Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 36) New Orleans’ Lower Mid-City neighborhood is slated for mass demolition to make way for a hospital complex ower Mid-City, that part of the Mid City National Historic District in New Orleans above Claiborne Avenue and below Broad Street, is a societal orphan. Its lineage is neither colonial nor Creole but American, a cultural parentage it shares with Uptown’s antebellum neighborhoods and the few remaining townhouses in what was once the Faubourg Ste. Marie but is now the heart of the Central Business District. Shaped and inhabited by both native-born and naturalized citizens from foreign lands, Lower Mid-City has always been a diverse multiethnic microcosm. It is where my German great-grandparents settled in the 1850s. It is where I grew up and it encompasses the residential neighborhood the City of New Orleans,FEMA and the Veterans Administration each officially declared in late 2008 could be annihilated, with “No Significant Impact,” after its selection as the preferred site for the proposed replacement LSU and VA medical centers. L THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION 36 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2009 THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION
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