From: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0610/S00240.htm NOLA Lost
72 hours in America’s other Ground Zero…
By Charles Shaw
Click for big versionThe St. Vincent’s guesthouse is a living metaphor for the city of New Orleans. The big, beautiful, bricked, French colonial structure on Magazine Street in what’s known as the Lower Garden District is a majestic presence. Wrapped in vines with an iron portico over the entrance forged in the traditional floral pattern that is characteristic of the Quarter, you are wowed and enticed by her beauty when you take her in for the first time. But step inside and the veneer suddenly drops and you find yourself unwittingly submitted to the hustle. For the interior of St. Vincent’s belies the soul of New Orleans: poor, black and desperate.
But the desperation in New Orleans no longer discriminates. It washed through the city astride the storm surge of a year ago, and remained when the waters receded, a dark ring constricting the city like the ubiquitous waterline that has become the unofficial monument to Katrina. You can feel it right away when you land at Louis Armstrong airport and realize you’re the only flight in sight, and the gates stand empty, their gangways retracted and tucked into the terminal wall. You smell it when you walk through an empty terminal to baggage claim only to find your bag waiting for you, and a line of taxi drivers eyeing you eagerly.
The thing is, there is no one in New Orleans. Most people moved away, and the tourists, on which the economy depends, haven’t come back either. You can hear a hint of it when the lady selling tickets for the airport shuttle says, “How long you stayin’, baby?” a bit too plaintively. In New Orleans, everybody is “baby,” but something in the way she says it now makes it intimate.
The shuttle whisks you Downtown on Airline Highway Rd. past fields of abandoned housing projects in the distance that look a hundred years old, and an old bleach white marble cemetery, each stone bisected by the ubiquitous horizontal brown line.
Downtown, the streets of the Quarter are empty, What is normally a vibrant and festive street scene of red-lit bars blaring Dixieland jazz and gift shops packed with beads, stuffed alligators, and Café du Monde now seems cartoonish and in bad form, a hustle as cheap as trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. Every third or fourth business is closed or for sale, and “50% off!” signs hang in the windows of the mostly empty shops that are still hanging on. Inside the music is too loud, and the shopkeeps stare out the narrow French doors across the rain swept cobblestones.
It makes you wonder how they can continue to sell kitsch when they know in their hearts that the whole world has seen the
real New Orleans now, and the Mardi Gras shtick isn’t cuttin’ it any more. They’re going broke trying to sell a memory.
So too is the St. Vincent’s Guest House. It began in 1861 as an orphanage for the surviving children of the frequent malaria epidemics typical of the sub-tropical climes of southern Louisiana, and now uses the memory of all those poor children to market itself as a unique “historical” experience. Unless you are particularly enamored with architecture, the “historical” significance ends with a row of four old black & white photographs mounted on the wall depicting nuns in large habits administering to a roomful of tots. Because the place is so big, and noble, and has a small pool and a gorgeous Southern style courtyard, it could have made a top-flite hotel or bed and breakfast. Instead, it became a flophouse.
This, of course, you don’t know if you’re from out of town and your girlfriend
happens across their website and thinks she’s booking you a room in a hostel with a “gourmet southern breakfast” and “free wireless internet,” because the website neglects to tell you that both are found across the street at a coffee shop called Mojo.
“You’re not staying
there,” the short girl with the blond bob behind the counter says as she’s steeping my cup of dragonwell, which I am buying so that I can use the Mojo internet guilt-free. I’ve just checked in and discovered the place is awful, and now find myself lamenting to the bobby barista my concerns about being able to work on my story. “I’m sorry, that place is a shithole,” she continues. “You’re a brave man.”
Click for big version“I believe the word you are looking for is poor,” I replied. A necklace round her neck reads “Sarah.”
“I caught someone from St. Vincent’s smoking crack in our bathroom,” she says. “It’s a pretty scary over there. Be careful.”
Mojo is populated by young bohemian aspirant whites who are part of a gentrification vanguard that has crept into this historically sketchy neighborhood on the banks of the river. This section of the Lower Garden District is more than 18 blocks from the Quarter, and I’m on the Internet trying to find my way to the offices of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) so that I can hook up with a couple community organizers and get a personal tour of the Lower 9th.
“Normally,” Sarah shouts over the hiss of the steamer, “I’d tell you to take the Magazine St. bus. But it doesn’t really run that much anymore. None of the buses or street cars do, not since.”
I decide to cab it. In the cab, the driver tells me I’m his first fare of the day. When I ask him how business is, he says his family is starving, his wife lost her job because of Katrina, and that there’s barely enough business to offset his gas costs. At an intersection another cab pulls up alongside, and the two men exchange a few words in their native language. Then the other drives off.
“He’s going home,” the driver laughs. “He says I’m hogging all the business.”
************
THOSE WHO STAYED
Click for big versionThere are a lot of rolled eyes in New Orleans these days over the word ACORN. Equally, though, there is heartfelt praise, because they are a unique presence in post-Katrina New Orleans. Ever since the hurricane blew the roof off their offices on Elysian Fields road, the New Orleans chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now have stood side by side with the residents of New Orleans poorest neighborhoods, including the Lower 9th, and helped them recover by gutting their houses, helping them file their taxes and relief paperwork, train for jobs, find public aid, and fight the ceaseless onslaught by the big money interests who would rather they just not stay. They have even authored a set of planning principles called “Rebuilding After Hurricane Katrina.”
They are also the only thing that stands between the former residents of the Lower 9th and the 2005 Supreme Court decision in
Kelo v. New London which extended Eminent Domain to commercial development. In simpler terms, the dirty little secret about New Orleans is that Ray Nagin and the powers that be in the Big Easy are involved in
a land grab of historical proportions.
Click for big versionIt’s actually not that big a secret in New Orleans. ACORN’s red and white “No Land Grab” and “No Bulldozing” signs are on virtually every house in the Lower Ninth, and their public campaign to save property rights is the leading cause of the aforementioned eye-rolling. Most of the signs went up in protest to an ordinance passed on August 29th that authorized the city to take any house or plot of land not already under redevelopment. This meant all homes and lots had to be cleared of all debris, and structures boarded, plans made, and permits filed. Forgetting that most of the residents were poor and completely wiped out, those who did try will tell you they faced every obstacle imaginable.
“We had to fight just for the right to come back,” ACORN’s Marie Hurt says as we circle block after block in the 9th. “One of our Directors had to go to Washington to testify that the National Guard had closed off the Lower 9th and homeowners were not being let back in. The Lower 9th wasn’t the only neighborhood that flooded, but it was the only one closed off by armed troops.”
Hurt’s pissed. Everyone is gone, she says. There is no one left to fight for what is right, and the powers that be know this.
“Two weeks ago when everybody was talking about Katrina
, where did all the media go to interview people? Not here. They went to Houston to interview people about New Orleans.”
…. SNIP….
Continues…
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