Delirious New Orleans

by Stephen Verderber

  18. Nolan Strong, “Details in Soulja Slim Shooting,” http://slumz.boxden.com/showthread.php?t=652424 (accessed January 7, 2008).

  19. “Seventh Ward Neighborhood Snapshot,” Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, http://www.gnocdc.org/orleans/4/14/snapshot.html (accessed January 7, 2008).

  20. “Tremé/Lafitte Neighborhood Snapshot,” Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, http://www.gnocdc.org/orleans/4/42/snapshot.html (accessed January 7, 2008).

  21. Ibid.

  22. Katy Reckdahl, “Best Reason to Drive ‘Downstairs,’” Gambit Weekly, August 31, 2004, http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-08-31/cover_story6.html (accessed January 7, 2008).

  23. Reid Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995). Also see Michael P. Smith, Mardi Gras Indians (New Orleans: Pelican Press, 1984).

  24. Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day, 30.

  25. Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003). For further discussion of the history of African American visual and musical culture in America, see Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998).

  26. Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day, 31.

  27. Ibid., 127.

  28. “Traditional Mardi Gras Returns to Claiborne Avenue,” Louisiana Music Archive and Artist Directory, February 9, 2004, http://p088.ezboard.com/flouisianamusicarchivemardigrascentral.showMessage?topicID=1495.topic (accessed January 7, 2008).

  29. He crossed over into the pop mainstream with “Ain’t That a Shame” (1955), although, as was common at the time, it took a white singer, Pat Boone, to have a number one hit with a cover of the song. Domino proceeded to release an unprecedented string of thirty-five Top 40 singles, including “Whole Lotta Loving,” “Blue Monday,” “Walking to New Orleans,” “I’m Walkin’ (Yes, Indeed, I’m Talkin’),” and a funky version of the old ballad “Blueberry Hill.”

  30. His induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and an invitation to perform at the White House failed to cause Domino to make an exception to his no-travel policy. He does, however, make annual appearances at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival as well as at certain other special events in the city.

  31. Roger Friedman, “Fats Domino Missing in New Orleans,” September 1, 2005, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,168122,00.html (accessed January 7, 2008).

  32. Kevin Krolicki and Nichola Groom, “Fats Domino Returns Home to New Orleans” (Reuters), October 15, 2005, available at http://www.redorbit.com/news/general/272803/fats_domino_returns_home_to_new_orleans/ (accessed January 7, 2008).

  33. While the World’s Fair was regarded as an artistic and aesthetic success, its financial failure seemed to have left a permanent stain. It took the external resources of a national hotel chain to rescue the piazza from becoming the world’s first postmodern ruin (it was finally restored in 2004). The twenty-five-year period of architectural stagnation, commencing with the closure of the fair, is discussed in greater detail in the following section.

  34. Marissa Bartolucci, “Power,” Metropolis, December 1994. Also see Richard Moe and Carter Wilkie, Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of Sprawl (New York: Holt, 2002).

  35. Mary Foster, “Ruined City Is Still Picturesque,” Times-Picayune, October 10, 2005.

  36. In theory, whites‘ avoidance of black neighborhoods was no different from what it was fifty years ago. Only then, avoidance was sanctioned and enforced by Jim Crow laws. Recently, the problem has worsened because of the deleterious effects of a subculture dominated by drugs and the associated turf-war rivalries between thugs. In post-Katrina New Orleans, fifty-six murders were committed between January 1 and June 1, 2006. This prompted Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin to once again send in the National Guard to police the city. One hundred fifty heavily armed troops arrived on June 20. They were assigned to the least populated areas of the city, including Gentilly, New Orleans East, Lakeview, and the Lower Ninth. These neighborhoods experienced the worst flooding and were now plagued by the looting of ruined houses and houses in the process of being repaired. Troops were still on patrol in these neighborhoods in mid-2008.

  Part 4

  This chapter’s narrative foundation has been inspired by and has drawn from the writings of Carol Flake and James Gill, two observers who have together come closest to capturing the essence of this key portion of a complicated story. I am greatly indebted to them for their critical insights.

  1. Chris Erskine, “Upbeat Notes from a City That’s Down but Not Out,” Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/travel (accessed September 23, 2005).

  2. Carol Flake, New Orleans: Behind the Masks of America’s Most Exotic City (New York: Grove, 1994). By 2000 the city had withered to 485,000 people from a peak of 627,000 in 1960. Louisiana had been shrinking as well; between 1995 and 2000 it was the only state in the nation to lose population. During a period of record high immigration in the rest of the country, New Orleans’s total of Hispanic and Asian-born residents did not change at all in twenty years. By contrast, New Orleans has the nation’s highest percentage, 77 percent, of native-born residents of any large metropolitan area in the nation (18).

  3. Kate Moran, “Shrinking City,” Times-Picayune, October 23, 2005, http://www.nola.com (accessed October 24, 2005).

  4. John Logan, “Nurture Social Ties to Bring City Back,” Times-Picayune, November 25, 2005. The situation in Louisiana was not much better. Louisiana fell to the bottom of the fifty states in 2002 in all three measures used by the Corporation for Economic Development (CED) in Washington, D.C., which studies and compares state economies and their prospects for growth. In the 2002 report, using a scale of A to F, Louisiana scored Fs in all three core CED categories: economic performance, including such measures as employment, earnings-job quality, equity of income, quality of life, and use of the state’s resources; development capacity, a measure of the quality of workers through education, financial resources available for businesses, and other factors, such as the number of doctoral scientists and engineers, households with computers, university research grants, and patents issued to inventors in the state; and business vitality, measured by such factors as the competitiveness of existing businesses, the number of new and entrepreneurial firms, and the diversity of the state economy. At the other end of the study’s spectrum were five states that earned As in all core categories: Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Virginia (Alan Sayre, “State Economy Bottoms Out in Study,” Times-Picayune, December 18, 2002).

  5. Mel Leavitt, A Short History of New Orleans (San Francisco: Lexikos, 1982). For this reason, architects and students of architecture must conjure the motivation to learn all they can about the past lives of a site and its neighborhood context. Such methodologies can yield a tremendous amount of information about the inhabitants’ social status, race, and perhaps even their political predilections.

  6. Pierce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003). Often, more data on land transactions are available in Louisiana compared to most other parts of the United States. This is the result of the civil law system, a system based on the Napoleonic code. This code, historically, required more information than was required by civil legal codes in the other forty-nine states.

  7. Ibid., 49.

  8. Leavitt, Short History of New Orleans, 87.

  9. Craig E. Colten, Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); also see Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2004). Also see Jeffrey Kluger, “Global Warming: The Culprit?” Time, October 3, 2005, 42–46; and Don Melvin, “Dutch Are Spending Billions in Their Defense against the Sea,” Milwaukee Journal Sentin
el, September 25, 2005.

  10. LaNitra Walker, “More than Black and White,” American Prospect Online, http://www.prospect.org (accessed September 10, 2005). She added:

  Not all black people in New Orleans are poor. The city has a substantial population of middle-class blacks and Creoles, as well as people of mixed-race background. Because of its geographic proximity to the Caribbean islands and its history as an outpost in the French and Spanish empires, New Orleans has become as rich and culturally mixed as its famous gumbos and jambalayas. In the years following the Haitian revolution, which raged from 1791 to 1894, black slaves and French slave owners sought refuge in New Orleans, bringing new ideas about race and class to our budding nation. In addition to these refugees, thousands of free blacks, known as “free persons of color,” lived in New Orleans in the nineteenth century. Many of these blacks were educated and owned property, and some even owned slaves. The mixture of landowners of French, Spanish, Indian, Acadian, and African descent created a middle class of Creoles who have helped to define New Orleans’ culture.

  11. John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1997).

  12. Lolly Bowean, “In New Orleans, Land Elevation Was a Matter of Race, Experts Say,” Kansas City Star, http://www.kansascity.com (accessed September 26, 2005). Dozens of homes went underwater in The East that could have contained valuable letters, portraits, and other artifacts from generations ago, as well as invaluable documents on the period of slavery and Reconstruction.

  13. Richard Sexton, New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000). Also see Frederick S. Starr, Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001).

  14. Flake, Behind the Masks, 72.

  15. Ibid., 22.

  16. Ibid., 24.

  17. Certain underlying assumptions have perpetuated this culture: the city would remain poor but picturesque; the supply of musical and artistic talent was replenishable; the Vieux Carré would remain both a national architectural treasure and a gaudy tourist trap; well-connected interests would be able to sway elected officials to build inappropriate buildings, e.g., Harrah’s Casino on Canal Street at the river; outside investors would be able to purchase properties that locals could no longer afford; and the shrinking yet entrenched Up-town enclave of Mardi Gras bluebloods would always dominate New Orleans society.

  18. Leonard V. Huber, Mardi Gras: A Pictorial History of Carnival in New Orleans (Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1977).

  19. Mardi Gras actually began first in Mobile, Alabama, and is celebrated to some extent in a number of other cities, but in New Orleans the conditions proved ideal for incubating a permanent carnival culture.

  20. Flake, Behind the Masks, 5.

  21. Ibid., 7.

  22. The bickering that ensued over the ordinance threatened to escalate into a divisive social and political conflict that opponents thought would forever disfigure, perhaps even destroy, the blithe, giddy façade of Carnival that had endured for a century and a half. This battle was also over the heart and soul of a city—the dwindling base of power centered in New Orleans—plagued with a rising crime rate, deteriorating housing stock, and an epidemic of white flight.

  23. Flake, Behind the Masks, 8.

  24. In the end, after eight hours of arguing and heated rhetoric, the ordinance passed unanimously, 7–0, with the three white members of the city council voting in favor.

  25. This spirit is so captivating that one becomes drawn into it, unknowingly, even against one’s will at times.

  26. Flake, Behind the Masks, 171.

  27. An indicator of how completely Carnival dominated the traditional social power structure: between 1920 and 1970, the total percentage of new blood brought into the Krewe of Comus was less than 1 percent. Some observers were writing newspaper columns about a conspiracy of social control held tightly over the entire population by the elite white krewes, even if this was just a self-fulfilling civic myth.

  28. Until 2007 the city was subdivided into seven tax assessment districts, each with its own elected tax assessor. This has led to wildly uneven tax assessments within and between districts over the generations. Most large American cities have a single tax assessment office or commissioner, aided by external consultants. Remarkably, New Orleanians in 2007 voted to condense the tax assessor offices into a single citywide office. Soon after the vote, all properties in Orleans Parish were reassessed. More than 5,000 property owners protested their higher reassessments. It was a classic case of “Be careful—you just might get what you wish for.”

  29. Flake, Behind the Masks, 45.

  30. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the fair, critics charged that the self-absorbed social elites turned even further inward and left the majority of the population to fend for itself. Making matters worse, the white egocentric social elite of the uptown Mardi Gras subculture offered few new ideas for the city’s future, since their immediate neighborhoods, while threatened by the crime epidemic that was overtaking the entire city, appeared to be under control for the time being. This attitude persisted up to the day Katrina struck. It was as if the course of events had inevitably reached a turning point, leading to an attitude of learned helplessness. A few within these cultural substrata privately acknowledged that new partnerships were desperately needed across neighborhoods and across social, racial, and economic class boundaries. These persons were tied by blood or marriage to the city for economic and social reasons.

  31. Flake, Behind the Masks, 60.

  32. Carnival was canceled during the Civil War, and following a brief resumption during Reconstruction, it was again canceled in 1875, following the clash between the Crescent City White League, a paramilitary and political coalition, and the metropolitan police, a largely black force then under the control of Republican carpetbaggers. Although the White League won the “Battle of Liberty Place,” federal troops arrived immediately thereafter to restore civil order. In 1891, an obelisk to commemorate the battle was dedicated on Canal Street. David Duke once marched around it, chanting, “White power!” He and other racists often referred to it as a rallying point. For blacks, on the other hand, the monument symbolized the legacy of Jim Crow. In 1989 it was removed to a nearby side street. See Samuel Kinser, Carnival American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990).

  33. Flake, Behind the Masks, 160.

  34. James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1997), 57.

  35. This club and others like it followed the precedent of the northern clubs until the outbreak of the Civil War, when the issue of slavery divided clubs in the North as well as the South. By the 1880s, this club had become synonymous with the city’s small, elite ruling class, highly restrictive in its membership. It was as if a form of social Darwinism was in operation—only the fittest would survive (Flake, Behind the Masks, 233).

  36. Monisha Sujan, “A Sad Aftermath of Katrina: Perpetuating Poverty,” http://www.blogforamerica.com (accessed September 23, 2005). This neighborhood was leveled by the storm surge of Katrina.

  37. “Blake Pontchartrain: New Orleans Know-It-All,” Gambit Weekly, August 13, 2002, http://www.bestofneworleans.com (accessed June 12, 2006).

  38. Ibid.

  39. AIA New Orleans Chapter, “Bywater,” A Guide to New Orleans Architecture (2005), http://www.neworleansonline.com (accessed December 15, 2005).

  40. Gill, Lords of Misrule, 143:

  New Orleans was probably the filthiest and least salubrious city in the Union, while government starved the public schools of money, ensuring that the populace would remain largely ignorant and illiterate. Recovery from the economic depression of 1873–1877, which had ruined many a rich man and sent Garden District values into precipitous decline, was slow. The vigorous entrepreneurial spirit of the pre–Civil War era seemed to have been dissipated, and the A
nglo-Americans now joined the Creoles in posing as the refined products of a vanished civilization that put them above vulgar commercialism … in race relations, the city continued to move steadily backward. Gangs of underfed black convicts, leased to construction and levee companies, labored under such brutal conditions that they died in appalling numbers … the few remaining pockets of interracial association disappeared from New Orleans in the 1880s.

  41. Leonard V. Huber, New Orleans: A Pictorial History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New Orleans: Pelican, 1971).

  42. The city seemed to bask in a state of relative delirium, as if it were intrinsically better to not be like any other American city. The question loomed: Could uniqueness alone continue to function as a sufficient prerequisite for this self-imposed autonomy from mainstream America?

  43. Gill, Lords of Misrule, 241:

  Carnival sympathizers’ fondest wish—that Comus, Proteus, and Momus might one day return to the streets—now seemed unlikely. The main problem occurred when krewes continued to delude themselves that their parades were meritorious in their own right. However, the supposed beneficiaries no longer saw it that way. They were feeling patronized. Carnival was seen as a smokescreen, obscuring deep fissures in the civic life of the city. Some members even complained of a backlash of blacks against whites, and to some extent this was true. This makes some sense when viewed against the broader social context of the descendants of slaves’ seeking reparations from the federal government. The old-line view was dying: the masses in the streets were no longer grateful to the krewes as their great benefactors. The old-line organizations have played a major role in perpetuating the delirious view that the South sustained a great civilization until it was destroyed by the evil, aggressive North.

  44. Many of these people attended Tulane as undergraduates and later earned a graduate degree from an Ivy League school. These fortunate sons (very few daughters) would return to New Orleans with the intellectual “endorsement” credential of a prestigious East Coast university, combined with the best undergraduate education New Orleans could provide.