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October 29, 2005

NOLA Yats: The New Spotted Owl

Lately I haven't been posting much about New Orleans, and to be honest, I haven't been reading much about it either. I click over to nola.com, I click through my New Orleans links over there on the right, and then I just want to look away.

Part of it is frustration. The same kind of frustration that a soldier must feel when the war is being fought and won while he sits at a desk job thousands of miles away unable to contribute. The New Orleans links are full of stories of successes and failures in cleanup and rebuilding. I listen to the Big 870 at night, in my car, and people call in with their questions and their rants about insurance adjusters and FEMA and the post office and the shopping situation, and I want to call in and just say, "uh...can I come help?"

Gina has applied for the FEMA architect job, she's been fingerprinted for an FBI background check...but nothing since then. FEMA's hiring process is about as efficient and effective as anything else they do. She'll still be going over there since she is doing the remodel for Mark's house in Metairie, but that's it.

But part of my problem also has been a sense of dread, that in all the flurry of activity of cleaning up, hauling away trash, and trying to rebuild, that the city is dying. The real city. Not the tourist part...I fully expect that in a year, two years, the downtown hotels will be full of conventioneers, the Quarter will be packed with drunks doing lewd things for beads, and the old famous restaurants will be back to their former glory.

But what of the neighborhoods? The Ninth Ward? Mid-City?

What about the Yat?

I read this essay on nola.com last week, and I thought it was brilliant, and I also thought it was so depressing that I couldn't go back to that site for days. It poses many questions about the future of New Orleans culture, and I fear that all the answers are all bad.


Many locals can't describe it because they are blind to it the way a fish is blind to water until he finds himself flapping helplessly on land. You cannot replace forty square miles of antique neighborhoods with a California vision of what a proper up-to-date American community should be and expect the soul of New Orleans to survive any more than a salmon can thrive in a parking lot.

We need to treat the Yat the way we do the spotted owl. That is, we need to restore the cultural ecosystem that provided his habitat. I wonder if anyone in Washington has even started to think of it this way? Is anyone thinking about how to provide more amenities and open space without destroying the dense fabric of the neighborhoods? There were hardly any garages in old New Orleans neighborhoods. What would be the consequences of introducing them? Are planners going to put back Markey's Bar or The Bright Star, both lynchpins of their respective Ninth Ward and Uptown neighborhoods? Will anyone dare to interfere with the property rights of the slumlords? What about the Mom and Pop grocery stores that made deliveries and extended credit; will they be back? Will there be Sno-ball stands? What aesthetic will take the place of the Victorian confections that turned Ninth Ward shotguns into wooden wedding cakes? Will anyone salvage the tall louvered shutters that covered all the shotgun doors and windows? What will they put them on if they do? How will extended families re-establish their neighborhood roots? How do we avoid the extremes of neo-Levittown or what an NPR commentator called "neo-precious?"

I used to think New Orleans was a strong and resilient city, and that it would come back from Katrina the way a forest comes back after a wildfire. That slowly but surely, it would sprout and regrow, and in a little while it would be bustling with life and in a longer while you'd never know there was ever a fire.

And on the surface, that's what it looks like is happening. There is certainly the "feel" of progress.

But more and more, I feel like real New Orleans culture is like a coral reef. A delicate and fragile ecosystem where every piece is connected somehow to every other piece. And if you kill the reef, the entire ecosystem radically changes. There is still an ocean there, there are still fish there, but they are different fish, and if you never saw what the reef looked like in its fullness of life, you'd never know how beautiful it was, how different it was, and how much better it was than what you have now.

Posted by ray at October 29, 2005 11:37 AM |
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Comments

Great post. I have had very similar thoughts on the future of NOLA. I finally got into the city yesterday and I feel much better now that I have seen it with my own eyes. Yes, there is devastation everywhere but the skeleton of the city we love is there. The French Quarter is already alive, and Uptown was beginning to totter back. The big questions to me is 1.)can the levees be built safer 2.)can insurance be gotten again and 3.)will business return. If these three conditions cannot be met, it will be impossible for anyone to stay.

Posted by: doctorj at October 29, 2005 1:18 PM

I went to a talk by Simon Winchester last week (his latest book is about the S.F. 1906 earthquake). He painted a damning contrast of the quick federal response in 1906, and in 2005. Very interesting.

Winchester then mused about American cities and what they might be like a millenium from now. In Europe there are amazing old cities still standing and amazing old cities in ruins. Both are fascinating to see. In Europe, it is now fairly well established where citizens should build, because the ruins of old cities are good warnings of danger spots (below Vesuvius, say). Here in the U.S., my own city sits in the shadow of a volcano. S.F. straddles a fault. Pheonix sprawls above a plummeting water table. And, of course, there is New Orleans. Winchester wondered which of these cities would still be vibrant in a millenium. Then he also, humorously, wondered which might be even worth visiting as ruins, and in the end could not convince himself that the ruins of Pheonix would ever be much of a draw, either alive or dead. To bring this around to the conversation above, what makes a city interesting (to me) is its neighborhoods, and once those dies, the city dies too.

Posted by: sarah at October 29, 2005 6:00 PM

Excellent post, Ray. I have no idea what will happen, but I have no doubt the city will not be what it was. The chances of the 9th ward being rebuilt are slim to none. Lakeview, yes, but it was a new community already and most of those folks had insurance. I don't know. The city was so screwed up to begin with. Screwed up and beautiful, heartbreakingly so, but still screwed up. I can imagine the powers that be are delighted to have most of the poor moved out. And they seem ready to pepper the streets with cartoon cut-outs of old New Orleans sprinkled with casinos and other tourist traps. The rebuild/repopulation is exciting and dreadful, sort of like the lead-up to a storm when you pack the car up and have that hope and dread and morbid curiosity swimming around in your belly for the long drive out of town.

I wish I was there too.

Posted by: Kate at October 30, 2005 11:13 PM

NPR interviewed one of the Neville brothers the other day; he was talking about staying in Austin out of fear that NOLA would never again be more than a Disneyland rendition of what it was. I have more faith in a city that lasted 300 years, but then I've only been a guest, never a resident.

(By the way, I don't know what you like, but for excellent New Orleans reading, I'd recommend Barbara Hambly's Ben January series, which starts with A Free Man of Color. They're set in about the 1820s, and the eponymous hero is both a musician and a surgeon who rarely gets to practice the latter skill because of his skin.

Posted by: dichroic at October 31, 2005 12:56 PM

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