Delirious New Orleans
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However, a few days later the newspaper did publish a letter of rebuttal to its one-sided coverage, albeit a strategically edited one (see the italicized portion at the end of the original letter as added by this author). The writer was Nathaniel “Buster” Curtis’s widow, Frances Curtis:
The “Agreement” between Holy Cross/Archdiocese of New Orleans/FEMA regarding St. Frances Cabrini Church apparently is whatever conforms to the desires of the powers that be, including the press, the broadcasting industry, the political establishment, and any others who are unwilling to hear the truth. To heck with a church, any church, the neighborhood only needs a school for boys ages 10–17, who will be bused in daily from the entire metropolitan area and the North shore to spark a building boom, they say. These shortsighted people are willing to demolish beauty for a tasteless pseudo nineteenth century architectural campus when they could have had both for the asking.
As far as the “devastated” church is concerned, the only damage from Katrina was to the mechanical equipment. In their haste to “remove” the building (did someone instruct Leslie Williams [in a recent article in the Times-Picayune on the church battle] to avoid the word “demolish” so much for semantics?) the contractors hired by Holy Cross, in order to avoid a possible Section 106 Review, carelessly damaged the eight-ton marble altar, the beautifully designed baptistery, the invaluable stained glass and, of course, the irreplaceable solid Honduras mahogany pews so callously bulldozed [Fig. 6.17]. Honduras mahogany is no longer available in any quantity, the slow growing trees having been decimated by the lumber interests. This wood was used in PT boats during WWII and is no stranger to water. It is found today only in fine antiques. Had FEMA not been forced to step in at the eleventh hour in compliance with the law, the church would have become a pile of rubble with nothing left to review (exactly what they intended) and suddenly those who wanted to save the church became “obstructionists.” Did the SFC parishioners have anything to say about all of this? Of course not! They were locked out of their church with heavy chains from the beginning.
The so-called leaking roof was repaired eighteen months before Katrina with the finest roofing materials available. The thin-shelled concrete was covered with elastomeric, a roof coating of exceptional durability used by the aerospace industry and on many government and industrial buildings. And what happened to the $4.2 million dollar insurance policy owned and maintained by the congregation all those years? Is it sitting in a bank somewhere earning interest? Has the Archdiocese confiscated it? Is it being used to repair the many other churches that were grossly underinsured? No one will answer these questions.
And what will the congregation have to show for the funds they worked so hard to raise to erect the church? An empty patch of real estate, that’s what, where Holy Cross has egregiously and pretentiously offered to display “memorabilia.” [Author’s note—The following concluding passage was cut from Ms. Curtis’s letter.] What gall. How despicable, outrageous and insulting. The school even wants to take over the cross from the top of the steeple. By what right? If it does so, surely it should become known as the “Unholy Cross.” The controversy has been from the beginning a done deal. Is the “mitigating” factor on whichFEMAdoomed the church its size, really? Or was it political pressure exerted at the highest levels of government? 40
6.17: Interior, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, 1963.
Interest in the battle by this time had reached far beyond war-torn New Orleans, fueled by a piece appearing in December 2006 in the New York Times, titled “In Tale of Church vs. School: A New Orleans Dilemma.”41 Many were now starting to weigh in. In an unpublished letter sent to Jim Amoss from Paris by Lois Frederick Schneider, a strong case was made for the church’s international importance as a work of modernist liturgical architecture:
Just recently I learned that Mr. Frederic Migayrou, Chief Conservator for Architecture of the Centre Georges Pompidou, had written a letter to FEMA during the period (February 6–26) when it was receiving comments, recommending that this remarkable architectural accomplishment be preserved. There has been a tragic deficit of communication between FEMA and the citizens of New Orleans. FEMA, intent on pursuing its action concerning the church, with Holy Cross School and the Archdiocese, did not appear to realize that the church could concern other New Orleans and Louisiana citizens attentive to the conservation of their patrimony. The church has been described by experts as a monument of extraordinary historical significance internationally, primarily because of its extraordinary structure of three cantilevered roofs designed by the structural engineer John Skilling, creator of the ill-fated Twin Towers destroyed in New York on 9/11. After Al Qaida, do New Orleans citizens really want to be next to destroy a John Skilling masterpiece?
I know that your primary concern is your subscribers, and that is natural, but you must realize that other Americans, and in particular New Yorkers, have a right to be sensitive about a building structurally designed by the same engineer as the Twin Towers. Mr. Barry Bergdoll, Chief Conservator for Architecture and Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wrote to Mr. Paulson, Director of FEMA in Washington, to urge his office to ensure this church is preserved, as it is a unique aesthetic and structural accomplishment. Too few in New Orleans seem to have been aware of this.
Other experts beyond the Centre Pompidou in France have expressed concern because of the special ties felt toward New Orleans. In fact, a delegation of the French Ministry of Culture was created for Aid to Reconstruction for New Orleans. Its Director, M. Pierre-Antoine Gatier, President of the International Commission for Monuments and Historical Sites (ICOMOS France), the Chief Architect for Historical Monuments in France, has stated that this remarkable church must be saved. Lastly, Professor Richard Longstreth, in his report, commissioned by FEMA, cited numerous reasons why Cabrini Church was exceptionally important.
Please bring these facts to the attention of your readers so that later they can not say that all this was concealed.42
In a letter sent to the Vatican that same month, Georgi Anne Brochstein, a member of the Friends of SFC Church and the widow of Hamilton Frederick, one of the talented designers of Cabrini Church while at Curtis & Davis in the early 1960s, pleaded for last-minute intervention to remove Cabrini from the equivalent of architectural death row. The letter was addressed to “Most Reverend Mauro Piacenza”:
Many of the Friends of Cabrini are second and third generation parishioners. This matter is both personal and intimate and extremely painful. It is because they continue to ask questions and request documentation that things come to light. Friends of Cabrini received copies of documents that indicate the reason given for the destruction of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church is based upon the “catastrophic damage to the church reported by Archbishop Hughes.” This could not be further from the truth.
Rome has been either misled or lied to. Rome needs to take another good look at this before the destruction is allowed to take place. When the truth is exposed no one in this is going to be able to say that they were unaware that there was a discrepancy or that what looks like a conspiracy was some sort of misunderstanding. The Archdiocese’s own experts put the damage to the church in the range of one million dollars, with no damage to the roof or structure whatsoever. It was during attempts to circumvent the (FEMA) Section 106 Review that workmen in haste caused at least another one million dollars in damage. Are you aware that these workmen bulldozed the irreplaceable Honduran Mahogany pews? Only when knowledgeable architects began questioning the Archdiocese’s actions did the Archdiocese begin to recompute the damage estimates with constantly inflated figures.
Now the Parish finds itself in the incredible position of being made the “guilty” party in that the Archdiocese says it isn’t tearing down the church. Holy Cross won’t accept the property with the church still on it and now the Archdiocese is going to bankrupt the Parish by billing the Parish for its demolition. This is unbelievable. The Archdiocese padlocked the doors and wouldn�
��t let the parishioners in to clean, then the Archbishop deconsecrates the church, then the Archdiocese bills the Parish for the demolition. This is an outrage. Someone needs to step in and put a stop to this because the truth is coming to light. Any logical person has no choice but to conclude that no priest and no money and no church equal no Parish. When the truth comes out New Orleans will be horrified as will the rest of the Nation.43
At the same time, Archbishop Hughes was to be seen on local television gleefully talking about the importance of reopening flood-damaged churches other than Cabrini, including the nearby, far more damaged Resurrection of Our Lord Church.44 Dr. Earthea Nance, of the mayor’s Office of Recovery Management, remained silent. Dr. Nance was the city’s rebuilding representative at the table during the FEMA Section 106 consultative meetings, and she represented Dr. Ed Blakely, the recently hired, jet-setting, highly compensated director of the city’s Office of Recovery Management.45 Blakely was widely referred to in the local press as Nagin’s erstwhile recovery czar. Dr. Blakely, too, had apparently been muzzled by the city’s Catholic machine establishment. By late April it was too late to save Cabrini. Intensely adverse public and political pressure stirred up a campaign designed solely to destroy a landmark church as a means to save a school. The conquering forces had been recalcitrant and had acted surreptitiously from the start. Ditto a punch-drunk, unquestioning local media. Jarvis DeBerry continued to slam the “obstructionists,” dismissing them as maybe well intentioned but very wrong to have slowed down the recovery of his neighborhood (before Katrina, he lived in a house directly across the street from where Holy Cross plans to build a football and baseball stadium, and his various pieces on the Cabrini issue will definitely not win him any national awards for unbiased investigative journalism).46
Tragically, the battle to save the church had been spun to the public and the local media from the start as a didactic either-or proposition rather than a both-and possibility. For FEMA’s part in this saga, its unfortunate decision to cave in to misguided local political pressure became part of a larger and more dangerous pattern in post-Katrina New Orleans.47 As for Blakely’s silence, the demise of Cabrini Church flew directly in the face of the recovery czar’s oft-stated goal of restoring valuable community and civic assets (such as churches) and to use them as key rebuilding elements in the city’s most damaged neighborhoods. The church’s senseless destruction would henceforth severely undermine Blakely’s credibility among preservationists, and soon he himself would be lampooned by columnist James Gill in the local daily paper for his repeated disparaging remarks (always made in far-flung locales at conferences and to news media) toward the city and its citizens. However, no one dared to publicly castigate Blakely for his or his staff’s callous indifference to the obvious value of keeping Cabrini Church.48
On April 27, the Friends of Cabrini filed two lawsuits. The first was filed in civil district court against the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the City of New Orleans. The second was filed in federal court against FEMA. On that same day, our attorney, Jim Logan, appeared before Judge Yada Magee and requested a temporary restraining order (TRO) to immediately halt the demolition until a trial date could be set. Although the judge seemed to be sympathetic to our cause, Holy Cross and archdiocese attorneys appeared at the hearing along with several political figures who objected, and the judge backed down from granting the TRO. The premise of the lawsuits maintained that the demolition paperwork was issued without proper authority of ownership. This was because the Congregation of St. Frances Cabrini Church, the church’s legal owners, had not officially voted to sell their property and church to Holy Cross or the Archdiocese. Since a corporate resolution had not yet taken place to sell either the church or its land, and because the demolition permit was issued in the name of the Archdiocese of New Orleans and not the rightful ownership entity, the demolition permit had therefore been issued to a fraudulent third party.
Second, the lawsuit cited two additional technical points in the city’s building codes and permitting laws that had not been met by the fraudulent third party seeking to demolish Cabrini: no rodent-inspection permit was on file, and, additionally, the parcels of land being in effect stolen by this third party on behalf of Holy Cross School were in fact three separate tracts. These consisted of the St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Elementary School, the Parish Life Center and Rectory, and the parcel occupied by the church. Each was a separate tract according to city records dating from the early 1950s. In their reply to our TRO request, archdiocesan attorneys insisted that the proper corporate resolution had already taken place and that all necessary paperwork was in order. Denial of the TRO was based on a mere (untrue) verbal assertion at the hearing that all paperwork was already in order.
Meanwhile, the archdiocese and Holy Cross were engrossed behind closed doors in a furious game of catch-up. They knew they were being broadsided yet again by the enemy, but they had prevailed thus far on purely emotional public arguments, i.e., “It was best for the city.” On May 10, before Judge Ernest Jones, a court hearing was held for a preliminary injunction in civil district court. At this hearing, archdiocesan attorneys were singing a new tune, stating that the corporate resolution had taken place two days before this court date, invalidating what had been falsely stated before Judge Magee only thirteen days earlier. In spite of the judge’s regret and his good wishes that we should move on to appeals court, our request for a TRO was denied yet again.
On Tuesday, May 22, we returned once again, this time seeking a trial and again requesting that the demolition permit be pulled, which would allow us to have landmark designation confirmed through the local governing board, the Historic District Landmarks Commission. The HDLC unfortunately by this time also appeared to have been silenced on the matter of Cabrini Church by certain local political interests. Its pat reply to our plea for support was that it would have to wait in the very long queue of buildings the HDLC was researching for landmark eligibility, and that a vote by the HDLC might not occur for six months or more. Meanwhile, the National Trust had been approached by the Friends to enter the lawsuits as a coplaintiff with us, but it declined, despite the strong recommendation of its lead attorney assigned to the case. The issue of joining the lawsuits reached the desk of the head of the National Trust in Washington, but he appeared to have been dissuaded (muzzled?) by a certain Louisiana-based politician. The Southern Region office of the trust, based in Charleston, South Carolina, was similarly powerless to assist, as was its local representative in New Orleans, Walter Gallas.
The granting of the TRO would, we believed, have given the federal court time to rule on our request for a second (and hopefully balanced, this time) Section 106 Review for landmark status, and would have allowed the church to survive or at the very least to get off architectural death row. Unfortunately, in spite of his best intentions, Judge Jones was overinfluenced by the unwaveringly staunch opposition, and he allowed the fraudulently obtained demolition permit from nearly eight months earlier to remain in force. On Tuesday, June 5, at 4:15 PM, the full-scale demolition of the church commenced. On the following morning, Jim Logan rushed back to federal court—the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana—to once again obtain a TRO. Again he was denied. That same morning yet another one-sided article ran in the Times-Picayune on the demolition, followed a month later by yet another distorted article on Holy Cross’s exit from the Ninth Ward and its relocation to Gentilly as the be-all and end-all panacea for Gentilly’s resuscitation.49 The next morning we taped two TV segments in front of the demolition site, which aired that evening locally, calling for a halt to the demolition. I shot a photograph of the church with the baldachin still standing, and Jim Logan hurriedly e-mailed it to FEMA, Holy Cross, the National Trust, and anyone else who might have a say in its last-second reprieve.
The courts, sadly, allowed the demolition permit to remain in place, despite both legally sound arguments and facts that showed the opposition was clearly operating reckles
sly, even at times outside the bounds of Roman Catholic canon law. This had occurred from at least October 2006. We continued to maintain publicly that at the very least an orchestrated pattern of misinformation had begun while Katrina’s floodwaters were still inside the church.
At this time the Cabrini Church Parish Council learned that the parish’s financial coffers had been totally drained by the archdiocese. In an ultimate irony, these funds were being applied to the now $780,000 cost of demolishing the church. Could it be that the parishioners were now paying for the demolition of their own church? Incredibly, this appeared to be the case. Meanwhile, we had been trying to contact the Vatican to intervene to save the church. On April 11, we finally received (through the local archdiocesan office) a letter from Rome dated March 17, 2007, which was based on a letter of November 2006, pertaining to our request for the Congregation for Clergy to begin a full investigation into the “sale” of Cabrini and its land and the intended demolition of the church. Meanwhile, in order to make his case to the Vatican against Cabrini Church, Archbishop Hughes elected to travel to Rome for a personal meeting with the Pontifical Commission, which took place in Rome on March 14. The outcome of this meeting was recounted in a letter dated May 15 to Georgi Anne Brochstein, from the commission’s president, Monsignor Mauro Piacenza, who is based in Rome.
On April 24, we had appealed to the Apostolic Signatura for intervention, through something called a Partition of Administrative Recourse, a request we fully expected would be approved, based on recent precedents in similar canon-law cases involving historic Roman Catholic churches around the world. This request for an investigation remained open at this writing, since we hoped the Vatican would render an opinion on the unnecessary demise of Cabrini Church because incomplete and misleading information was provided to the Vatican.50 The Friends had been requesting a meeting with Archbishop Hughes since November to discuss the church. Exasperated, the Friends sent the archbishop a three-page letter dated May 3, 2007. This was still five days before the full-scale demolition work would begin on the church itself (before the Friends’ court actions). In it, we refuted each and every claim he had apparently made to Msgr. Piacenza when he was in Rome. We presented the facts about the church’s structural integrity, its historic status as a work of architecture on an international scale, the closing of the parish accounts, the demonstrated feasibility of building Holy Cross School alongside the church, the archdiocese’s poaching of the $4.2 million flood policy held by the parishioners on their beloved church, and how human hands have damaged this “Cathedral of the Lakefront” far more seriously than Katrina did.51