New Orleans Is More Than Ready
November 28, 2007
New Orleans asks debate panel: Where y’at?
by James Oliphant
NEW ORLEANS—The Big Easy isn’t taking this one lying down.
This rebuilding city has its pro sports team back and is set to host the Sugar Bowl, the NCAA Championship Game and the NBA all-star game this winter. Hotels and tourist areas are operating at full speed. Getting around isn’t a problem. The convention center has been upgraded.
So you might understand why some residents and local media are miffed that the city has been deemed unfit to host a presidential debate. And they believe that the Commission on Presidential Debates has yet to give the city a straight answer as to why.
Local columnist Jarvis DeBerry, of the Times-Picayune, wrote this week that the commission is “now discovering that New Orleans is not the woman who cries quietly into her napkin at the news of her rejection. To the contrary, she is the woman who demands to know what the hell’s wrong with the person walking away.”
To New Orleanians, it’s isn’t about prestige. It’s about focusing the candidates – and the American public – on the status of the region more than two years after Hurricane Katrina hit and the levees failed. City councilman Arnie Fielkow told the New York Times that the city “has been through too much, and progressed too far, to be falsely disparaged on this national stage.”
The proposal was organized by the advocacy group Women of the Storm, in cooperation with four local universities and was supported by seven presidential candidates, including former Sen. John Edwards, who launched his presidential bid here. Anne Milling, founder of Women of the Storm, called New Orleans the “clear moral choice” for hosting a debate.
Bayou Classic
November 23, 2007
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Grambling and Southern fans give New Orleans economy a boost
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The streets around the Louisiana Superdome took on the festive air of a street fair on Friday as vendors set up booths and prepared to hawk everything from team T-shirts to secret-recipe barbecue to Bayou Classic fans. The annual matchup between Grambling State and Southern University — Louisiana’s traditionally black colleges and Southwestern Athletic Association powerhouses — is both a tradition and a much-needed economic boost for New Orleans. “Typically in most tourism cities holidays are pretty quiet and there are a lot of empty hotel rooms,” said Bill Curl, spokesman for the Superdome. “This brings people in every year. Then everybody goes home and raves about what a good time they had and that brings in more the next time.” The Bayou Classic, the brain child of the late Grambling coach Eddie Robinson, is much more than the football game. By the time it’s played Saturday, there will have been a coaches luncheon and the Super Job Fair on Friday. And the Battle of the Bands on Friday featuring the school’s marching bands, whose rivalry is every bit as intense as that of the football teams. Since Hurricane Katrina the crowds have been smaller, but have grown in the two years since the storm. Last year the game, which sells out at 70,000, drew only 47,136. The battle of the bands, which has about 35,000 seats, was sold out. The game is televised nationally on NBC. “Most of our special events we’ve rebuilt,” said Bill Langkopp of the Greater New Orleans Hotel & Lodging Association. “Even so, our occupancy rate is in the mid 70s and we’re hoping to break 80 percent by game time. That is significant on what is traditionally a slow tourism weekend.” Bourbon Street and the rest of the French Quarter and surrounding tourist areas were quiet Thursday night with people preferring family and friends to partying. But that always changes on Friday night when the Bayou Classic crowd hits town, said Earl Bernhardt, co-owner of five French Quarter bars. “We only had two of our locations open Thursday,” Bernhardt said. “But they’re all back up and running today and they’ll be busy tonight.” His Tropical Isle bars on Bourbon Street do especially well during the Bayou Classic, Bernhardt said, thanks to a mention of their trademarked drink the Hand Grenade by hip-hop artist Ludacris. “Ever since he sang about it in one of his songs, this crowd has been pretty hip to us.” Bernhardt said. The New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau was unsure of the economic impact of the event on the city, spokeswoman Mary Beth Romig said, because they were unsure what this year’s attendance would be. “It always comes during one of our slower weekends,” Romig said. “And it brings in a crowd that likes to shop, hit the restaurants and party.” |
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St. Charles Streetcar
November 11, 2007
N.O. Streetcars Welcomed Back With Party
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Amid a Carnival-like atmosphere, streetcars began rolling past the historic mansions of this city’s Garden District Saturday for the first time since Hurricane Katrina halted the St. Charles Avenue line more than two years ago.
While only about half of the line is reopened, many see the return of the 1920s-era green cars as a sign of progress in the city’s recovery and a morale booster.
“It’s like having another piece of the puzzle, another piece of the city” back, said Melisa Rey, who rode on the first of a string of cars with her husband, Tom, and 10-month-old daughter, Jeanne-Marie. “It’s so nice to finally have some good publicity,” Tom Rey added.
Six of the 13 miles the cars once ran are now open on the St. Charles line, and officials hope to restore full service through by spring.
It’s been slow going in large part due to the cost and scope of the storm’s damage to the line’s power system, due for an upgrade before the August 2005 storm. Mark Major, general manager of the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, praised federal highway officials for providing $14 million that he said was key to the resumption of the service.
Politicians and local officials were on hand, as they were in December when an initial loop of about 1.2 miles opened. But the feel was different, more festive.
On Saturday, a marching band led the streetcars down to the Lee Circle loop. Revelers dotted the oak-lined avenue — some waving or holding up drinks, others, carrying signs that read “No More Bus” or “Welcome Back,” or offering riders Mardi Gras beads or high-fives.
Councilwoman Stacy Head called the streetcars part of the city’s identity — “everything from the noise, the clanging down the avenue to the lights at night. The St. Charles line was the oldest continuously operating line in the world before Katrina shut it down in August 2005. It began operation in September 1835.
“It’s what makes New Orleans feel like home,” she said. “It’s as important as red beans and rice and Mardi Gras, and it’s hard to explain to people who aren’t part of this city how important this is as an icon and a real-life form of transportation.”
Karen Miller grew up riding the streetcar and took it to work before Katrina. It’s not just for tourists, and it’s far more fun than riding a bus — especially when the windows are down, she said. A warm breeze blew through the car in which she was riding.
Transit officials expect to run about five cars on the St. Charles line. The fare is $1.25 beginning Sunday; people got to take rides for free Saturday afternoon. Four or five streetcars also are running on the Canal Street line and two are available along the riverfront.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hOuP3QBBjs_qjHB1_LmDDKglt3TwD8SR4M280
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Rebuilding New Orleans, Post-Katrina Style
NEW ORLEANS — This city has always been known for its eclectic housing styles — Greek Revival, Italianate, Creole. Now emerging is what could be called a posthurricane vernacular, wide-ranging architectural responses to what everyone here refers to simply as the Storm.
There is what could be called the Defensive style, houses jacked up so high on pilings that they look as if they might teeter over or take wing.
There is also the Defiant style: pristine houses with columned porches painted in storybook pastels. These are surrounded by houses with boarded-up windows and padlocked doors; FEMA trailers still in the front yard; arrested construction because of a shortage of contractors; or empty lots with nothing left but corroding concrete foundations. These cheerful houses stick out like cartoonish stage sets, with people determined to live happily ever after inside, even though they may still be encircled by devastation and afraid to venture out on the deserted streets after dark.
And then there is the Do Good style, affordable housing being built by groups like Tulane University’s architecture school — in partnership with Neighborhood Housing Services, a nonprofit group — and taking advantage of this city’s blank-slate moment to introduce more contemporary structures into the landscape.
The result is precisely the hasty, haphazard aesthetic that some planners warned would emerge unless officials seized on Katrina as an opportunity to rethink the Crescent City in a more systematic fashion. But to many people who live here, some construction is better than none, whatever form it takes. Although about a quarter of the population has yet to return, at least some people are coming home.
“It would have been ideal had we started on Day One with an architecture and design program, but we didn’t have one,” said Edward J. Blakely, the urban planning expert serving as the city’s recovery chief. “I just want building to go on. We’re going to let people do what they think is right.”
Steven Bingler, a local architect who has been helping lead the planning effort, said: “I think we all have to be pragmatic about this. You can’t stop a city for two or three years while a detailed plan is developed. We just have to do the best we can to encourage development to take place on higher ground and to encourage the best-quality architecture we can — recognizing that there are going to be some projects not everybody is going to be proud of.”
To be sure, not everyone is comfortable with what is being built. R. Allen Eskew, a local architect who has been involved in the planning process, called it “generica” born of an “irrational self-determination.”
“With the ad hoc repair to the city, New Orleans is missing a golden opportunity,” Mr. Eskew said. “If your city has been destroyed, you’ve got a chance to make things right, not just to replace what was there. There is a tremendous amount of money being spent fixing things. The question is, is the fix of old paradigms the right way to get a community back in shape?”
“We need a Marshall Plan here,” he said.
Among the ideas advanced by architects and urban planners is permitting New Orleans to come back as a smaller city, with some heavily flooded areas left undeveloped; commissioning innovative 21st-century architecture for new public and residential buildings, even as the city’s treasured historic structures are preserved; and rebuilding low-income housing on higher ground.
“There is always a struggle in New Orleans between the forces of historicism and the progressive forces of those looking to create a new vernacular,” said Reed Kroloff, who recently stepped down as dean of Tulane’s architecture school and worked on the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, one of Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s early planning efforts.
Steve Dumez, an architect who works with Mr. Eskew, said he felt strongly that new buildings should not mimic historical traditions. “That would be an inappropriate way to show our allegiance to the past,” he said.
At the same time, architects like Mr. Eskew — whose firm, Eskew & Dumez & Ripple, restored the Superdome and has helped redesign six miles of the city’s riverfront — realize that the still-dire conditions of many New Orleans neighborhoods make big-picture planning seem like a luxury. People are doing what they can when they can.
“What’s interesting for me is watching the optimism,” Mr. Eskew said. “It’s a study in survival instincts.”
Michelle Stroud’s husband took four months off from his job installing security cameras to add a front porch to their new traditional-style home in Lakeview (a badly damaged area in the northwest section of the city), move the entrance from the side to the front to make the house more welcoming and install lighting and fans.
Still, Ms. Stroud, 39, says she gets a little nervous at night when her husband works late, and she is alone with her two daughters. The street is still largely uninhabited, and there are no services nearby. “It’s kind of eerie,” she said. “After two years, some houses haven’t even been knocked down. It would be nice to have a gas station or a food store.”
Despite Alzheimer’s disease and a post-Katrina divorce, Bob Murphy, 65, managed to renovate his traditional home on Hidalgo Street in Lakeview. “I’m pretty good with a crowbar now — I know how to knock out Sheetrock,” he said. His house’s columns, now longer-lasting tin instead of their former wood, came from Lowe’s; the kitchen countertops and bathroom tile from Home Depot; the cleaning supplies from Wal-Mart. “You name it, we hit it,” Mr. Murphy said.
Kathleen Mayer, 42, moved her family into a 1,525-square-foot modular cottage on Vicksburg Street in Lakeview while the 5,100-square-foot stucco-and-brick house that she and her husband are building a few streets away is under construction. Their temporary home, where the Mayers are living with their three children and a dog, is eight feet above the base flood mark. “Better safe than sorry,” Ms. Mayer said.
Gilbert St. Germain, 66, raised his home on Louis XIV Street, also in Lakeview, three feet, plowing $300,000 into a slab brick house he paid $58,500 for in 1977. His contractor, Arthur Virgadamo, said New Orleans was getting a bum rap for dragging its heels.
“Everybody says we’re going slow, but how many metropolitan cities have been wiped out?” said Mr. Virgadamo, 51. “I think we’re doing pretty good.”
The Urbanbuild program of Tulane — together with Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans — has completed three unorthodox houses in various sections of the city so far. “It’s a laboratory,” said Lauren Anderson, the president of Neighborhood Housing Services. “It’s contemporary, it’s solving the problems of the now.”
The first to buy one of these houses (for $125,000) was Timothy Holmes, 33, an officer with the New Orleans Police Academy who was assigned to the Superdome during Katrina. Mr. Holmes said he was happy in his new single-story, three-bedroom house on Dumaine Street in Upper Tremé, even though sitting on the wooden-plank porch’s built-in bench means looking out on a street of blight. During a reporter’s recent visit, a young man was handcuffed by plainclothes police officers across the way as Mr. Holmes was being interviewed inside.
Mr. Holmes’s house departs from traditional models for New Orleans architecture, with its horizontally banded sliding windows, a large sliding door that opens onto the porch and a roof ridge running parallel to the street — “like an extremely stretched Creole cottage rather than a shotgun,” John P. Klingman, a Tulane architecture professor, commented in New Orleans magazine in May.
Students from the College of Architecture, Planning and Design at Kansas State University designed and built a funky modern Mardi Gras museum for Ronald Lewis, 56, in the Lower Ninth Ward, with a tin roof, corrugated plastic ceiling and plywood floor. Mr. Lewis’s museum, called the House of Dance and Feathers, had been in his garage on Tupelo Street, right where the levees broke.
“This is one building that’s going to be a living story because I’m here to tell this story,” said Mr. Lewis, a former streetcar track repairman on the St. Charles Avenue line who is also president of the Big Nine Social Aid and Pleasure Club, a Mardi Gras group.
Dr. Blakely, who was appointed executive director for recovery management by Mayor Nagin last December, has served in a variety of jobs in and out of academia, including urban and suburban planning posts at the University of Sydney in Australia; the University of California, Berkeley; and the New School in New York, as well as deputy mayor of Oakland, Calif.
He conceded that the quality of the houses going up in New Orleans was uneven but said the new elevations often amounted to an improvement. “In large measure, those houses actually look better than they did before,” he said. “By raising the house, they create a stronger presence.”
To some extent, he has had to retreat somewhat from the city’s original aggressive planning, which called for turning devastated neighborhoods into green space and inviting outside experts to weigh in. Many residents protested.
Still, Dr. Blakely said, it is important to press on with rebuilding wherever possible, whatever the architectural result.
“I said I wanted cranes in the sky in September,” he said. “I’m an impatient man.”
Movie Benefit
November 2, 2007
Join us in Fortier Park for a movie
this Saturday night Nov.3rd@ 7pm
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You’ll see “The Out of Towners”
with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis
a Neil Simon story 1970
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Hot dogs/chili, popcorn, candy, and drinks
are only a buck each.
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Fortier Park is in the 3100 block of Esplanade.
Sponsored by Friends of Fortier Park and Asian Pacific Café.
This Saturday, November 3rd at 7 pm join your neighbors at Fortier Park for the movie The Out of Towners on Al’s huge movie screen.
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Bring a blanket and a chair.
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All proceeds to support the “Todd Windisch Fund” a local Carpenter/Contractor seriously injured in a motorcycle accident earlier this month at the corner of Moss & Esplanade Ave.
