Sunday, October 9, 2005
New Orleans
I keep wanting to put down some of my thoughts about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It's been more than a month now, and the news has stayed bad. Some of my earliest thoughts are beginning to be supported by the national news.
Basics
I've no head for dates; I had to get the date from Wikipedia. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans on the morning of Monday, August 29th. She was originally aimed dead at New Orleans, which expected to have a storm surge come right up the river, if not right overland; instead the eye curved east more quickly than expected, as Rita would do three weeks later. The first reports were that New Orleans had some flooding from heavy rains, and considerable wind damage (I saw video of a major hotel with every window on one side blown out) but that the levees had held. But a few hours after the eye had gone by, levees or flood walls breached in several places, allowing Lake Ponchartrain to flood something like 90% of the city. Even parts of the French Quarter that were actually above sea level got flooded at least briefly.
No one seems to know—yet—just what caused the breaches. Some experts say the levees show a high-water mark a foot or so below the top, and that no surge ever overtopped them. I heard one story that a drifting river barge or small ship rammed one. There are rumors going round, almost certainly groundless, that the government breached the levees on purpose to drown the blacks who were unable to evacuate.
But the story can be better gotten from the national media than from me. I want instead to put down some of my personal thoughts.
A Loss of History
One time, well over a decade ago, I drove down the highway along the Mississippi coast, probably through Gulfport or some such, a highway that ran right through town, between a broad public beach and a solid line of huge Victorian houses. I was interested mainly in the beach and the Gulf itself, but I remember the impression those wonderful old houses made on me. I always wanted to take Morgan down there to see them. Probably not a one of them was more than eight feet above the high-tide line. Probably every one of them is toothpicks and matchsticks now.
One of the fundamental facts of life, one of the ones I try to get across to my children, is that things always change. Nothing lasts forever. "This too shall pass"—the most hopeful and mournful saying in English. Those houses would inevitably go, one day, as even the sturdiest of Roman ruins will one day be gone from Europe, as even Stonehenge and the Easter Island statues will someday be gone. But I'll never be able to take my love to view that wonderful sight.
New Orleans, especially the French Quarter, was without a doubt the grubbiest, most decrepit tourist town I ever saw. Especially in the Quarter, a general atmosphere of genteel decay was a central aspect of the town's appeal. We still joke about a restaurant where we ate lunch on a narrow wrought-iron balcony that sagged a good six inches from wall to outer railing. Morgan and I made an agreement, if the balcony started to collapse into the street, which of us would grab which child in our leap for the French window. The Saint Louis #1 cemetery, one of New Orleans' most famous, lay in an area of town so poor that you were advised only to visit it with a very large tour group.
I visited New Orleans for the first time back in the early 80's, staying in a hotel on Canal Street and walking over into the Quarter every chance I got. I stood outside Preservation Hall listening to the band because even standing room in that tiny place had filled long before I got there. I marveled at the shops, everything from weird magic shops to art galleries, from strip bars that kept their doors open until the last bit of G-string was about to come off to fortune tellers on nearly every block. My boss, Dave, who had been there as a teenager, was acting as tour guide, marveling at how little things had changed. Except now, he noted, even the fortune tellers took American Express.
I remember standing on a corner looking at little square tiles embedded in the sidewalk, spelling out the name Pete Fountain, where he had once had a club. I listened to Pete Fountain albums when I was a kid, the ones my parents bought, him and Al Hirt and Boots Randolph, the big names in jazz in the 60's. It was a curious feeling to see his name embedded in a sidewalk and know that the peak of his fame had passed but this landmark still survived. It's what I imagine it must be like to visit Grauman's Chinese Theater and try your hand against the handprint of Barbara Stanwyck or Jimmy Stewart.
Of course, my memory of that moment is slanted by what happened next: My boss quietly said, "Don't make a big deal of it, but look over at that balcony across the street and see if you see any women on it at all." As casually as I could, I looked, and saw plenty of couples on the balcony and in the large room that opened onto it, but no women. Dave remarked that as another change since his earlier visits, that gay bars were so much more open about it. Fortunately, he was no more offended by it than I was, just amused and a little astonished at the openness of it.
What's going to happen to the essential character of the Quarter now? How much of it will have to be demolished? Will even the relatively undamaged portions of it get swept up in the rebuilding craze that's going to overwhelm New Orleans in the years to come? How do you rebuild an entire city without losing its historical flavor, without turning it into an unintentional parody of itself?
Race
Let me say first that I don't believe race had much to do with the pattern of evacuation. The poorest people were the ones last out or left behind, the ones left in the dubious shelter of the Superdome or the chaos of the convention center, which wasn't ever intended to be used as a shelter.
I don't believe the CIA deliberately dynamited the levees to drown the blacks who were unable to evacuate. New Orleans had too much to lose to the water for anybody but a lunatic to deliberately breach the levees. Nor do I believe that blacks will be mysteriously unable to get building permits or insurance payments that will be readily available to equally-provided whites.
But race had everything to do with the distribution of wealth in the area, had everything to do with who the poorest people were. And race will have just as much to do with who can afford to return.
Touring cemeteries in the city, Morgan and I drove to the Saint Louis #1 by the very worst possible route, down back streets we got onto by accident, that looked like they might dead-end in a housing-project parking lot at any moment, that with parked (and abandoned) cars were only one lane wide in places, past shotgun houses that probably dated to the Depression, the only such houses I'd ever seen anywhere except the poorest farm country. The idea of an entire block of shotgun houses shoulder-to-shoulder instead of placed one or two on every forty acres was incomprehensible to me before that afternoon. We drove through a mile or so of that neighborhood before we came to Saint Louis Street that runs along the northeast side of the cemetery, and for that entire time we and our daughters were probably the only four whites in the area.
That was only the second time in my life I was frightened of the people around me strictly because they were black. It wasn't their color that frightened me. It wasn't their obvious poverty, though I was shocked deeply by that. It was the fact that they were so completely segregated, that the very fact that we were white identified us as people immeasurably more wealthy than anybody around us, that even though nearly everyone around us was surely a decent person who'd have been happy to let us use a phone or help us change a tire, our color marked us as a plain target for that little fraction of these people who might not be so nice. I had the same feeling driving through the center of St. Louis back in 1986.
According to Google Earth (which seems to have a problem with negative elevations), Saint Louis #1, about half a mile northeast of the Superdome, is dead at sea level, which means that entire area was probably under several feet of water during the worst of the flooding. Almost certainly, every single shotgun house and shabby apartment building we passed in that area now has an appointment with a bulldozer. And those will not be the first houses rebuilt, not by private builders, not by the city government.
More than a million people were evacuated for Katrina, about half of them from New Orleans. At least half of those people have no homes to go back to, and won't for years to come. Thousands of people, tens of thousands, have already gotten jobs and bought homes in Baton Rouge, Houston, and places even more remote.
New Orleans has, by force of circumstance, accomplished something that New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities would pay billions to accomplish, if they could figure a way past the political outrage that would result: New Orleans has removed all of its poorest, least employable—and blackest—citizens and dumped them on other cities, many of them never to return. Cincinnati or St. Louis would surely think a few billion dollars a small price to pay for the more-or-less permanent removal of a quarter-million of their most impoverished residents.
Now what will happen? First the repairable homes and businesses will be repaired. Then the people with the best insurance and the best jobs and the best locations and the best reasons to return will rebuild the best parts of town. Enormous efforts will be made to preserve the oldest houses, dating right back to the days of French settlement.
But no restoration of the thousands of Depression homes and rental ruins will take place. If the most completely devastated areas are rebuilt, it will be in one of three ways: Developers and speculators will take over entire areas and build modern homes for outright sale, not for rental; or the government will slowly build projects that will hold only a fraction of the poor people that have been pushed out; or—worst case—developers will build what an NPR newsman called "neo-precious", a fantasy of what New Orleans means to the rest of the country—New Orleans as theme park.
In none of these cases will there be cheap homes for a quarter of a million displaced poor folk. Oh, there'll be some blacks brought back; somebody has to change the sheets in the hotels and sweep the aisles of the Superdome (or whatever they build in its place), and there've been several different benefits already to finance the restoration of New Orleans' largely black musical community, but a huge number of the very poorest and least desirable will never be allowed back. The racial balance of New Orleans has been altered for decades to come.
Art and Salvage
Among the other losses of the flooding, I can't help remembering the art galleries I saw in the French Quarter. How deep did the water get in the Quarter? Is there a LeRoy Neiman painting like the one I once saw there (not a print, an original painting) with mud and sewage soaked into its canvas? Are hundreds of prints, books, and paintings ruined?
The last trip down to New Orleans, if we'd had thirty thousand dollars we didn't need for anything else, I'd have come away with a Glenna Goodacre bronze I saw in a shop there. The life-size sculpture of a tall slender woman in jogging clothes, one of several ranging in price from a couple of thousand to over sixty thousand, made a tremendous impression on me, although we'd have had to build another room on our house to have a place to put it. Now, though, I imagine that bronze, and the others I saw there, with a high-water mark anywhere from knee to breast.
If it were mine, I would have it cleaned, if I had to ship it back to Glenna's studio in New Mexico. But how many thousands more would be added to the price now, if that bronze were accompanied by a certificate attesting that it survived the 2005 New Orleans flood? How many purchasers would carefully coat the staining or corrosion to preserve them forever, to show to everyone who saw the piece its dramatic history? Is a LeRoy Neiman painting with mud halfway up its brilliant colors ruined, or merely converted to a different sort of collectible?
I predict that Ebay will soon have (if it doesn't already—I haven't looked) a section dedicated entirely to relics of the New Orleans flood, water-damaged trinkets that were worth a couple of bucks in July now being bid up to hundreds of dollars. If the Superdome really does have to be demolished, the owners can probably finance the rebuilding by selling the original seats for several hundred apiece.
Like thousands of other people, my spouse has a piece of the Berlin Wall, which fell a few months before we met, while Morgan was in Germany. But there will be millions of pieces of debris, flotsam, and jetsam from this flood, enough to provide souvenirs for anyone on earth who can afford one. Somebody somewhere is probably already planning how to build a house entirely from salvaged lumber from New Orleans or Gulfport or Biloxi. Somebody's probably already applied—maybe hundreds of people—for whatever licenses are necessary to salvage and resell the ruins.
I've seen disasters before, fires and floods and back in the 80's a town ripped to pieces by a tornado; I was watching live as each tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. When a tornado hit my home town several years back I felt no desire to go out and view more damage, and what damage I did see was largely because Morgan had never seen tornado damage and wanted to know what it was like. I don't want souvenirs from New Orleans myself; I'd think I was being morbid if I did.
But as morbid as it sounds to collect pieces of such a disaster, I don't condemn anyone who wants a bit. I think it would be worse if no one made any attempt to commemorate the losses at all. But I can't help but want to spit on the people who lost nothing to Katrina, but will make a fortune off her leavings.
Basics
I've no head for dates; I had to get the date from Wikipedia. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans on the morning of Monday, August 29th. She was originally aimed dead at New Orleans, which expected to have a storm surge come right up the river, if not right overland; instead the eye curved east more quickly than expected, as Rita would do three weeks later. The first reports were that New Orleans had some flooding from heavy rains, and considerable wind damage (I saw video of a major hotel with every window on one side blown out) but that the levees had held. But a few hours after the eye had gone by, levees or flood walls breached in several places, allowing Lake Ponchartrain to flood something like 90% of the city. Even parts of the French Quarter that were actually above sea level got flooded at least briefly.
No one seems to know—yet—just what caused the breaches. Some experts say the levees show a high-water mark a foot or so below the top, and that no surge ever overtopped them. I heard one story that a drifting river barge or small ship rammed one. There are rumors going round, almost certainly groundless, that the government breached the levees on purpose to drown the blacks who were unable to evacuate.
But the story can be better gotten from the national media than from me. I want instead to put down some of my personal thoughts.
A Loss of History
One time, well over a decade ago, I drove down the highway along the Mississippi coast, probably through Gulfport or some such, a highway that ran right through town, between a broad public beach and a solid line of huge Victorian houses. I was interested mainly in the beach and the Gulf itself, but I remember the impression those wonderful old houses made on me. I always wanted to take Morgan down there to see them. Probably not a one of them was more than eight feet above the high-tide line. Probably every one of them is toothpicks and matchsticks now.
One of the fundamental facts of life, one of the ones I try to get across to my children, is that things always change. Nothing lasts forever. "This too shall pass"—the most hopeful and mournful saying in English. Those houses would inevitably go, one day, as even the sturdiest of Roman ruins will one day be gone from Europe, as even Stonehenge and the Easter Island statues will someday be gone. But I'll never be able to take my love to view that wonderful sight.
New Orleans, especially the French Quarter, was without a doubt the grubbiest, most decrepit tourist town I ever saw. Especially in the Quarter, a general atmosphere of genteel decay was a central aspect of the town's appeal. We still joke about a restaurant where we ate lunch on a narrow wrought-iron balcony that sagged a good six inches from wall to outer railing. Morgan and I made an agreement, if the balcony started to collapse into the street, which of us would grab which child in our leap for the French window. The Saint Louis #1 cemetery, one of New Orleans' most famous, lay in an area of town so poor that you were advised only to visit it with a very large tour group.
I visited New Orleans for the first time back in the early 80's, staying in a hotel on Canal Street and walking over into the Quarter every chance I got. I stood outside Preservation Hall listening to the band because even standing room in that tiny place had filled long before I got there. I marveled at the shops, everything from weird magic shops to art galleries, from strip bars that kept their doors open until the last bit of G-string was about to come off to fortune tellers on nearly every block. My boss, Dave, who had been there as a teenager, was acting as tour guide, marveling at how little things had changed. Except now, he noted, even the fortune tellers took American Express.
I remember standing on a corner looking at little square tiles embedded in the sidewalk, spelling out the name Pete Fountain, where he had once had a club. I listened to Pete Fountain albums when I was a kid, the ones my parents bought, him and Al Hirt and Boots Randolph, the big names in jazz in the 60's. It was a curious feeling to see his name embedded in a sidewalk and know that the peak of his fame had passed but this landmark still survived. It's what I imagine it must be like to visit Grauman's Chinese Theater and try your hand against the handprint of Barbara Stanwyck or Jimmy Stewart.
Of course, my memory of that moment is slanted by what happened next: My boss quietly said, "Don't make a big deal of it, but look over at that balcony across the street and see if you see any women on it at all." As casually as I could, I looked, and saw plenty of couples on the balcony and in the large room that opened onto it, but no women. Dave remarked that as another change since his earlier visits, that gay bars were so much more open about it. Fortunately, he was no more offended by it than I was, just amused and a little astonished at the openness of it.
What's going to happen to the essential character of the Quarter now? How much of it will have to be demolished? Will even the relatively undamaged portions of it get swept up in the rebuilding craze that's going to overwhelm New Orleans in the years to come? How do you rebuild an entire city without losing its historical flavor, without turning it into an unintentional parody of itself?
Race
Let me say first that I don't believe race had much to do with the pattern of evacuation. The poorest people were the ones last out or left behind, the ones left in the dubious shelter of the Superdome or the chaos of the convention center, which wasn't ever intended to be used as a shelter.
I don't believe the CIA deliberately dynamited the levees to drown the blacks who were unable to evacuate. New Orleans had too much to lose to the water for anybody but a lunatic to deliberately breach the levees. Nor do I believe that blacks will be mysteriously unable to get building permits or insurance payments that will be readily available to equally-provided whites.
But race had everything to do with the distribution of wealth in the area, had everything to do with who the poorest people were. And race will have just as much to do with who can afford to return.
Touring cemeteries in the city, Morgan and I drove to the Saint Louis #1 by the very worst possible route, down back streets we got onto by accident, that looked like they might dead-end in a housing-project parking lot at any moment, that with parked (and abandoned) cars were only one lane wide in places, past shotgun houses that probably dated to the Depression, the only such houses I'd ever seen anywhere except the poorest farm country. The idea of an entire block of shotgun houses shoulder-to-shoulder instead of placed one or two on every forty acres was incomprehensible to me before that afternoon. We drove through a mile or so of that neighborhood before we came to Saint Louis Street that runs along the northeast side of the cemetery, and for that entire time we and our daughters were probably the only four whites in the area.
That was only the second time in my life I was frightened of the people around me strictly because they were black. It wasn't their color that frightened me. It wasn't their obvious poverty, though I was shocked deeply by that. It was the fact that they were so completely segregated, that the very fact that we were white identified us as people immeasurably more wealthy than anybody around us, that even though nearly everyone around us was surely a decent person who'd have been happy to let us use a phone or help us change a tire, our color marked us as a plain target for that little fraction of these people who might not be so nice. I had the same feeling driving through the center of St. Louis back in 1986.
According to Google Earth (which seems to have a problem with negative elevations), Saint Louis #1, about half a mile northeast of the Superdome, is dead at sea level, which means that entire area was probably under several feet of water during the worst of the flooding. Almost certainly, every single shotgun house and shabby apartment building we passed in that area now has an appointment with a bulldozer. And those will not be the first houses rebuilt, not by private builders, not by the city government.
More than a million people were evacuated for Katrina, about half of them from New Orleans. At least half of those people have no homes to go back to, and won't for years to come. Thousands of people, tens of thousands, have already gotten jobs and bought homes in Baton Rouge, Houston, and places even more remote.
New Orleans has, by force of circumstance, accomplished something that New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities would pay billions to accomplish, if they could figure a way past the political outrage that would result: New Orleans has removed all of its poorest, least employable—and blackest—citizens and dumped them on other cities, many of them never to return. Cincinnati or St. Louis would surely think a few billion dollars a small price to pay for the more-or-less permanent removal of a quarter-million of their most impoverished residents.
Now what will happen? First the repairable homes and businesses will be repaired. Then the people with the best insurance and the best jobs and the best locations and the best reasons to return will rebuild the best parts of town. Enormous efforts will be made to preserve the oldest houses, dating right back to the days of French settlement.
But no restoration of the thousands of Depression homes and rental ruins will take place. If the most completely devastated areas are rebuilt, it will be in one of three ways: Developers and speculators will take over entire areas and build modern homes for outright sale, not for rental; or the government will slowly build projects that will hold only a fraction of the poor people that have been pushed out; or—worst case—developers will build what an NPR newsman called "neo-precious", a fantasy of what New Orleans means to the rest of the country—New Orleans as theme park.
In none of these cases will there be cheap homes for a quarter of a million displaced poor folk. Oh, there'll be some blacks brought back; somebody has to change the sheets in the hotels and sweep the aisles of the Superdome (or whatever they build in its place), and there've been several different benefits already to finance the restoration of New Orleans' largely black musical community, but a huge number of the very poorest and least desirable will never be allowed back. The racial balance of New Orleans has been altered for decades to come.
Art and Salvage
Among the other losses of the flooding, I can't help remembering the art galleries I saw in the French Quarter. How deep did the water get in the Quarter? Is there a LeRoy Neiman painting like the one I once saw there (not a print, an original painting) with mud and sewage soaked into its canvas? Are hundreds of prints, books, and paintings ruined?
The last trip down to New Orleans, if we'd had thirty thousand dollars we didn't need for anything else, I'd have come away with a Glenna Goodacre bronze I saw in a shop there. The life-size sculpture of a tall slender woman in jogging clothes, one of several ranging in price from a couple of thousand to over sixty thousand, made a tremendous impression on me, although we'd have had to build another room on our house to have a place to put it. Now, though, I imagine that bronze, and the others I saw there, with a high-water mark anywhere from knee to breast.
If it were mine, I would have it cleaned, if I had to ship it back to Glenna's studio in New Mexico. But how many thousands more would be added to the price now, if that bronze were accompanied by a certificate attesting that it survived the 2005 New Orleans flood? How many purchasers would carefully coat the staining or corrosion to preserve them forever, to show to everyone who saw the piece its dramatic history? Is a LeRoy Neiman painting with mud halfway up its brilliant colors ruined, or merely converted to a different sort of collectible?
I predict that Ebay will soon have (if it doesn't already—I haven't looked) a section dedicated entirely to relics of the New Orleans flood, water-damaged trinkets that were worth a couple of bucks in July now being bid up to hundreds of dollars. If the Superdome really does have to be demolished, the owners can probably finance the rebuilding by selling the original seats for several hundred apiece.
Like thousands of other people, my spouse has a piece of the Berlin Wall, which fell a few months before we met, while Morgan was in Germany. But there will be millions of pieces of debris, flotsam, and jetsam from this flood, enough to provide souvenirs for anyone on earth who can afford one. Somebody somewhere is probably already planning how to build a house entirely from salvaged lumber from New Orleans or Gulfport or Biloxi. Somebody's probably already applied—maybe hundreds of people—for whatever licenses are necessary to salvage and resell the ruins.
I've seen disasters before, fires and floods and back in the 80's a town ripped to pieces by a tornado; I was watching live as each tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. When a tornado hit my home town several years back I felt no desire to go out and view more damage, and what damage I did see was largely because Morgan had never seen tornado damage and wanted to know what it was like. I don't want souvenirs from New Orleans myself; I'd think I was being morbid if I did.
But as morbid as it sounds to collect pieces of such a disaster, I don't condemn anyone who wants a bit. I think it would be worse if no one made any attempt to commemorate the losses at all. But I can't help but want to spit on the people who lost nothing to Katrina, but will make a fortune off her leavings.
# posted by Dru @ 17:14 
