Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 37) in the weeks following the MOU, quietly and I wasn’t around to witness the last time public and unanimously passed ordinance 22,944. Section 1 federal funds were used to displace and destroy an of this December 2007 ordinance decreed“… no adjacent part of Mid-City during the 1950s. I don’t person shall be issued any building permit for remember the mansions and the century-old double construction, renovations, repairs, or for avenue of oaks along Claiborne Avenue before demolition in the area bounded by the west side Interstate 10 was constructed. But I dimly recall the of S. Claiborne Avenue between Tulane Avenue demolition of the old Hotel Dieu hospital and the and Canal Street, the south side of Canal Street subsequent 1975 battle to save St. Joseph Church from between S. Claiborne Avenue and S. Rocheblave sale and demolition. In 2005, as New Orleans reeled Sreet, the east side of S. Rocheblave Street from the largest man-made and natural disaster in this between Canal Street and Tulane Avenue, and nation’s history, I wondered if a neighborhood with a long history of publicly-funded expropriation would be the north side of Tulane Avenue between S. Rocheblave Street and S. Tulane Avenue, helped to recover or encouraged to leave. excluding Square 556.” This December 2007 In the autumn of 2007, I went home to visit a familiar neighborhood that had never been designated as a post- ordinance finally appeared in the Times-Picayune in late May 2008. Katrina residential recovery zone. While commercial and municipal properties along Tulane Avenue and RESEARCHING LOWER MID-CITY’S PAST Canal Street moldered, residents in the neighborhood’s As I wandered familiar streets in interior, were busily and successfully late 2007, I was often asked rebuilding. This recovering about the neighborhood. neighborhood was becoming, in With neither family some ways, better than it had tradition nor books been in my lifetime. People to guide me, I had had cultivated a sense of few answers. community. It was a Even now, I neighborhood once know only what again. could be At the time, neither gleaned from the residents nor I knew more than a year that Louisiana Recovery of seeking any Authority Chair Kim shred of Boyle had, in August 2007, information about testified before the U.S. this sacrificial and House Of Representatives reputedly valueless land. Committee On Energy And The story that emerged is that Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight THE H ISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION of a diverse and culturally rich And Investigations, confirming that “ State microcosm inhabited by generations of families officials have already initiated land acquisition for the whose artistic and musical contributions shaped targeted downtown site using state general funds …“ the sights, sounds and cultural fabric of our city. for construction of a new hospital complex. Three Many of them were people my family probably months later, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and knew as friends or neighbors. Acting VA Secretary Gordon H. Mansfield signed a Born during World War I, my father bore a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) under which the city would expropriate and raze a significant 34-acre surname from what was then an enemy nation. The child of a religiously and culturally-mixed section of Lower Mid-City, presenting it to the VA in a German-Irish marriage, he experienced sectarian construction-ready state within one year. Public prejudice. The youngest of a widowed mother’s meetings to discuss options fro the VA site began in late children, my father obtained part of his higher June 2008. Neither did the general public know the City Council, education, as did many Lower Mid-City boys, at the Vincentian seminary in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. My father left the Cape before taking vows but opposite page, top: An aerial view showing much of New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood, circa 1953. opposite page, bottom: Advertisement, circa 1894, for Ludwig Eichhorn’s cornice works and metalsmith some childhood friends stayed and became shop at 1716-1718 Tulane Avenue. priests. In 1975, my father’s classmate, Rev. Fr. above: A November 1899 street scene in Lower Mid-City taken by Derbigny Street resident William Lawrence Hawes. Spring 2009/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 37
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