Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  On the controversial subject of the closure of the flood-prone Mississippi River Gulf Outlet channel, commonly referred to as MR-GO. MR-GO has been widely blamed for the massive storm surge that destroyed St. Bernard Parish and much of eastern New Orleans. It was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and opened in 1964:

  If you drive back to the 40 Arpent [canal levee], which is not too far from my mom’s [former] house, and she was there this past Saturday afternoon. The water [caused by multiple breaches in the levee] just picked up those houses right off of their foundations. And we’re talkin’ about brick houses. Even whole foundations moved, just like my grandmother’s house. My take on it is, you can’t do the [Katrina disaster] tour in one day. I’m still driving—today I drove past my kids’ school because I was told yesterday that they had to tear it down. The first time I drove past, I couldn’t see anything wrong with it. Then they told me, drive around, look at the other side. So when I picked up the kids from school, I drove down, and, sure enough, although this school is only five years old, the water took a big chunk out of it. So my take on it is, I don’t want to see it all right now [nearly nine months post-Katrina], because everything starts to look like everything else. It all needs to be appreciated in its own right. And, yeah, OK, I haven’t been to Lakeview [in Orleans Parish], or Waveland [Mississippi] yet. I couldn’t get there, but I’m not going to look at it all in one day, because it was somebody’s home, too. I don’t want to walk past this stuff and say to someone, “Oh, hello.”

  We had a [fishing] camp on Lake Catherine, and I haven’t been there either. It’s the same story; everything’s hard [all the structures along Lake Catherine literally vanished in Katrina’s thirty-foot storm surge]. You just have to take it in gradually. You have to absorb it in sections, because I don’t want to dismiss any of it as “Oh, yeah, that was …” I want to take it for what it is. I will need to absorb [the loss] of every single bit of it, in time. The stories people tell are the same way, because so many are so similar.

  But at the same time, each person wants so desperately to tell their own [story]. I respect that. This place has definitely seen its share of tears. That’s what kills me—it’s the men, to see those men and the tears rolling down their face. I think that happens because they remember the Chalmette that was. That’s part of it. Because when you’re in here, if you close your eyes to everything outside, that is all you see, you think it is all like this. And someone asked me, actually, the other day during an interview I was doing for NPR [National Public Radio], “When do you think it will be normal again?” I don’t even know what normal is anymore. I don’t know what to expect. No one ever expected any of this. Normal has been completely redefined. A grocery store would be nice.

  That would give me some level of normalcy, even a drugstore. Family Dollar has made a real presence. Which is great, because the kids need socks. There were three gas stations open when we got back. The gas stations and bars were first. There are [still] no franchises, and they are being leveled left and right. I guess they figure it is easier to start from scratch. I never thought I’d miss McDonald’s. We do have one Home Depot. People need building supplies.

  On whether the St. Bernard Parish government is doing all it can to encourage rebuilding, given the near-total scope of devastation:

  I am so confused on that issue, because I am in the loop so much here [at Flour Power] and I am out of the loop at the same time. Everyone, every [parish] politician, every construction person, is in here talking, but I can’t keep up with what is being decided or who is doing what, or not. I am so caught up with so much other stuff to deal with that I am out of the loop. My take on it is that, looking at this parish, and comparing it to the Lower Ninth Ward, in Orleans [Parish]—we’re doing a fantastic job. The real issue is, who is doing the job. And I think it’s because a lot of the people who were back first were, of course, the politicians, their families, et cetera, so they said, “Oh, wait, we need a waste disposal company? Well, we’ll finance that.” Because there was nobody else here to do it. So they did it, and now it’s all coming back on them, because it’s all being awarded through politicians’ families or through people who know so-and-so—volunteers, whatever—but they were the only people who were here getting it done. Now FEMA is giving them flak, and I’m sure, you know, that things probably could have been done in a more professional way, possibly. But there was no time to do that. And now I’m between FEMA, with these trailers, and all the stuff you deal with [with FEMA]. If our parish, or any other parish, had as many problems with FEMA as we as individuals had in getting things done, then we would all still be stuck back exactly where we were on August 29 [the day the levees broke].

  CNN broadcast daily reports by correspondent Anderson Cooper in the aftermath of the catastrophe and the inexplicable FEMAtrailer debacle in St. Bernard Parish:

  Oh yeah, he was down here a long time. He asked, “Why are all these FEMA trailers just sitting here? Why won’t FEMA just pay for them to get them out to people’s houses?” And let me tell you, we are still waiting for our personal trailer at our house. These are business trailers [beside the building]. In our trailer, we have all of our business stuff, the business computer, as well as our family stuff. It would be nice to just have a trailer at the house so we at least could get away from the business for a while. But that’s OK. I can’t complain, because we at least have this one. I know so many people who are still waiting and don’t have anything. No job. No home. Nothing.

  On the slow return of life:

  We have one church open. They were holding mass outside on the lawn on Sundays, down the street from here, until they got the main church [building] back together. The Catholic school is also open. I am a little bit—I don’t want to say upset, with them, because when we came back, we were told by the archdiocese they decided that the school would not come back until they knew it was safe, because of all the chemicals and the contaminants. Basically, I felt like they were taking a shot at the local public school for already being up and running. And personally, I cannot say enough about how fantastic that has been. I commend all those teachers from pre-K up to the twelfth grade. These people have put their personal lives on hold. They’re there from six in the morning until seven at night. They are amazing.

  A portable intermodal-shipping-container-cum-commercial-store squatted on the site:

  Another friend of a friend called and said, “We wanted to start a business [in Chalmette] preKatrina, and we couldn’t find a spot anywhere for a trailer due to codes, permits, and all that stuff.” They wanted to open a business to print up signs, business cards, and now [post-Katrina] there were no laws or codes about putting [such] signs up everywhere. So somebody gave them a laptop and the equipment. But I said to them, “There are already two trailers here, and there’s no parking to speak of as it is.” Frankly, the guy was starting to piss me off, so I said no. Two or three days later, the guy shows up here, with the building on the back of a truck. He said, “Look, let’s make a deal here. I need a place to put it. We can put it right there [pointing]. It only takes up one of your parking places.” Then he said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll set you up with WiFi for free. Anything else you need—faxes, copies, signage, anything like that—we’ll take care of.” So here’s this guy with this trailer, he’s waiting. It’s there. And, you know, it’s not as if it’s going back to Baton Rouge, where it came from. And he’s going to have to pay to return it. So we’re like, you know, the circumstances are such that you’ve just got to wing it these days. That’s how it is with everyone. No one has a place to go. It’s the same with these things [the two on-site FEMA trailers and the portable shipping-container-cum-business] as with everything. He was from here, so I just said, “We’ll just make it all work. It’ll be OK” (Fig. 5.30).

  Dozens of funeral receptions and similar “reunions” were being held at Flour Power because in the aftermath of the storm, the parish lost virtually every public place where social in
tercourse had occurred:

  We had two receptions [this past] Friday, and one today [Tuesday]. We have lost so many elderly people since the storm, it’s unbelievable. Last week it was two who were in their eighties, and this week it was somebody else’s dad. Everybody is saying the storm is the reason why. Absolutely. I too believe it is. When you pull an older person out of their element and they don’t know what’s going to happen next and they’re living in an apartment somewhere, after living in their house for thirty or forty years, it’s just too much for them. It’s too much for us [referring to middle-aged and younger persons]. Yeah, it’s been hard.

  Their community is gone. All of their friends are somewhere else. My grandmother, for instance, she’s eighty-three, and now living in Thibodaux. She can’t drive her car around Thibodaux. She’s wary. She doesn’t know where anything is. She can’t just get in the car and drive to Wal-Mart. But here [Chalmette] she could go to Wal-Mart, shop, and do her little thing. She can’t do that now. She’s extremely skittish and nervous as it is about everything. And she doesn’t try to put the best face on it either, not at all. No way. She does not hide anything. Oh, she is a gem. [laughs] She says, “I’ll never live to see this place come back to the way it was before.” She was born in the French Quarter. She grew up there and later in the Ninth Ward, like so many [in Chalmette]. It was all about suburban sprawl then.

  5.30: Sign shop, intermodal-shipping-container nomad, Paris Road, Chalmette, 2006.

  Flour Power became the de facto social center of the parish in post-Katrina Chalmette, serving as the pulse of a faltering community:

  This place is just like the parish community center. Absolutely. And I certainly didn’t volunteer for the job, but this is where we find ourselves, and we adjust. I’m glad I’m in the middle of it, because I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I was somewhere else, and, you know, another reason we came back was that each time I came back here [from Bastrop, in the weeks following Katrina], I didn’t cry. I only cried whenever I left. Whenever I got back to northern Louisiana, I would cry for days, and I’m not a crier. Finally I said, “You know, if I’m crying when I leave that [devastation], and I’d rather be in the middle of all that, compared to here in a nice comfortable house with a grocery store and lovely people and normalcy, then something’s wrong.” I needed to be back here to see what we could do to help. My husband needed to be convinced more, but he soon remembered why he left north Louisiana.

  We needed to be back where we were appreciated. Halloween in north Louisiana made us realize, “Oh, we need to be back.” [laughs] It was the costuming that did it. It was too conservative. The Bible Belt, you know? There was a Mardi Gras parade here this year. My husband actually rode [on a float]. It started here on the corner [at St. Bernard Highway], passed by on Paris Road, up to Judge Perez past the Wal-Mart, and the whole FEMA area, then made a U-turn by the emergency community. We got our apartment every year like we do, on St. Charles Avenue [during Mardi Gras in New Orleans], and it was wonderful, just wonderful. It was the same with having held the Jazzfest. If we can come back from this [devastation] and stage those events, then we’re good. We’ll be just fine.

  A tour of the kitchen was provided, then the family’s personal FEMA trailer:

  The trailers have wheelchair ramps because—well, that’s a long story. Remember I mentioned earlier that this is a business trailer, so they just dropped it. There’s a 2101 Paris Road, New Orleans, on the other side of the parish. That’s by the bridge where you go over the MR-GO channel. We told them, “This is not the address where you want to build the ramp.” We were told, “These are our orders, now we have to comply. Now step out of the way. I’m going to build the ramp. We have to build the ramp.” I told them, “I do not want a handicap ramp if you’re going to impede me in any way, shape, or form.” So they built it however we wanted, which was very nice of them.

  On their trailer’s minimal amenities:

  We have an office set up. The priority was to just get in everything we need [to run the business]. Plus, I don’t want to put too much in there because, you know, the more space you have, the more you fill it up with. The shower is small, but it works. In a rainstorm, it really gets crazy. [laughs] We had a rainstorm recently, and my daughter was in the top bunk, and when the rain hit the roof of the trailer, it sounded like when you’re frying something and you throw water on it and it goes POP, POP, POP, POP—that’s what it sounds like in here. The wind also is funny, because we are right next to an oak tree. And the acorns in the wind hit with a BING—and you then hear them roll down the side of the trailer. So, that was a challenge with the kids. It took them a while to get used to it. They would much more prefer to be in a real bed. I can’t say enough about how wonderful they’ve been with all of it.

  Ronda concluded:

  All you can do is make the best of a bad situation. That’s all. Or you can be miserable someplace else. As hard as it is—we work fifteen hours a day—still, I’d rather be here, in the middle of all this, working hard, versus not being home. Nobody has dealt with anything like this before. How do you know what to do? It’s overwhelming. There are so many lessons to learn from Katrina.

  Reflections

  In a 1956 essay titled “Other Directed Houses,” the landscape historian J. B. Jackson, mindful of a recent spate of harangues on the aesthetic and moral failings of the emerging American highway strip, wondered if the critics’ drive-by denunciations were not missing the mark: “In all those streamlined facades,” Jackson wrote, “in all those flamboyant entrances and deliberatively bizarre decorative effects, those cheerfully self-assertive masses of color and light and movement that clash so roughly with the old and traditional, there are, I believe, certain underlying characteristics which suggest that we are confronted not by a debased and cheapened art but by a kind of folk art.”27

  He posed the question “Why not have a built landscape that jumbled forms and spaces much as the evolving American culture mixed regional dictions and stylistic variation?” What critics of the post–World War II strip typically failed to note was that the built environment of the everyday roadside landscape, rather than having its meanings and contours safely circumscribed by history, represented a landscape embedded in motion. It could not be considered with the same criteria used to assess the typical “static” pastoral or urban setting. This distinction certainly applied in the case of New Orleans, with the fine collection of pre–World War II commercial vernacular architecture and signage that lined its urban commercial districts along Claiborne Avenue, St. Claude Avenue, and Tulane Avenue, and along such pre-1945, pre-interstate classic strips as Airline Highway (now Airline Drive) and Chef Menteur Highway. He termed this incipient architecture “other directed.”

  This was not architecture intended as a self-justifying work of art, but was meant merely to please and attract passing motorists. Nor was it meant to supplant the civically inspiring neoclassical public libraries, churches, or pedestrian-scaled courthouse squares that had dominated towns across America before World War II. It was about the currents and crosscurrents in contemporary life. It was about the “everything else” in the ordinary, everyday milieu.

  Full disclosure: I first fell under Jackson’s influence while an undergraduate architecture student in the late 1970s. His writings seemed radical and at odds with much of my coursework. Yet I remained drawn to the intellectual clarity of his core thesis. His writings continue to influence my teaching, writings, research, and community service work in Katrina’s aftermath.28 Perhaps Jackson’s greatest contribution was to reintroduce Americans to their vernacular landscape, to teach them to see again—and in a new light—the common elements of roads, houses, yards, and towns. This ability to see anew will be essential in the rebuilding of New Orleans. His essays in Landscape, the magazine that he founded in 1951, sprang from a highly educated sensibility and careful literary craft. Moreover, they arose from a love of the baroque and a deep opposition to the International Styl
e.29

  Jackson often wrote under pseudonyms in the magazine’s early years. In 1953, under the pen name of H. G. West, he wrote a harsh review of Built in U.S.A., edited by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Arthur Drexler. He chastised the editors for championing only architects loyal to the teachings of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, and for their refusal to acknowledge the vital vernacular buildings of the postwar period, with their profusion of eclectic architectural forms and meanings: the tract house, the factory, and the drive-in as well as other businesses lining the highway. By contrast, the book focused on private houses, office buildings, and apartment houses, all large and expressive, and none of them needing to adapt to a neighborhood or commercial streetscape. They were, in fact, to be viewed and comprehended as “works of art.” He argued that while they may be undeniably beautiful, they were not architecture. Here, West/Jackson defined architecture as “true expressions of domestic or communal life … these buildings of the International Style have been inspired less by a desire to accommodate existence as we know it today than by an almost fanatic rationalism.”30

  If Jackson sought to elevate the routine experience of going out for a drive, then the attractions and attractors of the roadside were logical, worthy subjects of inquiry by architects, urbanists, and others. To him, the lights and neon signs eased the workaday world and established their own sense of legitimacy, place, and identity. By the 1950s, attentive readers of Landscape had at hand a fundamental critique of the modern movement in architecture and planning and a set of new guiding principles, some of which anticipated, in important ways, postmodernism.31 To him, everyday commercial vernacular buildings and artifacts were created by and for people who knew exactly what they wanted. While high architects were primarily advocates for the wealthy and powerful, he was a champion of the average citizen’s desire for freedom of choice, convenience, and access.32 His vision was antithetical to the utopian modernist vision.