “You know, it’s the one thing that no one can speak. Nobody dares write it . . . but how many people said, ‘It’s the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans.’ Now, here’s the problem: It was rich white people who were saying that when we weren’t even finished burying our dead. We still hadn’t even found our dead and people were saying that. Now, you look back and you gotta think about what it was like in 2005, our crime, our corruption, our police, our education. They’re all better now. Would they have improved had we not had this intense, overwhelming catastrophe, which forced us to not only rebuild and recover and repopulate but also reimagine ourselves? Would that have happened? I think it’s safe to say no.”

 
* * *

  —

  To drive through back-of-town neighborhoods to the intersection of St. Claude and St. Roch is to cut through the heart of pre-Katrina black New Orleans—thriving decades ago, now battered—only to find, at the corner on the Lake Pontchartrain side of the street, a new market that’s gleaming and white inside, high, tall windows reflecting light on the tile floor.

  This is the St. Roch Market, one of the places Mayor Landrieu likes to use as an example of what the city might be. As a kid, he remembers coming to the back to get crawfish for his mom from the Italian family who ran the place. He grew up, and the market fell into disrepair, eventually abandoned.

  Now it’s home to more than a dozen small businesses. The market sells things rich people like—expensive balsamic vinegar, Negronis, fusion Korean food—and for someone who lived in the city before Katrina, the sheer number of white people walking around this stretch of St. Claude is disorienting. One night, at a rap/funk show at a bar a few blocks away, a political, black-nationalist rapper performs for a mostly white crowd in a place that sells “artisanal popsicles.” Later a jam band noodles and solos over a sampled Malcolm X speech. It’s just a whiter city than before. You see white people in places they never used to go, which the people who live in those places notice too.

  The white population has grown, while the overall population has shrunk by more than 100,000 people, almost all of them black. More than half of the black males in the city don’t have work. More than half of black male ninth-graders fail to graduate from high school on time. There are few jobs and fewer places to live—none of the city’s housing projects was seriously damaged in the storm, but all of them have since been torn down, which opened up the valuable real estate trapped beneath them. One study says there are now 3,221 fewer low-income units than before the storm. In 2005, a two-bedroom apartment averaged $676 a month. Now it averages $950. The city didn’t replace the public housing units one-for-one, so poor citizens are being pushed toward the outskirts of town. The crime in suburban neighborhoods, like New Orleans East, is exploding. There are shootings and stabbings night after night.

  With the lack of affordable housing, activists tried to save some of the projects, among them the Iberville, the last project to come down. One group came a few years ago to meet with Blair Boutte, Shack Brown’s friend and former boss. They wanted his help in stopping the demolition. Boutte not only runs a prominent bail bonds company but also has built significant real estate holdings and a political and business consulting firm. He knows the streets better than anyone else, and politicians pay for that knowledge and influence. During the activist group’s meeting, everyone sat around Blair’s conference room table, in his office across from the Orleans Parish Prison in Mid-City. He recognized only one or two people. Everyone else was from out of town. He listened and, when they finished, he asked one question.

  “Why?”

  A hush came over the room.

  One person he didn’t recognize answered, “That’s our home, and we can’t let them just come in and take it.”

  “Ma’am,” Blair said. “Can I ask you a question? Where are you from?”

  “I live here now,” she said.

  “Well,” Blair replied, “where are you from?”

  “I’m from Boston.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “A year.”

  Boutte took a breath, and before ushering everyone out of his office, he told the group his only regret about the Iberville was that he couldn’t tear it down himself. “I discount everything you said,” he told them, “because I realize you weren’t here when the Iberville project was a death trap to many people. The poorest of the poor, the most uneducated, were all boxed into one geographic location. And we suffered through that. And for anyone to come in and suggest somehow that that is a great thing, that we should preserve it, they did not live through it.”

  Gentrification is a weaponized word, swung around New Orleans by all manner of people with all manner of agendas. There are no easy answers and no readily assignable villains or heroes. The Iberville should come down, and whatever rises in its place will not be designed to help the people who used to live there. Battling to save the projects is really a proxy fight against the helplessness that poor citizens feel. The decisions about their future will be made by unseen people in unseen rooms, then handed down like tablets, their tomorrows already carved in stone.

  * * *

  —

  Throughout the summer, the state continues debating how to use the vacant Charity Hospital building on Tulane Avenue, even as its replacement hospital prepares to open just before the anniversary of the storm. The state fought FEMA in the halls of Washington and eventually secured around $475 million to build new hospital complexes for University Medical Center and the VA about a mile away. Although UMC’s complex will continue to serve as the gunshot emergency room for the city, the spirit of serving the poor mostly died with the nuns whose ranks at Charity began to dwindle in the 1990s. Katrina merely destroyed what little of that mission remained. Charity stands empty now, while the new hospital stretches over three blocks in upper Treme, on the Mid-City line, which will soon be home to the Lafitte Greenway. The plan is working. Real estate prices in nearby Treme are the fastest growing in the city. This was a dangerous, blighted neighborhood before Katrina. In just 21 days this summer, from June 10 to July 1, the average price of a Treme listing rose a stunning $126,913, from $220,000 a house to nearly $347,000 a house. These prices will only continue to climb. In two generations, nobody will remember the dangerous back-of-town streets between Orleans and Esplanade—or the people who died defending tiny pieces of forgotten turf—and nobody who grew up in the shadow of Willie Mae’s Scotch House and Dooky Chase’s will be able to afford to live there again.

  * * *

  —

  A mile and a half up Broad from Dooky Chase’s, there’s a music club on the narrow wedge of land where North Broad and Hope Street intersect.

  Blair Boutte is waiting at a table in the back.

  There’s little he’s not connected to in New Orleans. His bounty hunters can find bail jumpers who remain invisible to the police. The famous Rebirth Brass Band started in his house, he says, with Blair on the saxophone, and when he left the projects for college, the band re-formed without him—was reborn, you might say, hence the name. In his office on South Broad Street, two photographs hang on the conference room wall. The first is Boutte with Nelson Mandela, taken when the South African leader visited Louisiana. The second is a close-up of the street signs at the intersection of Crozat and Iberville, so he can look up at that wall and remember how far he’s come.

  Boutte has brought me here because he has a story to tell.

  “A tale of two parks,” he says.

  He leans toward the middle of the table and begins to talk. The parks in the city, he says, are the knife’s edge. In a place where the most disenfranchised group is young black males, a good park is sometimes the only thing holding someone upright. “Let’s not say making it,” Boutte says. “Let’s say surviving. It’s about surviving in my neighborhood. It’s about . . . ‘Who’s gonna get the right break? Who’s gonna be able to avoid the land mines?’ There are many in the neighborhoods of New Orleans. Having a coach, having a team, having something to do after school can minimize the risk.”

  He points to the first park, Harrell, in Hollygrove, where the rapper Lil Wayne grew up. Coaches got together and raised money, building a thriving youth league, drawing kids from the neighborhoods in the 17th Ward: Hollygrove, Pigeontown, and Gert Town, the last a shortened version of the racial slur that gave the place its name. They got a concession stand up and running, which allowed the park to become self-sufficient, and when the Super Bowl came to the city, the NFL installed a field. That’s a success.

  Then there’s his friend Shack Brown.

  In 2009,
Brown came to Boutte asking for help. The men from the neighborhood wanted to start some organized sports at Lemann Playground near the Iberville projects where Blair and Shack grew up. “These are guys of very humble means,” Boutte says. “Let’s just talk candidly. When you’re dead broke, now you’re gonna try to figure out how to finance a playground? Helmets and shoulder pads and jerseys and mouthpieces, the whole deal from scratch. I admire these guys. They came to me: ‘Blair, how do we get the money?’”

  He gave them the first donation.

  Shack Brown took on this impossible task, and damned if he didn’t get the park running. They had four to five age groups playing football by 2013, more than a hundred kids running around.

  Then Shack and Blair began dreaming bigger.

  They figured the boys and girls needed restrooms. First they tried a port-a-potty, but it got filled with junkies and drug needles. Blair decided to build a cinder-block concession stand, which would provide restrooms and a way for the park to make enough money to survive. He got an architect involved while Shack found bleachers to set up by the field. Boutte wanted the kids in the Iberville to have the same opportunities available to the boys and girls growing up around Blair’s new neighborhood, Uptown. He says the biggest threat to a child’s future is the two hours after school and before practice. Empty warehouses sat useless across the street from the field, and Blair made plans to buy or lease them. He wrangled retired teachers and started thinking of tutoring programs to go with the field. By the overpass, in between the old Iberville and Lafitte projects, he says, a little organic miracle was flourishing.

  Then it all fell apart.

  “We’re gonna run the Lafitte Greenway through that park,” the city told Brown and Boutte. The parks department tore down the makeshift concession stand and forbade them from building a permanent one, according to Brown. Without a way to support itself, Shack’s football program died. The people who’d spent their own money on the league felt powerless and impotent, as if they weren’t residents of a neighborhood but a problem to be solved so the neighborhood could reach its potential. They felt in the way, which they were.