More New Orleans

Helping a friend with outside stuff yesterday plus Adams-Morgan Day has put me behind in reading. There were a number of articles in yesterday's papers on the Katrina disaster that I need to plow through.

Associated Press graphic.

There are a couple of good things to read right now, including the always great Inga Saffron, and her Sunday column "Don't bulldoze distinctive houses--New Orleans' historic districts survived. But what about the structures that give them flavor?" From the article:

Even people who aren't from New Orleans can imagine what it means to miss the French Quarter and the Garden District, two celebrated neighborhoods dripping with charm and magnolias. But mention Bywater, the Irish Channel, or the Lower Ninth Ward, where 16-foot-wide shotgun houses are permanently dressed for an architectural Mardi Gras, and you will almost certainly be met with blank stares. Yet it is those modest neighborhoods of steamy, close-packed, wooden cottages that have long provided the aspic in which New Orleans' high-struttin' culture could jell. And, tragically, it is those neighborhoods that are now most likely to be sitting knee-deep in fetid water.

Though flooding has receeded several feet in many areas of New Orleans, water is still high in some neighborhoods. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Those blocks of vernacular houses, which fuse the ordinary and the fantastical into the fabric and soul of this special city, must now gird themselves against forces more powerful than any Category 5 hurricane: big developers, insurance-company automatons, federal bureaucrats, bone-deep poverty, and the local disposition for inertia. The impulse will be to move in quickly with bulldozers, without much planning. But to do so would cost New Orleans its identity.

In the days since Katrina's strike, it has become clear that the areas best known to tourists remain largely intact. The French Quarter, the Garden District, the Canal Street business corridor, and the Warehouse Arts District were spared the worst of the deluge, thanks to their location along a ridge of high ground. New Orleans, like Philadelphia, is a generally flat city squeezed between two bodies of water, yet it has marked variations in terrain, just as it has marked variations in social conditions. The high-ground neighborhoods tend to be the affluent ones.

When I telephoned Delia LaBarre, a local preservationist, last week at her townhouse near Lafayette Square, a few blocks from an office district that resembles our Market Street, she answered as if it were just another day. "We have water. We have electricity. I really do not understand why they want us evacuated," she said. Fearful that city officials will want to raze great swaths of her beloved city, LaBarre is determined to be present when the ground war begins against the waterlogged structures in the less affluent, low-lying sections.

This Garden District house looks unscathed. Frank D.M. Strachan III tours New Orleans' historic Garden District. Strachan was one of the lone holdhouts who stayed in the city to watch over his property. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times)

Without a doubt, New Orleans' historic sections will get by, as they have gotten by during the last 200 hurricane seasons. Flooding takes a costly toll on buildings by turning brick foundations into mushy clay, by causing wood pilings to rot, and by fouling rooms with sewage and chemicals. But given enough money and stubbornness, almost any building can be fixed.

Charleston, S.C., Mayor Joseph P. Riley, one of the nation's few preservationists elected to office, proved that after Hurricane Hugo in 1989 by intervening to stop wholesale tear-downs. Bricks were replaced. Poultices and bleach were deployed against mold and toxins.

New Orleans preservationists say it's not clear that their mayor, C. Ray Nagin, will show Riley's resolve. New Orleans' population has dropped over 20 percent, to 485,000, since 1960, yet the blocks of candy-colored Creole cottages seem to go on forever, much like the Philadelphia rowhouses that march north, south and west from Center City. What will happen to the one-story shotgun houses that lack the imprimatur of historic designation?

Also, Tom Angotti, a professor at Hunter College and editor of Progessive Planning, wrote an interesting piece in Gotham Gazette, "9/11: Will The Lessons Learned Help New Orleans?" From the article:

Four years after 9/11, the nation is facing another disaster, not on 16 acres but over an entire city. What have we learned about land use planning in the aftermath of 9/11 and will any of it apply to the rebuilding of flood-floored New Orleans? I think there are five major lessons.

1. Leadership Matters;
2. Public Discussion Helps;
3. [Who Owns the] Property Matters;
4. The Impact On The Environment Must Be Dealt With;
5. Immigrants Suffer; and
Race Matters