Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2008 - (Page 49) the Times-Picayune in 1991 that “ builders and investors people living north of Chef Menteur in 2000. East of Paris have given up on Village de l’Est. You build a house out Road the population was less than 15,000. there, there’s fighting, there’s vandalism The last builder Too Little Conservation, Too Late I know of pulled out. Too bad. It used to be very nice.” The impact of the oil collapse in the early 1980s further Most of New Orleans East remained marshland and hurt Village de l’Est. The more successful Lake Forest initial development of the area was little hindered by development began to face problems with rundown environmentalists demanding that wetlands making up of apartment buildings and a rise in drug use and related the tract be protected. In 1959 little thought was given to crime. By 1995 the Times-Picayune reported Lake Forest this matter, but by the 1980s things were changing as “experienced a construction boom in the 1970s and then fell environmentalists recognized that Louisiana was losing 50victim of the oil bust of the 1980s, [but is now] is staging a square miles of coastline a year. In 1981, New Orleans East moderate comeback.” Property sales increased, while donated two acres of land around Fort Macomb to apartment complexes were renovated. Homehalt erosion of the site, and announced building firms that had abandoned the east in intentions to build a 5,000 acre planned the 1980s were coming back finding that community nearby. buyers appreciated the larger, modern Before this happened, Clint “Some st houses available here with better costs Murchison went bankrupt and ven sugge ly e than in older parts of the city. Luxury defaulted on a loan to Merrill Lynch critics nd is total subdivisions like Eastover and its golf which became owner of New Orleans arshla e that m using.”—Th course opened in 1987, and its phase one East. To avoid legal hassles with ble for ho , 1975 was so successful that by 1995 more environmentalists, or pay taxes on the unsuita icayune phases were planned. land, the financial giant under the Times P Emergency Wetlands Resources Act sold The Rise of African-American Suburbia endangered wetlands along Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne for a wildlife refuge. Lake Forest became especially appealing to Authorized by Congress in 1986, the federal successful African-American homebuyers. buyout was financed through the Land and Water Neither Lake Forest nor New Orleans East were planned Conservation Fund of the Department of the Interior, and in as predominantly black areas, but with the Civil Rights 1990 the Bayou Sauvage Refuge was officially established. Act of 1964 both communities were as open to blacks who Covering 23,000 acres, it is the largest urban wildlife refuge could afford to live there as whites, and both were in the nation. In the words of the Times-Picayune, the refuge promoted as racially harmonious communities. Orleans “dramatically alters a vision long held for the Parish, with its newly obtained majority black population underdeveloped expanse of eastern New Orleans.” and black government, was more welcoming than the Overall the East only partially lived up to the dreams of predominately white communities of Jefferson Parish the 1960s. Although far from early optimistic population prompting African Americans to move east. In 2000 the area projections, Lake Forest and the area west of Paris Road has north of Interstate-10 to the lake was 86 percent African successfully become a viable city-within-a-city. True, there American, while the area south to Dwyer was 95 percent. are urban woes: dilapidated apartment complexes, drugs The section east of Read Road including the wealthy confines of Eastover was 73 percent African American. Village de l’Est also had a large black population in 2000, St. Mary’s Academy School, like much of New Orleans East, was but it was also the center of the city’s burgeoning destroyed by floodwaters unleashed from levee breaks in the wake of Vietnamese community. Thirty-seven Hurricane Katrina. The renovated campus reopened in Fall 2007. percent of its population was Asian, while 55 percent of the residents were African American, and fewer than 4 percent white. Population growth, however, never met the trumpeted levels, nor did it restore New Orleans population to the competitive levels aspired to; in fact, despite the development of the East, the population of New Orleans continued to steadily decline, losing nearly 150,000 residents from its peak just as the East was being developed until just before Hurricane Katrina came ashore in 2005. In the 1960s, optimists predicted that eastern New Orleans west of Paris Road would contain 195,000 residents, while New Orleans East would number 250,000. The area west of Paris Road, including Lake Forest, has been by far the most successful eastern development with almost 80,000 DAVID RAE MORRIS Spring 2008/LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 49
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