He argued for that which was messy, indeterminate, naïve, practical, unself-conscious, humble. He argued for an examination of new building types expressive of new rituals and routines. He embraced the delirious cacophony of franchises, gas stations, Airstream trailers, eye-catching signs, and parking lots. He sought to identify creative acts of newness in the built environment, but not from architects. Instead, from everyday people responding to the circumstances of their everyday lives.
The pre-automobile era in New Orleans would likely have been a source of fascination to him. But he was equally well versed in the visual and verbal languages of post–World War II America and how a new medium—television—was affecting attitudes toward technology, communication, and materiality. His dynamic, fluid perspectives on landscapes led him away from its traditional locus within painting. There, it had frequently been considered as little more than scenery, a static backdrop.33 He celebrated relations between art, construction, commerce, consumption, beauty, satisfaction, freedom, transcendence, transgression, ethics, and meaning. The functions of racism, class inequalities, poverty, and politics in America rarely if ever were explicitly cited in Jackson’s writings, however. Therefore, if alive today, would he have fused these issues with the case for rebuilding New Orleans, with its strong European roots and its Americanized suburban periphery? Probably so.
He recognized that a landscape need not always be only about harmony. Jackson’s landscape was a process of sequences, perhaps an annual occurrence, such as a fragile flower unfolding. Fueled by unpredictable waves of economic opportunity, landscapes—including both medieval market crossroads and contemporary shopping centers—could blossom anywhere, anytime. He went so far in the 1950s as to hail the vehicular strip as the new American form of community and as part of an ongoing dialogue that knit together individuality and collectivity.34
It is one thing to argue to preserve a neon sign, but what about the larger issues lurking in the shadows? Jackson would have advocated for the preservation of the everyday vernacular expressed in such classic examples as the Crystal Preserves sign, the Stereo Lounge sign, and the Frostop Drive-In (see Part I). But what would Jackson have thought of New Orleans’s post-Katrina roadside landscape (Fig. 5.31)? Would he have sought to reconcile, even celebrate, the indispensable role of the lowly, nondescript FEMA trailer as a vital force in the rebirth of New Orleans? I suspect the answer is yes. Jackson was wary of architectural or planning paradigms, or programs, emanating from a central bureaucracy. He would have championed the case for rebuilding New Orleans for everyone, not just for the New Urbanists. He would have found cause to celebrate the city’s failings and shortcomings, because it is a place overflowing with complexity, uniqueness, intricacy, nuance, inexplicability, and the rhythms and cadences of life.35 It is logical to conclude that Jackson would therefore have been highly skeptical of the extemporaneous imposition of ideology, whether the antiseptic pre-auto nostalgia of New Urbanism or that of egocentric, globe-trotting, avant-garde architects seeking to foist their latest signature building upon the city’s landscape.36
5.31: Deep South Motel, Airline Drive, Metairie, 2005 (post-Katrina).
Above all, Katrina magnified the importance of hanging onto that which is authentic in our lives. Authenticity is critical to the reconstitution of any city. An open gas station, convenience store, or roadside trailer dispensing po-boys becomes an emotive, transcendent experience when one has so little else to cling to. Reattachment to place can be fostered by the vernacular architecture of the everyday milieu. These are the places, as Jackson so adroitly argued, where we live out our lives. The everyday milieu is the central progenitor of place attachment: it is a catalyst. Such places, whether of recent or vintage origin, whether “permanent” or nomadic, whether modest in scale or otherwise, symbolize civic rebirth. Such places—as much as the art of place making—are lifesavers we can hold onto amid an ocean of uncertainty. I experienced this firsthand in Katrina’s aftermath.
A real danger exists, however, that the intrinsic value of these everyday buildings and artifacts will be dismissed in the rebuilding process. If so, then a joyously indigenous, deeply authentic, delirious place will have been lost forever. Formalist “signature” architects and either-or planners tend to be dismissive of the everyday landscape. New Urbanists, for their part, disdain commercial strips in favor of neo-nineteenth-century “town squares.” They view the funkiness of both-and landscapes as a contaminant, as having negligible value. By extension, they deem auto-centric strip environments unworthy of protection.37 While pedestrian-scaled communities are praiseworthy in and of themselves, a homogenized, banal, anywhere-USA New Orleans can be avoided—whether pedestrian-or auto-centric—only if all who are concerned work together to ensure otherwise.
This book is ultimately a call to everyone—including community activists, architects, preservationists, investors, consumer advocates, private citizens, developers, and politicians—to authentically rebuild both-and funkiness, this endangered ingredient, into the extraordinary gumbo that makes New Orleans unique. Beyond, it is a call to action for Americans everywhere to rediscover and save these treasures before it is too late. Katrina taught us all a valuable lesson: do not take anything whatsoever for granted in the built environment—for it can be stripped away at any moment.
6
Architecture Under Siege
A Lesson from Katrina for Twenty-First-Century America
Right now, [the power elite’s] whole thing is, “Let’s take this opportunity to make a new city for the elite!” We have got to speak the truth as we know it and not be afraid.
—K. BRAD OTT, NEW ORLEANS GRASSROOTS NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZER
ON THE ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF KATRINA, August 29, 2006, the media descended upon disaster-stricken New Orleans. National and international media attention had been in sharp decline during the previous year. A horde of reporters and celebrities appeared. They scoured the city for any tangible signs of progress. Most reports would be about a tale of two cities. On the one hand there was the virtually untouched New Orleans that stretched along the high ground; it came to be known, as previously mentioned, in the days after the flooding as the sliver by the river. Here, the city was buzzing, reclaiming itself street by street and block by block. These returned families and individuals had a combination of money and the sheer will to return. Most also had a job, a house, or both. Generally, these were citizens of some means, and places of personal importance to them, along with their sense of place attachment, remained intact. The tale of the “other” city, which was reported globally on the one-year anniversary, was one of mile upon mile of still-ruined, mold-infested neighborhoods.
Even CNN, whose reporting from day one had been extensive, struggled to express the scope of this jarring urban paradox. That week, CNN would show a reporter (usually Anderson Cooper) stationed in the Lower Ninth Ward on a pitch-black street. In an instant, the producers would then cut to a reporter in the French Quarter, where a lively street scene played in the background. This stereotypical contrast proved highly irritating for returned residents and diaspora victims alike. Which was the real New Orleans? Those who were still suffering resented any “recovered city” storylines, whereas the relatively well-off segment of the returned population resented “city in ruins” storylines.
Meanwhile, the destruction of significant buildings, old and new, large and small, was being planned with worrisome frequency. Virtually nothing new was being built. There were a number of reasons for this. First, the federal levee system remained in tatters. Hastily concocted post-Katrina repairs had been made to the storm-weakened levee system during the first year of reconstruction. Because of this, the insurance industry had put the screws to New Orleans, redlining the city and much of the region south of Interstate 12. Where insurance policies were not cancelled outright, premiums skyrocketed. Insurance, beyond the reach of so many before Katrina, was now a near impossibility.
Second, with no federal f
unds flowing for rebuilding, private investors continued to sit on the sidelines. Developers in New Orleans were not availing themselves of the tax credits made available by Congress one year earlier through its Gulf Coast Opportunity Zone (GO ZONE) legislation. Given the precarious state of the levees, a climate of uncertainty permeated negotiations between lenders and builders. The cutoff date of December 2008 for projects to be completed in order for developers to receive the tax credits also became problematic. Construction costs by late 2006 had increased by 30 to 80 percent over preKatrina construction figures. Third, the city’s expanding crime epidemic strongly deterred rebuilding efforts.
Finally, stillborn planning efforts and a continuing political-leadership vacuum continued to suppress public confidence in the city’s elected officials. Promised federal rebuilding funds remained far on the horizon. The report by the Bring New Orleans Back (BNOB) Commission had been soundly rejected in early 2006 and nearly completely shelved (along with the volunteer efforts of many of its subcommittee members) as a result of the intense backlash against the commission’s ill-fated proposal to reduce the geographic footprint of the city. In reaction, a quasi-feudal condition emerged in which ragtag neighborhood organizations sprang up across the city, each with its own self-interest, goals, and political constituencies. The Broadmoor Civic Improvement Association was one of the first such confederations to form, as if in direct defiance of the report’s recommendation to create “dots” of green space at the center of their neighborhood’s below-sea-level “bowl.” Fired up, residents struggling to rebuild their homes and their upended lives banded together. At the time, the ire of these bands of roving neighborhood activists was largely directed at the Washington, D.C.–based Urban Land Institute, which had played a vital yet tormenting role in providing national and local financial support and “expert” guidance to the BNOB Commission.
The Broadmoor group (largely white), as well as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN, largely African American), soon created an activist template for all other neighborhoods to follow. One by one, from the Lower Ninth to Gentilly to Lakeview to Mid City to flooded sections of Uptown, people united to share their frustrations with one another and with the snail-paced recovery. They clamored for effective officials at any and all levels of government and in particular in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (now widely referred to as the Army Corps of Amateurs). Still in a funk, trying to cope with a catastrophe of such magnitude, citizens collectively asked, “How could this have happened to us?”
This aggregation of quasi-feudal grassroots groups set out to make sure their voices were heard by someone. One such group, the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association, was organized by returned residents (most of whom were living in FEMA travel trailers) in the absence of any sort of citywide coordinated rebuilding plan. With no money and no government funding, such organizations were left to kiss the ring, so to speak, of any potential patron or suitor who may have come along with an offer of help. New Orleans was indeed now a quasi-feudal kingdom, in many respects, and a few seedlings were beginning to flower amid the ruins. As will be shown below, where this type of patronage flourished, New Orleans would come closer and closer to falling dangerously, even deliriously, into a post-Katrina dark age. Meanwhile, the New Orleans City Council, acting on its own, funded something known as the Lambert Plan, led by Paul Lambert of Miami, but this work was limited to the flooded neighborhoods. Lambert had had, preKatrina, a lucrative planning contract with the city.
Against this backdrop, when it became clear to outsiders that comprehensive planning efforts in the city were going nowhere fast, the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York City, stepped up with funding for a “unified recovery plan” for the city. With a grant of $3.5 million in hand, augmented by $1.5 million in matching funds, the Unified New Orleans Plan was auspiciously born in spring 2006 amid high hopes that finally a master plan for all neighborhoods—flooded and unflooded alike—would express the concerns of the ragtag assortment of neighborhood fiefdoms that had sprung up in the disaster’s aftermath. The Rockefeller Foundation, naturally, was extremely wary of falling into the same morass that had swallowed up the BNOB Commission only a few months earlier. After sending out feelers and negotiating some backroom détente, the foundation finally delivered the funds, which were subsequently administered by the Greater New Orleans Foundation (GNOF), led by Ben Johnson.
The UNOP planning team presented its final report in January 2007. Like the bedeviled reports presented by the BNOB and Lambert, this one failed to completely satisfy anyone, but this time fewer people felt angry, hostile, or overtly disenfranchised. The plan presented detailed maps and scenarios for each of thirteen planning districts across the city.1
Meanwhile, national organizations continued to weigh in with their lofty, disconnected, utopian takes on the strange, unprecedented saga unfolding in New Orleans. The manifesto of the Katrina Task Force of the national organization Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility stated in part:
Disasters … tend to have a disproportionate effect on disenfranchised populations who are typically bypassed in rebuilding efforts. This invariably reinforces their pervious social isolation, lack of jobs and capital, and consequently sets them farther back in all the social capacities of life. The idea that poor people could be permanently displaced from their communities and not given a voice in its rebuilding, especially in New Orleans, in the name of “reconstruction” is unacceptable to responsible architects, designers, and planners. The current reconstruction effort is not a suitable response by our professions to the magnitude of these historic inequalities and new injustices. We must take this opportunity for a new Reconstruction by … [creating] new social and economic opportunities by empowering local communities.2
Such a screed, in the view of locals, amounted to little more than the rhetoric of well-wishing outsiders. The city’s residents and their informal grassroots organizations were closing ranks by the fall of 2006. They had become increasingly suspicious of outsiders. During this period, and almost always behind closed doors, many architectural landmarks were being slated for demolition across the city, especially twentieth-century landmark buildings. These places included the 1950s-vintage Economical Supermarket and its prominent sign on the corner of Gentilly Boulevard and Elysian Fields, in Gentilly; the site was totally leveled in 2006, including the landmark sign (Figs. 6.1 and 6.2). Beyond this, modernism, and the International Style in particular, was now caught directly in the crosshairs. It was frightening enough that neighborhoods such as Holy Cross, which was filled with late-nineteenth-century Victorian shotguns and cottages that had flooded, were suddenly endangered by wholesale demolitions perpetrated by their owners and the city. In neighborhoods such as Holy Cross, a culture of expediency had emerged whereby demolition was seen as far more “efficient” than costly and time-consuming rehabilitation. The Preservation Resource Cen-ter and Squandered Heritage, the latter led by the indomitable, heroic Karen Gadbois, began to urgently sound the alarm about the ramifications of destroying so, so much of the city’s irreplaceable cultural heritage.
6.1: Economical Supermarket, Gentilly, 2005 (preKatrina).
6.2: Economical Supermarket, demolished, 2006.
Numerous twentieth-century buildings were now being targeted for death, including brilliant art deco landmarks built in the 1930s. This list included the venerable yet obsolescent Charity Hospital (1938); a number of public housing projects, including St. Bernard, Iberville, St. Thomas, and Calliope (all built in the 1930s and early 1940s); the Blue Plate foods plant (1936); and Baumer’s Foods factory and the landmark sign perched atop its roof (1942). International Style buildings of high quality were now also endangered. Their thoroughly senseless destruction was being justified on the grounds that they never “fit” into New Orleans in the first place; they were ugly, or so it was claimed; and no one ever really liked them in the first place. Suddenly, an “opportunity” existed for the
opportunists—and presumably the prerequisite cultural climate of rebuild-at-any-cost-ASAP—to demolish these past “errors” of the twentieth century in a bold act of architectural cleansing. The pace of destruction was now quickening. By the summer of 2007, a total of nearly 6,000 structures from all periods had been bulldozed in Orleans Parish alone, although the twentieth-century sections of the city were now under the most intense attack.
Endangered modernist and moderne buildings now on architectural death row included the Pan American Life Building (1952) on Canal Boulevard in Mid City, by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which had sat empty since 1999; the city was desperate to unload it. The New Orleans Civic Center complex (1957) in the central business district was also on the hit list. This very handsome yet poorly maintained complex included the stately and well-appointed State of Louisiana Supreme Court Building, the New Orleans City Hall, and the State of Louisiana Office Building, all under the threat of demolition because of neglect and indifference. Another endangered building was the landmark Carver Theater (1950) on Orleans Avenue, built as a movie palace for African Americans. No films had been shown there since 1980, and before Katrina it had been used as a free health clinic. Another endangered building was the American Bank Building (1958, demolished 2008) by Moshe Goldstein. The estate of recently deceased millionaire oilman Patrick Taylor wanted to level this “eyesore,” located on a prominent site on Lee Circle, and replace it with a pocket park. As for moderne commercial vernacular architecture, the 1950sera Capri Motel (1955) on Tulane Avenue, which flooded, and other strip motels, along with their vintage neon signs, were suddenly endangered. However, none of these post–World War II buildings have, to date, elicited the unprovoked attacks and public fury that were directed at an exquisite International Style church that had been built in the lakefront section in 1963.
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