Two years after the deluge: A brew of Hollywood pyrotechnics, homeowner nightmares and local cultural revival in New Orleans.
By Bill Sasser
salon.com
July 23, 2007
Two years after Hurricane Katrina sent a wall of water crashing through New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, visits by celebrities, politicians, and busloads of volunteers have mostly faded to memory. Blocks and blocks of a once crowded neighborhood can feel like an empty post-disaster twilight zone, as tentative signs of rebirth stand alongside stark reminders of what was lost. Some scenes are perhaps best described as surreal.
Near the corner of Forstall and Galvez, a ragtag armada of pirogues, sailboats, and motorboats stripped of their engines sit on a dusty curb. Some were likely used to rescue flood victims after the levees broke, but their next cue will be as props for Black Water Transit, a Hollywood “post-Katrina gunrunning thriller” once set to star Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis, now featuring Lawrence Fishburne and Karl Urban.
Movie set under construction in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward - Photo by Bill Sasser
Production workers have built a “wrecked” house from the ground up at this desolate corner in New Orleans hardest-hit neighborhood. Tilted on its foundation at a nearly 45-degree angle, the movie set sits next to several flood-damaged houses that were slated to be demolished as part of the city’ aggressive new clean up campaign, but left standing for the film project. A few weeks ago, filmmakers rammed a car through the front of their fake Katrina house. Near the end of production, they’ll blow it up with pyrotechnics.
Just across Forstall Street stands a tragic evidence of the all-to-real disaster that occurred here: The gutted shell of Mount Carmel Church, its brick façade still bearing spray-painted skulls from the early days after Katrina, apparently showing that flood victims were found inside.
Half a dozen blocks downriver from the movie set, Japanese artist Takashi Horisaki is completing latex castings of a flood-wrecked shotgun house on Caffin Avenue, which he plans to install at the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City later this summer. The house would have been bulldozed months ago but for the cooperation of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is implementing the city government’s tear-down list. A graduate of Loyola University in New Orleans, Horisako has gotten help from dozens of volunteers over the past two months to make his deadline, and hopes his art will remind New Yorkers that New Orleans is still hurting.
North Miro Street, Lower Ninth Ward, July 2007 - Photo by Bill Sasser
That’s true for Johnnie Blunt, whose house on nearby Charbonnet Street might still be standing if he were a film producer or conceptual artist. Blunt, 63, his wife, Charlene, 34, and their five children, all between the ages of 4 and 10, were among the last families in the Gulf region to receive an emergency trailer, which sat by their hurricane-damaged home for months before they finally received a key from FEMA. The Blunts evacuated ahead of Katrina and spent the next year and a half living outside Baton Rogue. A month ago they returned to the Lower Ninth to move into their FEMA trailer, only to discover that their house had been demolished by the city without warning. A cabdriver and part-time minister, Johnnie Blunt planned to rebuild the cinder-block-on-slab home, which also served as his small community church.
“We talked to them at City Hall ever since Katrina, and they told us to gut and board up our house and they’d take it off the knock down list,” says Blunt, who did the work with his wife on weekend trips back to the city, to comply with the new city property ordinances. “We figured we didn’t have anything to worry about. The only thing wrong with the house was a big tree had put a hole in the roof, but the walls outside were brick and in perfect condition.”
Johnnie and Charlene Blunt and their children (l to r) Wenzy, Wayne, Wanesheir, and Wallace - Photo by Bill Sasser
Blunt and his children stand on the front steps of their trailer on a late Sunday afternoon, looking out across a neighborhood that feels like a forgotten rural outpost. Nearly two years after 13-feet of water blasted through the Lower Ninth, the city’s tear down campaign has left empty fields where weeds stand six feet tall, wild chickens cluck after bugs, and front steps lead to houses that are no longer there. Silence is broken by a pit bull that turns a corner and barks at the children, who cower and flee inside. The dog belongs to a neighbor who lives in another FEMA trailer down the street.
“They’re afraid of that dog and he knows it,” says Blunt, who plans to enroll his children in the nearby Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School when it reopens in August, one bright spot in the Lower Ninth’s long dirge of tragedy since the storm. “We thought about trying to find some kind of summer camp for them, but we didn’t know where to look and now it’s probably too late.”
Blunt has other worries. Facing some money troubles back in 2005, he stopped paying his homeowner’s insurance so he could finish paying his property mortgage, two months before Katrina struck. “That turned out to be a really bad decision,” he says. Although now nearly broke, he paid property taxes on his house just a few weeks before it was demolished in May. Blunt has applied for a federal grant aiding homeowners affected by Katrina, but hasn’t received a dime from Louisiana’s Road Home program, and now has to reapply, since he no longer has a home to repair.
Mount Carmel Baptist Church, July 2007 - Photo by Bill Sasser
“I don’t understand it,” says Blunt, who is more bewildered than angry. “It seems like they’re doing everything they can to keep people from moving back here.” Blunt is not alone in his experience. Mayor Ray Nagin’s administration has been criticized for its implementation of a “tear down” policy aimed at clearing hurricane-damaged structures deemed “imminent dangers,” while placing liens on the properties for the cost of the work.
(Click images for larger view - photos by Bill Sasser)
A report in The Times-Picayune recently cited at least a dozen cases in the Lower Ninth Ward in which homes in apparently salvageable condition were listed for demolition. Housing advocates point to haphazard enforcement of the law, a confusing and inconsistent notification process, and the lack of an appeals process. The city’s tear-down campaign runs parallel to its Good Neighbor Program, which gives property owners 120 days to clean, gut and board up hurricane-damaged houses. Activists have threatened lawsuits unless the city reforms its tear-down process.
To date, the private market has shown little interest in rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward, an area that before Katrina had one of the highest homeownership rates in the city. In the aftermath of the disaster, the area just east of the catastrophic breach in the Industrial Canal became a national emblem of the destruction Katrina wrought on the city’s black working class. But like Blunt, many were struggling long before the hurricane.
Gloria Irving, at the Original Big Seven's annual second line parade - Photo by Bill Sasser
“After I bought this house in 1989, I worked and worked to pay that mortgage off,” he says. “I left for work early so I could walk and not have to pay bus fare. Some days I didn’t eat lunch.” Many years later, he says, “we’re supposed to be enjoying it.” But that dream of a well-rooted family life, and a solid investment in a home, is long gone for now. “We asked FEMA for a bigger trailer and they said they couldn’t do that,” Blunt says. “So we said, OK, we’ll make do.”
On the other side of the Industrial Canal, the city’s recovery continues in patchworks of steady progress and static desolation. Much of public housing remains shuttered, with thousands of former residents scattered, as a lawsuit against HUD’s plan to raze most traditional public housing projects in the city awaits a court date. Like Blunt, thousands of homeowners have yet to receive long-promised state and federal aid to supplement shortfalls in insurance payments.
Yet a tide seems to have turned on blocks where the flood was less than devastating, including some predominantly black neighborhoods in the Seventh and Ninth wards. With scant political leadership, economic aid or coherent planning, it’s an improvised effort that has mostly happened through individual will, investment by nonprofits and community development corporations, and the work of thousands of volunteers from all over the country.
Artist Takashi Horisaki - Photo by Bill Sasser
Perhaps the most important rallying cry for natives has been the city’s unique street culture of music, food, and community celebration. Hundreds of New Orleans residents still displaced by Katrina recently returned to the Seventh Ward from cities as far away as Atlanta to attend the Original Big Seven Social Aid and Pleasure Club’s annual second line parade. Drawing primarily from former residents of the closed St. Bernard housing project, the club’s honored guest this year was Gloria Irving, 71, a former St. Bernard resident who last year was at the forefront of protests over the development's closure. In April 2006, Irving led a group of demonstrators who forced open a security fence at the development, driving her motorized wheelchair through a line of police and housing authority security guards. Rescued by boat from St. Bernard five days after Katrina, she spent most of the next 16 months in Houston before moving back to New Orleans. “This is our day – we’re home and we’re here to stay!” Irving declared from her backseat perch in a convertible at the recent second line parade.
(Photos: the Original Big Seven Social Aid and Pleasure Club’s second line parade »)
While notable progress has been made in parts of the Seventh Ward over the past year, similar homecomings have yet to happen in neighborhoods like Johnnie Blunt’s. Still, he has no doubts about his family’s return. “We was always planning on coming back,” Blunt says. “This is home, where I eat and work and do everything. Now we’re stuck right here and have to live with what we got,” he says, nodding towards his FEMA trailer. “This is my family, we’re tough, we’re OK. The Lord will take care of us.”
To Be Continued brass band, at the Original Big Seven's annual second line parade - Photo by Bill Sasser