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Katrina
Katrina in a Coffee Pot
In the
house we gutted on Tennessee Street, the kitchen was a challenge.
Floor-to-ceiling wood paneling is a pain in the arse to pry loose,
and we had to wrestle with cabinets, a sink, a stove, and a
dishwasher:
Notice the under-the-cabinet coffee pot. It took me a minute to
realize why it was full:
That's the water that has caused so many troubles. (All right, I'll
lay off the photographs for now.)
Pre-Gutted and Post-Gutted
I was
trying to figure out how to do an animated gif to show a before and
after of one of the walls in the house we gutted on Caffin Street,
but I can't figure out how to do it within the confines of my blog
templates. Such technical troubles today. So here we go, low-tech.
First, a mud-caked and moldy hallway wall, before:
And after it met the business end of my crowbar:
There was something so powerful about the process of deconstructing
the house that a family has lived in for decades, but I'm not sure
it's something you can convey via photographs. (Or at least, that
I can convey via photographs.) Luckily, I have some video
from Caffin Street that I'm editing later today. And of course,
there's always words. With that in mind, I'm working on some
text-only posts on the whole trip.
New Orleans Photographs -- a "Best" Subset
I've been looking for a clean and elegant way to display here on the
blog a selection of the photos I took last week. I didn't want to
use the built-in Flickr slideshow as deciphered by Paul Stamatiou
both because the design has too many distracting elements, I think,
and because it scrolls through photos automatically -- I think it
takes something away from the pleasurable experience of interacting
with photographs if they're served up to you after regular 5 second
intervals. So I settled on Flickrshow. I'm not entirely happy with
it (for one reason, the javascript that drives it is hosted
offsite), but heck, it's free and seems to be fairly reliable. I
can't quite figure out how to display a Flickrshow inline in the
blog format, because it requires that you add a unique head tag to
the page where you want to display your photos. So I'm going to have
to ask you to jump over here to have a look at the
subset of forty or so "best" photos I've culled from all those I
took in New Orleans.
Gutting New Orleans
Working
with ACORN, yesterday I helped to gut two houses in the Lower Ninth
Ward, one on Caffin Street and one on Tennessee Street:
We more or less gutted all of the Caffin Street house down to studs
in one day, and finished clearing out the Tennessee Street house
after lunch.
School's Still Out in New Orleans East
One more
while we're doing portals:
Now why on God's green earth did I not frame the shot to include all
of the smashed window? Argh. Anyway, the Barbara C. Jordan School in
New Orleans East is mud-caked, busted, and broken.
Walls of the Lower Nine
It was a
learning and interviewing day today. And I indeed learned a great
deal about some aspects of rebuilding New Orleans -- I think.
Tomorrow I get my hands dirty a bit, both observing one home-gutting
project in the Lower Nine and busting down some moldly old walls
myself:
I'll soon write up what I've found here -- this weekend most likely
-- but for now, I'm taking everything I can about rebuilding in and
starting the process of processing it.
Five Neighborhoods
When I
posted notice on MyDD about me coming down to New Orleans, several
commenters raised the idea that while the focus of national
post-Katrina attention has been on the Lower Ninth Ward,
neighborhoods like Lakeview, Gentilly, New Orleans East, and
Chalmette are also still quite devastated. On their recommendation,
I hit the western part of New Orleans East yesterday and went
through the other three today -- as well as the Lower Ninth, as I'd
never been. Wow, just wow. More on that later. But I ended up with
about 400 photos (I've borrowed my brother's Nikon D70s digital SLR
for the week) and just finished selecting out a set of 82 for
Flicker. I'll be posting a bunch of them in the coming days and
sharing some thoughts and observations on New Orleans, but I'm a bit
pooped. Here's just a taste of a few of my more random shots. First,
a car that nature's made a planter, in the Lower Ninth:
And the view through that car's window:
Next up, also from the Lower Ninth, Mary. doing her best:
Now this was eerie. I stumbled upon the deserted Barbara C. Jordan
School in New Orleans East, and investigated. It was completely
washed out and it seemed like other than a bit of clear-out work,
things were pretty much frozen as they were in August of 2005. In
the school courtyard were piled the students' desks and chairs:
And finally:
This puppy found stuck in a windowsill in Chalmette says g'night.
(It seems like it's all-hurricane, all the time here. For example,
the local television station I have on in the background is showing
a program that covers every aspect of the storm, from the levees
breaking to how to hire a licensed contractor to handle mold
removal.)
The More They Stay the Same
I'm just
crashing now from my first day back in New Orleans. I visited here
last about five weeks after Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. It wasn't
that I didn't know intellectually that not much rebuilding had been
done places like the Ninth Ward since then, but I guess I somehow
didn't expect things could in places still be so strikingly similar
to the way they were what, 19 months ago? Here is a shot I took in
2005 of the Sheralane Dog Grooming Shop on Downman Road:
For whatever reason, those spray-painted signs chilled me to the
bone back then. I took this photo of Sheralane today, more than a
year and a half later:
But that's not to overgeneralize. Houses here and there in the
northwest corner of the Ninth have been rebuilt or rehabbed. But
they're still on streets that are largely deserted, from what I've
seen. Here's an example of that:
The house of the left was beautifully manicured -- new mulch,
flowers in the yard. The one the right was barely more than a shell,
and you can still clearly see the line to which the flood waters
rose.
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