Lost Central City

A few years ago, we posted some information about the mid-twentieth century slum clearance program that affected a group of self-proclaimed "Wimawalas."

We recently came across this circa 1937 glass lantern slide marked "Slum Housing Displaced by Magnolia Street Project." It's unusual to find historic photographs of these lost New Orleans neighborhoods, as the federal photographers of the period had a tendency to focus their energies on the French Quarter.

Image above:  Digital reproduction from glass lantern slide marked "Slum Housing Displaced by Magnolia Street Project." Undated. Tulane School of Architecture Glass Lantern Slide Collection, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Reminder: District C Master Plan Meeting

A gentle reminder that the City of New Orleans has scheduled a planning meeting for District C (includes parts of the French Quarter, the Faubourgs Marigny and Treme, Sixth Ward and Seventh Wards, Algiers and Esplanade Ridge) for this evening, March 31st, from 6-8 pm at the Musician's Union Hall (2401 Esplanade Avenue).

To read the proposed Master Plan and Zoning Ordinance, click here.

New Report on the NOLA Master Plan

The Bureau of Government Research (BGR) has recently released its Connecting Neighborhoods to City Hall: Neighborhood Participation and the New Orleans 2030 Draft Plan, which outlines the organization's policy response to the draft master plan's community participation program. BGR's report provides an overview of perceived problems and makes recommendations for improvement. The latter include:

• Develop a participation system that connects neighborhoods directly to the City Planning Commission
• Redraw the planning district boundaries to better reflect neighborhood boundaries and interconnections
• Deploy planning staff in a strategic manner
• On matters that affect two or more neighborhoods, bring relevant neighborhoods together
• Require an official response to neighborhood concerns
• Either extend the comment period for the draft master plan or remove the community participation program from the draft plan

To read more about the organization and its reports, click here.

Transportation Leviathan

As the New Orleans Master Plan discussions currently involve the removal of the raised I-10 expressway through the Sixth and Seventh Wards, it seemed an appropriate time to resurrect some ephemera related to the initial grass roots effort focused on keeping the highway off the riverfront area.

Image above: Louisiana Council for the Vieux Carré. The Elevated Riverfront Expressway, undated flyer. Louisiana Research Collections, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Cleveland's Building Woes

Today's New York Times reported on the growing number of home foreclosures in Cleveland, Ohio. Alex Koslowitz's piece "All Boarded Up" provides a preview of this Sunday's NYT Magazine feature story. Cleveland estimates that 1 in 13 houses is vacant, some 10,000 foreclosures in the last two years. The Cuyahoga County treasurer claims the real numbers are actually higher. Conceiving of Cleveland as a bellweather, cities are turning to it for guidance. To read the piece, click here.

Above: Reuben Cox, photographer. Scavengers frequently descend on abandoned houses, removing appliances, plumbing fixtures and, as in this kitchen, copper pipes. NY Times 05.03.2009.

Master Plan for New Orleans

From Bruce Eggler's piece in today's Times Picayune:

"New Orleans voters narrowly agreed Tuesday to amend the City Charter to give the city's forthcoming master plan the force of law, meaning that all zoning and land-use decisions will have to conform to the plan.

The master plan is supposed to guide the city's development for the next 20 years, creating a framework to promote goals such as economic development, better housing, improved infrastructure and environmental quality.

The City Planning Commission has hired a team of consultants to create the plan, which is expected to be finished by late 2009."

Public meetings are planned for November 8-13th. For more information, click here.

Highways and Neighborhoods

The transformation of live oak-filled public boulevard space along Claiborne Avenue into the roadway deck for elevated Interstate I-10 dramatically altered Sixth and Seventh Ward New Orleans, much as the routing of Interstate I-35 affected the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota and Interstate I-275 impacted West Tampa, Florida. All three areas were home to tight-knit, fiercely independent and mixed race communities. Rondo's identity as a neighborhood was nearly erased by the highway construction; today it is largely known through oral histories and individual memories. West Tampa is being altered once again, this time by I-275 expansion for Florida's burgeoning population of motorists. To read a blogger's perspective, click here.

Thirty-eight years ago, the New Orleans Tambourine and Fan Club, a neighborhood-based cultural organization associated with the Sixth and Seventh Wards, initiated a revitalization effort for the Claiborne Avenue Corridor. By November 1973, the Claiborne Avenue Design Team (CADT) was formed and began a three-year multi-disciplinary planning process to revitalize the corridor that involved architects, engineers, community members, and social scientists. Participants included Ashe Cultural Arts Center co-founder Douglas Redd (1947-2007) and musicians Alvin Alcorn (1912-2003), Harold Dejan (1909-2002), and Freddie Kohlman (1918-1990). The team focused its attentions on potential development between Poydras Street and Peoples Avenue, and published its comprehensive plan that included supplementary architectural drawings, graphs, maps and statistical data. The CADT I-10 Multi-Use Study may be found in Tulane University's Special Collections Division, Louisiana Collections [NA 9127.N46 C 55] and in the Hogan Jazz Archive.

At the time the team conducted its surveys of CADT area residents, 62.8% of those responding selected recreation for children as the preferred use for the land. When asked the question, "If you had the choice, what three things would you select for general improvement of your community," the primary responses were:

Recreation for children 25.8%
Better streets 24.5%
More jobs/employment 17.4%
Misc./other 6.7%
DK/NA 14.7%


Photograph above: Claiborne Avenue Corridor, July 1966. From CADT I-10 Multi-Use Study. New Orleans: The Team, 1976, p. 44.

Cornerstones Project

National Public Radio recently featured a story about the new Cornerstones Project, a collaboration between Tulane School of Architecture's Tulane City Center and the Neighborhood Story Project. What is it?

"Cornerstones is an effort to document and advocate for the overlooked and threatened landmarks of New Orleans. With the input of New Orleanians (living here and elsewhere), Cornerstones will be the first ground-up approach to identify New Orleans’ impor­tant historical and cultural sites and we believe it will broaden our ideas about the types of spaces that are important to our city and why they are significant to us.

Generally in New Orleans, places have been designated as important landmarks based on their architectural significance or their role in official histories. We hope our featured cornerstones help you consider other ways spaces are meaningful to our communities, such as adding playful design and color to our streets, grounding cultural traditions, storing local histories, or offering a sense of neighborhood belonging. On this webpage (please see Nominate a Cornerstone), you will find our Cornerstones Nomination Form and we would like you to identify a place that in a similar way is significant to our city.

As nominations are submitted, Cornerstones, with the help of the Tulane City Center, will update our online registry (please see Cornerstones Registry) to feature the places you think are important to our neighborhoods and New Orleans. The online registry will include nominators’ written narratives, interview excerpts, photographs, and architectural drawings to illustrate the dynamic intersection of places and people that make our city unique.

The creation of a registry of everyday monuments and gathering places is essential in post-Katrina New Orleans, since demolition and redevelopment plans are not always sensitive to the ways in which our cornerstones keep our community environments and social and cultural networks intact. With your help, we also want to note threats to the vitality of nominated places, so we can advocate for our vulnerable landmarks, many that have made New Orleans worth coming home to."

Want to read more?

Coming out the Door for the Ninth Ward. New Orleans: Neighborhood Story Project, 2006.

Bolding, Ebony. Before and After N. Dorgenois. New Orleans: Neighborhood Story Project, 2005.

Dennis, Jana. Palmyra Street. New Orleans: Red Rattle/Soft Skull Press, 2005.

Jackson, Waukesha. What Would the World Be without Women: Stories from the Ninth Ward. New Orleans: Red Rattle/Soft Skull Press, 2005.

Nelson, Ashley. The Combination. New Orleans: Red Rattle/Soft Skull Press, 2005.

Wylie, Arlet and Sam. Between Piety and Desire. New Orleans: Red Rattle/Soft Skull Press, 2005.

Titles have multiple holdings in Tulane University Libraries. Check the online catalog (OPAC) here.

Coming Soon to the TSA Library:

Cornerstones. New Orleans: Neighborhood Story Project, 2008.