[lit-ideas] Re: Essay on New Orleans
- From: Carol Kirschenbaum <carolkir@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:16:42 -0700
Dear All,
Sharing.
Best,
Carol
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September 1, 2005
A Sad Day, Too, for Architecture
By S. FREDERICK STARR
SITTING safely in Washington, I am watching harrowing footage shot from
helicopters above the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, submerged under 14 feet of
water when the Mississippi thundered through the breached levee at the
Industrial Canal and destroyed everything in its swirling waters.
My home is there, a West Indian-style plantation house built in 1826,
standing as an ancient relic amid a maze of wooden houses a century younger.
Some are classic bungalows, but most are distinctly New Orleans building
types, with fanciful names like shotguns and camelbacks. I watch as a
neighbor is rescued from his rooftop. Dazed, he has emerged from his attic,
wriggling through a hole he hacked in the roof, swooped up by a Guardsman on
a swinging rope. He is safe. Scores of others aren't. Bodies float through
the streets of the Ninth Ward. Presumably they are from the diverse group
that inhabits this deepest-dyed old New Orleans neighborhood: poorer blacks
and whites, Creoles of color and a sprinkling of artists.
My neighbor Miss Marie is also one of the lucky ones. Born on the ground
floor of what is now my house, she is 81, residing in a shotgun house that
her husband, now deceased, built 60 years ago. She has spent most of her
life within a perimeter of barely 30 yards. Both her speech and her cooking
were formed right there. A painted plaster statue of the Virgin has
protected her through all previous storms. But this time she pleaded with my
friend John White to take her as he left town. Satellite photos show the
shadow of her roof beneath the filthy water. Her house is gone, but John
saved her life, driving to Atlanta, sleeping on benches at rest stops.
Until Monday, our Ninth Ward was a neighborhood on the way up. When I bought
the forgotten Lombard Plantation 16 years ago it was surrounded by a 15-foot
cyclone fence to fend off drug dealers selling cocaine in the nearby port.
Murder was common. My father was convinced I was mad to buy it, even at the
grand price of $110,000. But then a few brave artists began fixing up houses
a few blocks away. They persuaded the city to give the neighborhood an
antiseptically modern name: Bywater.
Gradually crime declined and housing prices soared, at least by the modest
standards of New Orleans real estate. Happily, most of the old inhabitants
stayed on. I recall more than a few cases of the newcomers helping their
older neighbors paint their houses. As this happened, a wonderfully textured
community emerged, embodying the best of new and old. Bywater even developed
its own neighborhood celebration, the annual Mirliton Festival, named not
for the dance in the second act of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker" but for the
locally grown squash that Creole cooks like Miss Marie transform into a
spicy treat.
Bywater was a model of humane and organic urban revitalization. It even
acquired a motto, emblazoned on signs painted by a local artist: Be nice or
leave. Until Monday.
We are just beginning to appreciate the human disaster occurring in New
Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hundreds, maybe thousands, have already
perished. Hundreds of thousands will lose their homes and all their worldly
possessions. Untold numbers of businesses will close their doors, throwing
huge numbers of people out of work. New Orleans, its population already in
decline, now faces economic and social collapse.
It also faces the loss of some of America's most notable historic
architecture. Maybe not in the French Quarter, which may emerge relatively
intact, or the Garden District, which was spared most of the flooding. The
dangers lie in neighborhoods like Tremé and Mid-City, which extend along
Bayou Road toward Lake Pontchartrain and are rich in 18th- and 19th-century
homes, shops, churches and social halls. They have been badly hit by the
violent winds or torrents of water. And so have hundreds of other important
buildings and vernacular structures throughout the city and across the
breadth of South Louisiana and the Gulf Coast.
I think, for example, of the 220-year-old Destrehan Plantation along the
River Road, a living record of Louisiana's complex and conflicted history,
only recently reclaimed from near-ruin by the state, under the supervision
of Eugene Cizek, a Tulane architectural preservationist. The news reports
that all of Destrehan is deep under water. Or what about the wonderful mix
of grand homes and well-proportioned freedmen's cottages along Bayou
Lafourche, or the old wooden farmsteads in Louisiana's so-called Florida
parishes, which stood close to Katrina's ruinous path?
Louisiana, especially South Louisiana, is a living archive of American
social and cultural history, and not just in its buildings. In no other
state is the proportion of people born and raised within its borders so
high. As a consequence, they are something that is ever more rare in a
homogenized and suburbanized America: the living bearers and transmitters of
their own history and culture. Katrina, and those fateful levee breaks in
New Orleans, put this all at risk.
I am pondering what I will do with my own piece of Louisiana's heritage. For
six years I have used my academic salary to work with Jack Stewart, a local
master builder, to restore the Lombard Plantation. His craftsmen include
Pierre Trudeau, a descendant of the free black who surveyed the land back in
the early 1800's, and the Clesi brothers, descended from the large Sicilian
immigration that so enriched New Orleans life after that group's arrival in
the 1870's.
By last month we were almost done. The house breathed a lost age, when New
Orleans was the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean world, and when a New
Orleanian, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, was composing music that anticipated
ragtime and jazz by 70 years. So evocative was the ancient house that Disney
was considering it as a set for a feature film starring Denzel Washington.
Just last Thursday 20 Disney cameramen, sound and light people, and set
designers pored over the place. Their decision, if positive, would have paid
for the final steps in my six-year adventure.
Now the Lombard Plantation is under water. If it survives at all, it will
need massive rehabilitation. Just as likely, it will go the way of Miss
Marie's house and of hundreds of other pieces of the region's heritage.
But I do not intend to give up easily. Why? Because I am absolutely
convinced that New Orleanians will not allow their city to become a ghost
town. And I intend to be part of the renewal that springs from this
determination.
No city in North America has lived more constantly with natural disaster
than New Orleans. For nearly three centuries it has been overwhelmed
periodically by floods, hurricanes and pestilence. A major outbreak of
yellow fever occurred as recently as 1905, long after that disease had
passed into history elsewhere in North America. Soft "batture" bricks, the
result of there being no clay within 50 miles, dissolve, causing buildings
to collapse. Fires in the largely wood-built city have periodically wiped
out whole swaths of town. Formosan termites eat everything except tungsten
steel. Good friends in the Garden District recently spent millions restoring
a grand home there. But Formosan termites dropped onto their new roof from a
gorgeous overhanging oak and ate away most of the roof timbers before their
munching was detected.
Economic disasters, too, are part and parcel of New Orleans life. For
centuries this has been the "boom and bust" capital of North America, where
not only individuals go from nothing to riches and back to nothing in a
decade, but the entire community does. It's an old story.
The culture of New Orleans has long since factored disasters and general
uncertainty into its economic and philosophical outlook. An
early-19th-century cholera epidemic killed one out of five New Orleanians,
the equivalent of 100,000 today. Even the gravediggers died, forcing people
to pile bodies at the cemetery gates. The first owner of the Lombard
Plantation was among those who succumbed. But his wife and family stayed on,
and some of their descendants, both white and black, are still in New
Orleans today, perhaps perched on their rooftop awaiting rescue or huddling
gratefully with friends out in Lafayette or Breaux Bridge.
I expect they, too, will return, and that life in New Orleans will go on,
with all its precariousness and sense of fragility and, yes, with all its
relish for the moment. That relish, by the way, which arose from the
constant awareness of precisely such disasters as we are experiencing today,
accounts for much of what gives the people of that city their reckless
abandon, their devil-may-care attitude, and their zest for life. Rebuilding
after Katrina will be just the next in a long series of events in which that
spirit has been manifested.
S. Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns
Hopkins University, served previously as vice president of Tulane University
and president of Oberlin College. He is the author of four books on New
Orleans and the leader of the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble of New
Orleans.
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end
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