Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 - (Page 46)

CITIZENS TAKING CHARGE The same demographic forces that depressed urban neighborhoods across the country in the late 1960s visited both Marigny neighborhoods. They both faced a fight for survival as viable communities. “How do you take old neighborhoods and refit them for today’s use without destroying them?” queries architect and preservationist Eugene Cizek. As the father of the Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association, finding community-based answers to that question has consumed his entire professional life. “Old houses made out of lumber that you cannot buy today; built in a way that withstands the storm; raised up off the ground and has shutters; they have all those things that make it comfortable in a hot humid climate, and it’s often a work of art. CHERYL GERBER “I HAVE TO REMAIN POSITIVE. WHERE WE ARE IS WHERE WE ARE TODAY. TOMORROW, WE’LL PULL UP, AND AFTER THAT WE’LL PULL UP A LITTLE BIT MORE, UNTIL WE PULL OURSELVES OUT OF IT.WE’RE HERE TO STAY.” — Loretta Harrison on post-Katrina Faubourg Marigny dollars. To maintain the interest in the building trades, Cizek worked to help establish the Priestly School of Architecture and Construction. In New Marigny on North Villere is the home of worldrenowned artist Willie Birch. Growing up in the Magnolia Housing Project, Birch received a master’s degree in fine art from the University of Maryland. As part of a Guggenheim fellowship, he returned to New Orleans in 1994 where he set up shop in a shotgun double that he converted into his studio. As Eugene Cizek looked to architectural 46 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Summer 2008 CHERYL GERBER customers and walking down the street chanting “Vegetable Man! I got bananas! I got watermelon red to the rind!” Segregation was still common practice. Where one attended schools and churches was based on race instead of location. I was well into high school before I was free to walk into Washington Square. When I watched baseball games there, it was always through the fence. But one evening in the mid1960s after the Civil Rights Act became law, I saw a black friend I knew only as “Tex” actually sitting in the bleachers watching a game. He waved for me to come and join him. After a two-generation family lifetime of Jim Crow, I went in and watched the softball encounter without incident. Following 60 years of racial segregation, it was after all only a game. “You take a lot of the plaster work, and the carving they did for the mantles; these are things that have great value. Who built those houses? The more I studied about New Orleans, the more I realized that the bulk of the master craftsmen were African Americans. Why would you want to tear down a masterpiece? People come to New Orleans not to see high rises. They come here for a sense of place.” In the 1970s, Cizek and likeminded activists began a political and educational movement to protect the neighborhood’s irreplaceable 19th-century treasures. During the 1970s and ‘80s, they developed plans for historic zoning districts, worked for legislation that favored preservation, and co-founded the Preservation Resource Center. Largely through their efforts, Faubourg Marigny escaped the urban decay that has affected other areas. Historic preservation proved to be a desirable feature in a nation that was losing its authenticity. Houses that once sold for $5,000 were being fixed up and sold for hundreds-of-thousands of

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities George Rodrigue’s Louisiana: Cajuns, Blue Dogs & Beyond Katrina The Historic New Orleans Collection After The Flood Faubourg Marigny: The Creole “Suburb” Preserving New Orleans Jazz, One Generation at a Time: Conversation & Music with Tom Sancton Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Architecture Baton Rouge Photographs, 1863-1910 Jazz Notes The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Louisiana Association of Museums Nature of the “Beast” Louisiana State Museum Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Summer 2008

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