Culture Après le Déluge: Heritage Ecology after Disaster Benjamin Alan Morris Clare Hall 20 April 2010 & 20 July 2010 Department of Archaeology University of Cambridge This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. -2- Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text. It does not exceed the required word limit of 80,000 words specified by the Department of Archaeology. -3- Summary This PhD dissertation examines the relationships between cultural heritage and the environment, focusing specifically on the devastation and rebuilding of New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Departing from conventional approaches to the natural world (such as documentation- and conservation-based approaches), this thesis adopts a developmental-systems based approach to cultural heritage in order to construct a new way of interpreting it, within the specific context of natural disaster. This new approach, termed ‘heritage ecology’, reinterprets cultural heritage in two ways: first, as a physical assemblage of sites, materials, traditions, beliefs, and practices that are constructed in significant ways by their natural environments; and second, as a metaphorical ecosystem which impacts back on the assessment and construction of that natural environment in turn. In order to construct this approach, the thesis poses three interrelated questions: how is cultural heritage transformed as a result of disaster, how do societies rebuild their heritage after disaster, and how does heritage contribute to the rebuilding process? Examining a rebuilding process in real-time provides a unique window on these processes; events and developments in New Orleans taken from the first four years of recovery (2005-2009) suggest that prior understandings of how societies rebuild themselves after disaster have neglected crucial aspects of cultural heritage that are integral to that process. The examination of data from the case study—data of diverse forms, such as historiography, the culinary arts, music, the built environment, and memorial sites and landscapes—reveals the limitations of traditional approaches to heritage and prompts a reassessment of a range of issues central to heritage research, issues such as materiality, authenticity, and commodification. This study moreover incorporates into heritage research concepts previously unconsidered, such as infrastructure and policy. In the coming century of global climate change and increased environmental hazards, this last theme will become increasingly central to heritage policy and research; the dissertation concludes accordingly, with a reflection on contingency and future disaster. -4- Table of Contents Declaration ..........................................................................................................................................2 Summary ..............................................................................................................................................3 Table of Contents ..............................................................................................................................4 Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................................6 List of Illustrations ............................................................................................................................9 Chapter 1: Introduction and Dissertation Outline Prologue: The Silent Second-Line......................................................................................13 1.1: Introduction to the Argument.....................................................................................17 1.2: Heritage and the Environment: An Overview..........................................................19 1.3: Heritage Ecology: Foundations and Aims.................................................................27 1.4: Research Methodology .................................................................................................31 1.5: Chapter Outline .............................................................................................................36 Chapter 2: The Deaths and Lives of New Orleans, Louisiana 2.1: Introduction ...................................................................................................................38 2.2: History and Historiography of New Orleans............................................................42 2.3: What We Talk About When We Talk About Culture .............................................46 2.4: Hurricane Katrina: Origins and Impact .....................................................................55 2.5: Transformations in Landscape ....................................................................................56 2.5.1: X Marks the Spot..........................................................................................60 2.5.2: The Waterline ................................................................................................61 2.5.3: Stairways to Nowhere ..................................................................................65 2.5.4: Overgrowth ...................................................................................................67 2.5.5: Debris .............................................................................................................69 2.5.6: The Fleur-de-lis.............................................................................................73 2.6: Renewing New Orleans................................................................................................74 Chapter 3: Katrina and the Culinary Arts Prologue: Tacos or Po-boys? ..............................................................................................80 3.1: Foodways and Heritage ................................................................................................83 3.2: New Orleans Cuisine, Past and Present.....................................................................84 3.3: Katrina’s Impacts on Culinary Industries ..................................................................88 3.3.1: Impacts on Restaurants ...............................................................................90 3.3.2: Impacts on Recipes ......................................................................................94 3.3.3: New Styles and Enterprises...................................................................... 100 3.4: Culinary Infrastructure............................................................................................... 105 3.4.1: Culinary Museums ..................................................................................... 105 3.4.2: Public Markets............................................................................................ 109 3.5: Ecologies of the Table ............................................................................................... 114 Chapter 4: Katrina and the Musical Arts Prologue: The Locked Gate ............................................................................................. 119 4.1: Music and Heritage .................................................................................................... 122 4.1.1: Material Culture ......................................................................................... 123 4.1.2: Musical Infrastructure ............................................................................... 125 4.1.3: Lives and Livelihoods ............................................................................... 126 4.2: Renewing Our Music ................................................................................................. 130 4.2.1: Benefit Concerts and Compositions....................................................... 131 -5- 4.2.2: New Material Culture................................................................................ 133 4.2.3: Renewing Festivals .................................................................................... 139 4.3: Case Studies: Musical Heritage Under Threat........................................................ 144 4.3.1: The Scattered Tribes: Mardi Gras Indians............................................. 145 4.3.2: Neighbourhood Development: The Musicians’ Village ...................... 154 4.3.3: District-level Development: The Hyatt Jazz District ........................... 160 4.4: Ecologies of Music ..................................................................................................... 168 Chapter 5: Katrina and the Built Environment Prologue: The Latex House.............................................................................................. 172 5.1: New Orleans Architecture Past and Present.......................................................... 176 5.2: Blank Slates: Demolition vs. Reconstruction ......................................................... 182 5.3: What Is New Orleans? Individual Case Studies..................................................... 184 5.3.1: St. Francis of Cabrini Church .................................................................. 184 5.3.2: ICInola ........................................................................................................ 187 5.3.3: Make It Right Foundation........................................................................ 193 5.4: Public Heritage............................................................................................................ 198 5.4.1: Charity Hospital ......................................................................................... 199 5.4.2: Public Housing, Public Culture ............................................................... 207 5.4.3: Reinventing the Crescent.......................................................................... 211 5.5: Filling the Blank Slate ................................................................................................ 218 5.6: Ecologies of Architecture.......................................................................................... 225 Chapter 6: Remembering Katrina Prologue: Disneyfication................................................................................................... 232 6.1: Memorialising the Storm ........................................................................................... 234 6:2: The Hurricane Katrina Memorial ............................................................................ 244 6.3: The Lower Ninth Ward............................................................................................. 257 6.3.1: New Orleans for Sale ................................................................................ 259 6.3.2: Waiting for Godot? ................................................................................... 263 6.4: A Storm in a Glass Case: The Museology of Katrina ........................................... 267 6.5: Emergent Issues in Post-Katrina Mnemonics ....................................................... 271 Chapter 7: Summary and Conclusion Prologue: Sister Storms? ................................................................................................... 276 7.1: Future Work Introduction ........................................................................................ 279 7.1.1: Urban Work................................................................................................ 283 7.1.2: Cultural Work............................................................................................. 285 7.1.3: Policy Work ................................................................................................ 289 7.2: Contribution to Heritage Studies ............................................................................. 299 7.2.1: Materiality and Immateriality ................................................................... 300 7.2.2: Authenticity ................................................................................................ 300 7.2.3: Infrastructure.............................................................................................. 302 7.3: Heritage Ecology: Summary and Conclusion......................................................... 304 Appendix A: Afterword: Hurricane Gustav, 2008 ................................................................ 309 Appendix B: Katrina Anniversary Events, 2006-2009 ......................................................... 317 Appendix C: Remarks by Dr Frank Minyard, 29 August 2008 ........................................ 328 Appendix D: Inscriptions, Hurricane Katrina Memorial.................................................. 330 Bibliography................................................................................................................................... 331 -6- Acknowledgments In trying to express my gratitude to everyone who has helped me in the writing of this work, and in feeling a greater than usual inadequacy in being able to do so, I have for several weeks been tempted to resort to a metaphor: a race, a gestation, even a siege. But other views must be considered: the first from Arturo Rosenbluth and Norbert Weiner, who argue that “The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance,” and the second from Milan Kundera, who wrote that “Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.” I take all these admonitions on board. At the end of the day, however, my lot lies with Walker Percy, who noted that asking a person to consider the nature of language “is like asking a fish to consider the nature of water.” In other words, a fruitless task and one that annoys the fish. So instead, I will simply say thanks: To John Lawrence, John Magill, David Rubin, David Houston, Dan Piersol, Barbara Robichaux, Jacqueline Bishop, Tracie Ashe, Wayne Troyer, Michelle Kimball, Emily Clark, Lawrence Powell, Randy Sparks, Bruce Raeburn, Sara LeMenestrel, Rebecca Scott, Eve Troeh, Clem Goldberger, Gerald Patout, Poppy Tooker and Scott Hutcheson. I am grateful as well to Kristen Evans, Monique Piliè, Kim Griffin, Jordan Hirsch, Peggy Varnado, Dr Frank Minyard, Ian McNulty, David Spielman, Frances A. Karnes, Dave Brinks, Sarah Elise Lewis, Karen Gadbois, Shirley Laska, Rebecca L. Carter, David Lessinger, Ronald Lewis, and the Hon. Thomas J. Capella. And my thanks, paid in Abita, to Mimi Phan, Jon Cone, Lauren Childs, Tope Fadiran, Jeff Dennler, Daniel Braud, Rafael Delgadillo, Brent Tranchina, Eli Grove, and Gabrielle Reisman. My thanks to Pamela Breaux and Gaye Hamilton at the Louisiana state Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism and Brian Boyles at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. I am indebted to the journalists whose work I have regularly drawn upon for insight: Doug MacCash, Jaquetta White, Lolis Eric Elie, Katy Reckdahl, Adam Nossiter, and Larry Blumenfeld. I am grateful to the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, where Steven Maklansky, Karen Leathem, Charles Chamberlain, and Gabriela Hernandez opened their doors literally and figuratively to me. I owe David Shayt of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, a debt of thanks as well for opening the Katrina archives in the Smithsonian collections. Special thanks to Richard Ford and Kristina Ford. In 2007-08 I served as a Visiting Scholar at the Ethel and Herman C. Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans. My thanks to Connie Atkinson, and to Arnold Hirsch, David Beriss, Robert Cashner, and Elizabeth Uzee Sigler. I’d also like to thank everyone from the Cultures of Rebuilding in Post-Katrina New Orleans conference sponsored by the Midlo Center, the Graduate School at UNO, and the Louisiana State Museum—M.B. Hackler, Elizabeth Macy, Jay Edwards, and Andrei Codrescu in particular. Thanks as well to Michael Mizell-Nelson for his work with the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, a continual point of reference. As these pages were being prepared, I learned of the passing of Johanna Schindler and the Reverend Marshall Truehill. I regret that my debts to them both will remain unpaid. I would like to thank my supervisor and my advisor, Robin Boast and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, for their encouragement and incisive (if at times uncomfortably so) criticism. This work could not have taken place without it. My thanks to Catherine Hills, Charly French, Janice Stargardt, Graeme Barker, James Barrett, Tony Badger and Helen Taylor. I am grateful to David Lowenthal and Marilyn Strathern for early advice, to Yael Navaro-Yashin and Mehmet Yashin, and to Jane Woods, Natasha Martindale, Mark Newman, and Casey Synge. Special thanks to the community of artists, writers, and researchers who are engaged with environmental issues: Bettina Furnée, Joe Smith, Renata Tyszczuk, Nigel Clark, Robert Butler, -7- Robert Macfarlane, Abbie Garrington, Emma Dummett, Gregory Norminton, Stefan Skrimshire, Caspar Henderson, Melanie Challenger, Peter Gingold, Stephen Peake, Michaela Crimmin, William Shaw, Kellie Payne, Teresa Ashe, Zoe Svendsen, and Clare Patey. It has been exciting to work alongside Trinidad Rico, Ian Russell, May Cassar, Heather Viles, Caitlin DeSilvey, Dan Hicks, Michelle Berenfeld, Pamela Jerome, Carol Westrik, Chiara Bortolotto, and James White. And I am grateful to Yudhishthir Raj Isar for his invitation to work in a novel context. I am grateful to the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University for the training they provided: to Koko Warner, Thomas Loster, Mohammed Hamza (and the wolperdinger), Heather Lazrus, Carmen Lacambra-Segura, and David Wrathall. A special debt to Anthony Oliver-Smith. My thanks to Julie Tetel, Toril Moi, Melissa Malouf, Deborah Pope, Hannah Rogers and Alexis Blane. And to Sara Hudson, for forcing me to say why. Without the support of the following institutions, this work never would have taken place. First and foremost, to Clare Hall—a special debt to Bobbie Wells, Rosemary Luff, and Irene Hills. I am deeply grateful to the Overseas Research Studentships and the Cambridge Overseas Trusts for their early faith in this research, and to the Prince Consort Fund, the Worts Traveling Scholars Fund, the Smuts Memorial Fund, the Department of Archaeology and the Ridgeway- Venn Trustees. Thanks to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) for their support in the 2009-2010 Mellon Sawyer Seminar ‘Modelling Futures’ Dissertation Fellowship. I am indebted to Mary Jacobus and to Andrew Webber. It is impossible to fully thank my parents, Toxey and Virginia Morris, for their support and encouragement, but I can start by thanking them for visits to Felix’s on Iberville from an early age, shaping my taste for raw oysters and therefore laying the groundwork for the third chapter of this dissertation. I’d like to thank my brother Robert Morris, Sabree Hill, and my nephews Ash and Alex Hill, for the pleasure of explorations in New Orleans past, present, and future. There is no way to thank all my friends who have shared this journey (there’s that metaphor, at last) except to say that the Ministry doors are always open, no matter where they’re found. But there are a few people left to thank who might have thought it was safe to enter the water: Mathias Kolle and Julia Grunert, and Rosa Poetes and Nicolas Roger for their infinite patience; Dacia Viejo-Rose, whose passion for a better world is matched only by her grace; Helen Mort, to whom I raise a dram every time I lift my pen; and Bradon Smith, partner in crime, clime, and just about everything else. Finally, I would like to thank Lauren Lastrapes, whose friendship and love have made anything of any value in this work possible, and which I will be attempting to repay until long after NASA settles the moon. (Which it will. Just you wait.) To anyone else I owe thanks whom I have inadvertently forgotten, I ask forgiveness, noting only that in my old age, memory is the first to go. But in thinking of the frailty of my own memory, I cannot help but think of those nearly two thousand people whose memories and histories were taken from them before their time, and how this work, arising as it has from an ongoing moment of great suffering, grief, and loss, will never amount to what any one of those individuals gave up. It is to their memory that this dissertation is therefore dedicated. Benjamin Morris April 20, 2010 Physical copies of this dissertation are deposited in the Cambridge University Library, the New Orleans Public Library, and the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at UNO. An electronic copy is in the DSpace at the University of Cambridge (http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/). -8- Postscript: July 20, 2010 Three months on and it’s still hard to believe. The day I submitted this thesis, April 20, was the same day that an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform killed eleven crew members and resulted in an underwater oil spill that as of this writing has leaked over fifty million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, devastating lives, livelihoods, environments, and ecologies across the region for decades to come. The worst oil spill in United States history is now the worst environmental disaster in US history, overshadowing Hurricane Katrina, but like Katrina it is not a natural disaster. This disaster was totally man-made and totally preventable: the result of corporate oversight, negligence, hubris, and greed, and since its very first days, a clarion call to reconsider the safety and necessity of these drilling practices. Recovery and conservation efforts have been underway since the explosion, but the longer-term questions remain: when will the underlying problem of our national and international dependency on fossil fuels, and the commitment to the degradation of the natural environment that this dependency entails, finally be rethought? Will it be this disaster that finally moves the national dialogue forward, as we once thought about Katrina, or will it take another? The cycle must end somewhere. For now, though, all we can do is roll up our sleeves, lace up our boots, and get to work—on our lifestyles and our policies just as much as our wildlife and our wetlands. The remediation of one cannot take place without the reimagination of the other. -9- List of Illustrations All images are my own except those specified in the Bibliography. 1.1 Drummer Albert ‘Gentleman June’ Gardener at silent second-line procession, 26 August 2007. 1.2 Residents marching in silent-second line procession (ibid.). 1.3 Leaflet distributed at the silent second-line procession (ibid.). 1.4 Global and continental temperature change 1906-2005, United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (2007). 1.5 Variations of the Earth’s surface temperature: years 1000-2100. IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001). 2.1 Satellite image showing Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, 28 August 2005. 2.2 Satellite image showing Katrina at 9.15am, shortly after landfall, 29 August 2005. 2.3 “Hurricane Katrina Floods the Southeastern United States.” 4 September 2005. 2.4 ibid. Detail of greater New Orleans region. 30 August 2005. 2.5 Hurricane Katrina flood depth estimation, NOAA, 31 August 2005. 2.6 Hurricane Katrina flood depth estimation, 20 September 2005. 2.7 Undated aerial photograph of flooded New Orleans, September 2005. 2.8 The security ‘X’ diagram, detailing building hazard codes. Undated photograph by Christina Bray. From Moye (2009). 2.9 Thomas Mann, “Markings No. 3.” Selected work from Storm Cycle (2006). 2.10 Photograph of the flood waterline on the side of a house, 24 August 2006. 2.11 Political cartoon by Jack Ohman satirising the waterline as metaphor. 2006. 2.12 Remains of staircase of destroyed house at 1630 Reynes Street, 22 December 2007. 2.13 Remains along Highway 90, Pass Christian, Mississippi, 11 September 2007. 2.14 Undated illustration of art installation “Steps Home” by sculptor Dawn DeDeaux. 2.15 Photograph of mould in the interior of a house, 29 October 2005. 2.16 Undated photograph of Katrina landfill by C.C. Lockwood. 2.17 Undated photograph of installation by Henrique Oliveira at the Center for Contemporary Art, New Orleans, LA. 2.18 Floodwall installation by Jana Napoli, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 21 July 2007. 2.19 Emblem of fleur-de-lis (and flooded streetlamp) on souvenir poster, 9 January 2008. 2.20 Political cartoon by Steve Kelley depicting the fleur-de-lis as symbol of New Orleans. 2006. 2.21 Photograph of first-year anniversary commemoration service of Hurricane Katrina, with ‘Renew, Rebuild, Restore’ slogan, 29 August 2006. 2.22 ibid. 2.23 T-shirt with the slogan ‘renew orleans’. Undated image. 3.1 Tres Banderas taqueria. Undated photograph by John McCusker. 3.2 Pot of gumbo (recipe by author), 20 February 2010. Photograph by Helen Mort. 3.3 Dooky Chase restaurant, Orleans Avenue, 8 May 2006. 3.4 Angelo Brocato Ice Cream Parlor, Carrolton Avenue. Undated photograph. 3.5 New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival, 18 November 2007. 3.6 New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival, 23 November 2008. 3.7 Abita Springs Restoration Pale Ale. Undated photograph. 3.8 Absolut New Orleans flavoured vodka. Undated image. 3.9 The Southern Food and Beverage Museum, 19 June 2008. 3.10 St Joseph’s Altar, Southern Food and Beverage Museum, 19 June 2008. -10- 3.11 Details of Katrina damage, Southern Food and Beverage Museum, 19 June 2008. 3.12 The Pinettes Brass Band at the Sankofa Market, Lower Ninth Ward, 9 August 2008. 3.13 Circle Food Store, Claiborne Avenue and St. Bernard. 14 November 1954. Photograph by Charles L. Frank Photographers. 3.14 St Roch Market, St. Claude Avenue (undated, 2006). Photograph by D.P. Nicolls. 3.15 Political cartoon by Walt Handelsman on the effects of hospitality towards displaced New Orleanians. 2005. 4.1 Plaque marking the vicinity of Congo Square. Undated photograph. 4.2 Reopening of the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts, 9 January 2009. 4.3 Map of displaced tradition-bearers, Sweet Home New Orleans. August 2009. 4.4 New Orleans musician’s benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, 20 September 2005. 4.5 The Elysian Trumpet. Undated digital rendering. 4.6 ibid. 4.7 Irvin Mayfield Jr. playing the Elysian Trumpet, 29 August 2007. 4.8 ibid. 4.9 Political cartoon by Jack Ohman satirising federal leaders at Mardi Gras. 2006. 4.10 Mardi Gras float, “Refrigerator Heaven,” Krewe of Mid-City. February 2006. 4.11 Mardi Gras floats, Krewe of Chaos. February 2006. 4.12 Gang Flag Thomas Watson of the Golden Blade tribe, 12 August 2007. 4.13 Interior of Backstreet Cultural Museum, 31 August 2006. 4.14 Interior of House of Dance and Feathers, 7 January 2008. 4.15 Program from 10th Annual Mardi Gras Indians Hall of Fame, 10 August 2008. 4.16 ibid. 4.17 Design sketch for Habitat for Humanity Musician’s Village. Undated image. 4.18 Row of newly-constructed shotgun houses, Musician’s Village. Undated photograph. 4.19 Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, Musician’s Village. Undated illustration. 4.20 Digital rendering of design for Hyatt National Jazz Center (unrealised). 4.21 ibid. 4.22 Digital rendering of design for National Jazz Center building (unrealised). 4.23 ibid. 4.24 Mural by Bruce Davenport, Jr. 5.1 Photograph of “Social Dress – New Orleans”, sculpture by Takashi Horisaki. Undated photograph by Ellis Lucia. 5.2 Unauthored photograph of “Social Dress – New Orleans”, sculpture by Takashi Horisaki. 5.3 Shotgun house, Preservation Resource Center. Undated photograph. 5.4 Creole cottage, Preservation Resource Center. Undated photograph. 5.5 Double gallery, Preservation Resource Center. Undated photograph. 5.6 Exterior view of St. Francis of Cabrini Church. Undated photograph. 5.7 Altar of St Francis of Cabrini Church. Undated photograph. 5.8 Undated design rendering of ICInola development, Wayne Troyer Architects. 5.9 ibid. 5.10 Map of ICInola development. New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 2008. 5.11 Icky-nola campaign poster, Bywater neighbourhood, 9 July 2007. 5.12 Make It Right Foundation “Pink Project”, Lower Ninth Ward. 22 December 2007. 5.13 ibid. 5.14 Digital renderings of design sketch for Make It Right Foundation house. 5.15 ibid. 5.16 ibid. 5.17 Charity Hospital prior to Hurricane Katrina. Undated postcard image. -11- 5.18 Charity Hospital shuttered after Hurricane Katrina. Undated photograph. 5.19 LSU/VA proposed medical complex map, Tulane/Gravier neighbourhood. 5.20 Undated digital rendering of refurbished Charity Hospital, RMJM Hillier Architects. 5.21 ibid. 5.22 Photograph of second-line in support of Charity hospital refurbishment, 31 August 2009. 5.23 Demolition of CJ Peete public housing complex. Photograph by Karen Gadbois. 7 March 2008. 5.24 New Orleans Building Corporation schema, “Reinventing the Crescent.” 15 April 2007. 5.25 Model of interventions along Mississippi River, “Reinventing the Crescent.” 28 July 2007. 5.26 Undated digital rendering of design for proposed conversion of Bywater Point, “Reinventing the Crescent.” Hargreaves Architects. 5.27 Architectural model for proposed conversion of Bywater Point (detail). 28 July 2007. 5.28 Exhibition map of DesCours architectural installations, 2007. 5.29 Exhibition map of DesCours architectural installations, 2009. 5.30 Photograph of NoLA rising. Undated photograph by Matthew Hinton. 5.31 NoLA Rising street sign, corner of North Derbigny and Reynes Streets, Lower Ninth Ward. 22 December 2007. 5.32 Street art by Banksy, New Orleans. August 2008. 5.33 ibid. 5.34 ibid. 5.35 ibid. 5.36 Fred Radtke’s erasure of graffiti by Banksy, Lower Ninth Ward. 11 September 2008. 6.1 Hurricane Katrina Memorial, Biloxi, Mississippi. 7 September 2007. 6.2 ibid. 6.3 Memorial service (obscured), Industrial Canal, Lower Ninth Ward, 29 August 2008. Photograph by Charlotte Bearn. 6.4 Granite marker at the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center. 7 September 2007. 6.5 Memorial complex, Claiborne Avenue, Lower Ninth Ward. 31 August 2006. 6.6 ibid., steel poles marking the height of the floodwaters in the Lower Ninth Ward. 6.7 ibid., granite marker and flag poles (with structure from Pink Project visible). 6.8 ‘Uncle’ Lionel Ferbos, Treme Brass Band, preparing for jazz funeral and second-line for Hurricane Katrina on the first anniversary of the storm. 29 August 2006. 6.9 Frank Minyard playing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’ 29 August 2008. 6.10 Procession for the final unclaimed body for the Memorial, 29 August 2008. 6.11 Carriage bearing the final unclaimed body for the Memorial. 29 August 2008. 6.12 Interment of the final unclaimed body for the Memorial. 29 August 2008. 6.13 Ceremonial bell-ringing and conclusion of anniversary service. 29 August 2008. 6.14 Mayor C. Ray Nagin unveiling memorial plaque. 29 August 2008. 6.15 Undeveloped site for the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. 22 December 2007. 6.16 Hurricane Katrina Memorial tombs under construction. 13 August 2008. 6.17 Early design rendering for Hurricane Katrina Memorial, sponsored by New Orleans Katrina Memorial Corporation. Design by Mathews International Corporation. Undated images. 6.18 ibid. 6.19 Louisiana river cypress bordering the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. 23 August 2008. 6.20 Nearly-finished Hurricane Katrina Memorial prior to dedication. 23 August 2008. 6.21 Undated image of ‘Angel of New Orleans’ sculpture by Kim Griffin. (unrealised) 6.22 Monument erected at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. 29 August 2009. 6.23 ibid. 6.24 Film still from “New Orleans for Sale.” 2-Cent Productions. July 2007. -12- 6.25 ibid. 6.26 Silhouettes of former residents, Lower Ninth Ward, August 2008. 6.27 ibid. 6.28 Production still from Waiting for Godot, Creative Time Productions, November 2007. 6.29 ibid. 6.30 Design sketch for Hurricane Katrina collections, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. 11 February 2008. 6.31 Diary wall created by Elton Mabry, BW Cooper housing complex. Photograph by Jennifer Zdon. 24 August 2008. 7.1 User-generated map of all hurricanes to strike New Orleans, 1908-2008. 7.2 Katrina diaspora mapped by FEMA assistance applications, 23 September 2005. 7.3 Katrina diaspora mapped by US Postal Service change of address forms, 1 July 2006 7.4 Political cartoon by Dwayne Powell depicting the Katrina diaspora. 2005. 7.5 Political cartoon by Stuart Carlson with waterline representing underlying problems in New Orleans. 2005. 7.6 Angela Perkins outside the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center. Photograph by Brett Duke. 2 September 2005. 7.7 Forever New Orleans Advertising Campaign. Undated images. 7.8 ibid. 7.9 ibid. 7.10 Flyer for Festival New Orleans, London, United Kingdom, 24-25 October 2008. 7.11 Recreation of French Quarter street signs, Festival New Orleans. 24 October 2008. 7.12 Soul Rebels Brass Band performing at Festival New Orleans. 24 October 2008. 7.13 Images from Forever New Orleans advertising campaign. 2007. 7.14 Political cartoon by Ben Sargent depicting New Orleans as Baghdad. 2007. A.1 Montage of path of Hurricane Gustav, 25 August – 1 September 2008. A.2 Satellite rendering of Hurricane Gustav, 31 August 2008. A.3 Sign taken from light pole on Frenchmen Street, New Orleans, LA, 28 August 2008. A.4 Erosion of Chandeleur Islands after Hurricane Katrina, 15 October 2004 and 16 September 2005. A.5 Chandeleur Islands before and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 7 October 2001, 13 October 2004, and 16 September 2005. B.1 Great Flood Commemoration and Memorial Ceremony, 29 August 2006. B.2 ibid. B.3 Listing of memorial events, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 29 August 2007, p. A14. (1/3) B.4 ibid. (2/3) B.5 ibid. (3/3) B.6 Listing of Memorial Events provided by Mayor’s Office, 29 August 2007. B.7 Hurricane Katrina Memorial Groundbreaking Ceremony, 29 August 2007. B.8 ibid. B.9 Great Flood Commemoration and Memorial Ceremony, 29 August 2007. B.10 ibid. B.11 Listing of memorial events, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 27 August 2008, p. A14. B.12 Sankofa New Orleans Commemorative Ceremony, 29 August 2008. B.13 Listing of memorial events, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 27 August 2009, p. B4. B.14 Hurricane Katrina Fourth Anniversary Memorial Ceremony, 29 August 2009. -13- Chapter 1: Introduction and Dissertation Outline Some glad morning, when this life is over, I’ll fly away… —Traditional Prologue: The Silent Second-Line Shortly after midday on August 26, 2007, a few days before New Orleans, Louisiana observed the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall two years earlier on August 29, 2005, its celebrated French Quarter played host to a curious sight. Residents and tourists alike began to trickle slowly out of the many restaurants, bars, shops, and galleries that line the narrow streets of the historic Vieux Carré, as dozens of brass band musicians began to march past them in a long, slow file. What made this occurrence so unusual was not so much the musicians themselves—rare is the day indeed in New Orleans, the cradle of jazz music, when some kind of performance is not happening somewhere—but the fact that these musicians, rather than playing traditional brass numbers such as ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ ‘Bourbon Street Parade’ or ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ as they processed, instead held their instruments, silent, at their side. Professional musicians who refused to ply their trade—even as an audience began to gather around them as they marched, taking photographs and ringing friends and family on mobile phones, telling them to come and see what was happening in the Quarter—what could possibly explain this? What could have happened for musicians—dozens of them, then hundreds, it seemed, representing some of the city’s most celebrated musical ensembles, such as the Treme Brass Band—to cease to play? Accompanying the marchers—apart from members of television and print media who quickly swarmed to the scene, following and documenting their every step—were residents of New Orleans carrying large hand-made placards and signs, many festooned with slogans, musical notes and fleurs-de-lis that read IMAGINE A SILENT NOLA, THE DAY THE MUSIC STOPS IN NEW ORLEANS 8-26-07, and, simply, MUSIC IS NEW ORLEANS (Figures 1.1, 1.2) -14- Figure 1.1: Drummer Albert ‘June’ Gardner at silent second-line procession, 26 August 2007. Figure 1.2: Residents marching in silent-second line procession, 26 August 2007. -15- Figure 1.3: Leaflet distributed at silent second-line rally (with author’s notes), 26 August 2007. -16- This silent ‘second-line’1—which had originally begun at Donna’s Bar and Lounge on North Rampart Street, a traditional gathering and performance venue for the city’s brass bands—wound through the Quarter to arrive in Jackson Square, the heart of the French Quarter and the symbolic heart of the city, stopping directly in front of St Louis Cathedral, one of New Orleans’ oldest and most iconic structures. There the musicians (many of whom were members of the American Federation of Musicians Union, Local 174-496, which had organised the event) staged a public rally and protest against poor working conditions, low pay, and the nightmarish bureaucratic process involved in bringing musicians who had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina back home to New Orleans (Figure 1.3). Imagine, ‘Deacon’ John Moore (musician, singer, and president of the local chapter of the union) urged the crowd, a New Orleans in which the music no longer plays, the horns no longer blow, and the people no longer dance: what would be worth living for in that kind of New Orleans? Permanent silence in the city with the richest musical and cultural heritage in the country—would it even be recognisable as New Orleans? In the work that follows I return to these themes in different places and in different ways, but I introduce this gathering here as one of many such events that have unfolded in the years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, events that have encapsulated in microcosm the complex issues of memory, identity, landscape, authenticity, and personal and communal heritage—issues that have characterised the rebuilding process following what is widely acknowledged as the most costly and devastating natural disaster ever to strike the United States. These four years have witnessed overwhelming destruction and loss, but have, at the same time, witnessed events and acts of remarkable resilience, courage, and innovation in response to a disaster that threatened, in its first days, to remove an American city from the map. Yet the city has rejected that fate, time and time again. This dissertation tells that story. 1 I explain in more detail in Chapter 4 the phenomenon of the ‘second-line’; for this purpose, it is, at heart, a line of marching musicians and their followers; traditionally, the followers were the ‘second line’ behind the band. -17- 1.1: Introduction to the Argument This PhD dissertation addresses the complex relationships between culture, cultural heritage, and the natural environment, arguing that the cultural heritage of a society contributes significantly to the rebuilding process that that society faces after it suffers a natural disaster or environmental trauma. To make this claim more fully, this dissertation examines in-depth the mechanisms by which cultural heritage is rebuilt by local, community, and state actors in the aftermath of a disaster—in this case, primarily over the first four years after Hurricane Katrina— and investigates how this process of rebuilding operates on multiple levels (social, material, discursive, and performative). In so doing, it illuminates the roles that cultural heritage plays in the construction of and recovery from natural disasters, including its transformation as a result of undergoing that disaster: a transformation of considerable material, social, economic, and political impacts, leading to a creation of new forms of heritage in the same stroke as necessitating and inaugurating a re-evaluation of the old. It furthermore illuminates the way in which disaster can become a form of heritage, and the consequences this poses for present and future societies. This process can be encapsulated in the term ‘heritage ecology’ which this thesis develops and deploys, a term which is theorised more fully in this chapter and throughout this dissertation. As an analysis of the entire field of research linking cultural heritage and the environment is outside the scope of this dissertation, I have limited it in several productive ways. First, to clarify my boundaries in discussing the natural environment, I primarily consider the phenomena of environmental upheaval and collapse—natural disasters—phenomena which put societies and cultures at severe risk of destruction and loss, and which furthermore jeopardise the many forms of cultural heritage they embody. Hoffman and Oliver-Smith argue that paradoxically, it is disaster that best exposes and illuminates the inner workings of a society rather than a study of its ‘ordinary’: “Disasters,” they argue, -18- take a people back to fundamentals. In their turmoil, disassembly, and reorganization, they expose essential rules of action, bare bones of behavior, the roots of institutions, and the basic framework of organizations…As a result, disasters offer the investigator amazing situations in which to analyze hypotheses pertaining to the constitution of society and culture, to reap data sustaining or confounding such maxims, and, potentially, to create new suppositions. (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 1999: 11) Examining these events along a timeline from their inception (the seeds for which are often sown long before the event itself) to their manifestation to their short- and long-term aftermaths, I ask the following interrelated questions: how is cultural heritage transformed after a natural disaster, how does heritage contribute to rebuilding after a disaster, and how is heritage itself rebuilt following that disaster? If disaster offers an opportunity to examine the ‘fundamentals’ of a society, then a disaster that impacts a place whose heritage is one of the most salient parts of its individual and collective identity (as I argue in Chapter 2) offers an opportunity to examine those fundamentals as they undergo loss and change. Second, though the case study taken for this dissertation is limited to one city and one natural disaster (albeit one disaster in the context of an environmentally risk-prone region), I argue that the issues exposed by these kinds of transformative events are present in ways that pertain to numerous other instances, both temporally and spatially: temporally, in the sense that local ecologies are constituted by influences and pressures that are generations in the making, and spatially, in that other communities across the world dwelling in similarly risk-prone environments also face the loss of their heritage from disaster, and the same issues in rebuilding will likely become manifest. This dissertation is written, then, with a view not just towards documentation, analysis, and interpretation, but towards mitigation as well: in the hope that the insights gained by looking at this case study may usefully be applied to other cases, may help to inform disaster preparedness and response plans, and in so doing, may limit or prevent future loss. As I argue at the end of this dissertation, loss is a more complicated cultural and ecological process than is typically acknowledged. But this complex nature does not warrant its allowance where preventable. -19- 1.2: Heritage and the Environment: An Overview Before introducing the case study, methodology, and chapter outlines, I first review the extant ways of thinking about cultural heritage and the environment. The measurement and mitigation of environmental impacts on cultural heritage is an area of research and policy that has emerged in force in recent years, in part due to the emergence of climate change in public discourse (as detailed below), and in order to contextualise the present study it is necessary to assess the state of current thinking on the issue. Much of the current research and guidance on heritage and the environment takes the environment as heritage, in that the national and international creation of natural or biological reserves, state parks, and other designated areas for the protection and conservation of flora and fauna in their ecosystems adopts the discourses and management strategies of man-made cultural heritage. The description of ‘natural’ sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List, for instance, cites among the criteria for inclusion on the List criteria that resonate deeply with cultural sites as well: outstanding beauty, importance, value, significance, or superlative representation of a process or feature found elsewhere (UNESCO 1972). In this respect select areas of nature—itself incapable of resisting or debating this designation, for as Lähde has argued, “Nature did not make speeches at Kyoto and it will not do so at any subsequent conference” (Lähde 2006: 98)—become elevated and set aside for specific kinds of human intervention: the conservation of species, the allocation of resources, promotion and publicity (often for tourism purposes), and restrictions on subsequent development. Contradictions abound in this process, however. As I have detailed elsewhere (Morris 2010b), though the natural world (or portions thereof) does enjoy the status of ‘heritage’, numerous critiques challenge the construction of the very idea of nature (McKibben 2003, Macfarlane 2007) and its degradation, decay or even outright destruction (Carson 1962, Shellenberger & Nordhaus 2004). Even historicity itself comes under fire: “A historic landscape,” argue Knudsen, et al., “hardly qualifies as ‘pure’ nature. Thus, beyond a vague nostalgic sentimentality and yearning for simpler times, understanding of historic landscapes is -20- necessarily limited to those who have ‘learned’ the site” (Knudsen, Soper, and Metro-Roland 2008: 5). These critiques, however, differ in approach from this research, which is to assume the presence of the natural world in order to address the roles it plays in creating and sustaining cultural heritage, and vice versa (an integrated approach, as I argue below). Research in these related fields tends to use the term ‘landscape’—occasionally substituting it altogether for the term ‘environment’—in order to account for cultural heritage or archaeological material in its natural surroundings, but as Angèle Smith (following Tilley 1997) has argued, landscape is hardly the most stable of concepts, either: Landscapes are made by the people that engage with them, and in making landscapes, the people themselves are made: their sense of place, belonging, and their social identity is [sic] constructed alongside the construction of the landscape. But the corollary to this is that landscapes are often highly political and contested, as different communities of people try to negotiate different interpretations of the same landscape. … More than simply a physical place, landscape is now understood as also having social and ideological or cognitive elements. (A. Smith 2008: 14-15) Both the environment itself, then, and the perceptions, attitudes, and knowledges of it, undergo continual evolution. With this caveat in place, it is important to note that the issues Smith raises regarding landscape directly impinge on central themes in heritage research: the sense of place and social belonging, the construction of identity (often in contested settings), and the politicisation (often ideologisation) of space, memory, and history. But unlike recent developments in understanding the role of heritage in situations of armed conflict (Layton, et al 2001, Bevan 2006, Viejo-Rose 2009), to which I return at the end of this dissertation as a touchstone for ways forward in a policy context, the extant research on situating heritage in and as an environment (not of an environment, such as a park or nature reserve) pales in comparison. More common are assessments of known risk that natural processes may pose to the built, artistic, or archaeological heritage, such as the Monuments at Risk Survey conducted for English Heritage (Darvill 1998), or post-event studies of the effects of disasters—such as the 1966 floods in Florence, Italy, the 2002 floods in Dresden, Germany, or the 2003 earthquake on the World Heritage Site of Bam, Iran (Batini 1967, Taboroff 2003, ICOMOS 2004). These reports -21- frequently inventory what was lost, but rarely examine the cultural construction of that process of loss (as DeSilvey 2006 argues), or the presence of deeper meanings embedded in the relationship between a society and its environment that condition a specific kind of response to a disaster—mourning, grief, and denial, but also acceptance, improvisation, and reorganisation. These considerations require a reassessment of the nature of disaster. The traditional view of natural disasters (dating back centuries, as Drees (2002) argues) holds that they are merely the extremes of normal ecological phenomena, over which mankind has little to no influence or control. Indeed, as Hamblyn (2009) has recently argued, sudden, calamitous events such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tornadoes, or indeed massive storms often reinforce this discourse of ‘acts of God.’ Steinberg has argued that this conceptualisation often shapes the legislative and policy response to disaster: “Seeing natural disasters as unforeseen acts of nature—as opposed to complex interactions between the natural world and social and economic forces—remains a common formulation that has repeatedly surfaced in congressional debates over disaster relief” (Steinberg 2000: 176). The present generation of thought, however—ever since Hewitt’s (1983) work on the social, political, and technological creation of disaster—has undergone a fundamental shift. Current research emphasises a more human-agency centred approach, wherein the root causes of disasters are not located simply in physical processes, but equally in humankind’s contribution to those processes: namely, its propensity to obviate its own settlement in a given landscape, increasing its risk of loss and devastation. On this view the term ‘natural disaster’ has effectively been evacuated of any former meaning it once harboured, as rather than merely denoting events of traumatic environmental shift or collapse (whether sudden or gradual, localised or widespread), the term is now understood to be oxymoronic, implicating human agency at every level of disaster preparedness and response. As Hoffman and Oliver- Smith have argued, “the hazards that lead to disaster, natural or technological, emerge directly from human activity upon environments and the intensity of human environmental intervention. Human societies and their environments are considered fundamentally inseparable, engaged in a -22- continuous process of mutual constitution and expression” (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 1999: 6). This view now has its own mantra: “There is no such thing as a natural disaster” (e.g. Smith 2006; Hartman & Squires 2006). Nur & Burgess (2008) have criticised this view, arguing that a sufficiently forceful event such as an earthquake or volcano can sublimate any amount of adaptation or mitigation against it, but the point remains that disasters rarely happen where the conditions are not suitable for them to do so: “Crises,” Cadzyn argues, “are built right into many systems themselves; systems are structured so that crises will occur, strengthening and reproducing the systems themselves” (Cadzyn 2007: 649). These conditions are increasingly aligning, however, for reasons that have become apparent in the last generation of environmental research. With the recent emergence of climate change—anthropogenically-induced global warming of the earth’s atmosphere due to the rise in carbon dioxide, methane, and other artificially warming gases (IPCC 2007, Stern 2007)—on the international political, legal, and scientific radar over the past thirty years, the study of this phenomenon in nearly every field of scientific and social scientific research has become a major point of focus on research agendas across the world. While climate change research originated from conclusions drawn by atmospheric science, oceanography, and climatology documenting and analysing these changes and potential impacts (Figures 1.4, 1.5), studies of these impacts have lately spread to the social and cultural sphere as well: recent work comes from fields as diverse as media studies (Boykoff 2010), theology (Northcott 2007), and poetry (Astley 2007). Research on its impacts on cultural heritage in particular has primarily stemmed from the field of conservation, tending to focus (like Darvill 1998 above) on the physical impacts of a changing environment on the built and archaeological heritage. This work includes the documenting of atmospheric changes, pollutants or irritants on the surfaces or materials of historic buildings; recording variances in temperature, humidity, acidity, or wind speeds on the same; or projecting the attrition rates of cultural resources in highly vulnerable settings such as coastlines (Bláha, et al 2006; Grossi, et al 2006; Sabbioni, et al 2006). -23- Figure 1.4: Global and continental temperature change 1906-2005, IPCC4 (2007). -24- Figure 1.5: Variations of the earth’s surface temperature 1000-2100, adapted from IPCC3 (2001). -25- Research such as the above has rarely examined the deeper social and cultural issues that underscore and condition those physical impacts. But even this landscape is beginning to change; national governments, policy advisory bodies, research institutions, and nongovernmental organisations have recently begun to link complex changes in the environment to cultural heritage in a more meaningful way. While many state governments have commissioned inventories and assessments of climate change impacts on the local sites and monuments under their care (e.g. National Trust 2006, English Heritage 2008 in the United Kingdom), more wide- ranging in its focus is the 2007 UNESCO report Case Studies on Climate Change and World Heritage. Surveying a range of World Heritage Sites (cultural, natural, and mixed sites) and detailing potential impacts based on known and projected climate models, as well as potential strategies for adaptation and mitigation, this report also—crucially—argues that environmental imbalance and upheaval affects more than just local sites and monuments. “Climate change is primarily a threat that has physical impacts,” the authors conclude. But, in turn, these effects have societal and cultural consequences. When it comes to cultural ‘dynamic’ heritage—i.e. buildings and landscapes where people live, work, worship, and socialize—it is important to underline the cultural consequences. These consequences can be derived from the degradation of the property under consideration. But climate change can also force populations to migrate (under the pressure of sea-level rise, desertification, flooding, etc.) leading to the break-up of communities and to the abandonment of property, with the eventual loss of rituals and cultural memory. As far as the conservation of cultural heritage is concerned, this abandonment raises an important concern in contexts where traditional knowledge and skills are essential to ensure a proper maintenance of these properties. … The assessment of the impacts of climate change on cultural World Heritage must, therefore, account for the complex interactions among natural, cultural and social aspects. (UNESCO 2007: 65) Assessing and mitigating the ‘break-up of communities’ to which this report refers has been a signature feature in studies of the impacts of climate change on specific cultures; Crate (2008), for instance, has argued for tools such as dialogue, advocacy, and policy recommendations to link local communities affected by climate change to governments and institutions in control of policy and resources, and writers such as McKibben (2005) have issued forth calls for individuals and institutions in the culture sector specifically to take up the challenge of addressing climate -26- change and its impacts. Climate change studies have thus signalled and occasioned a return to studies that focus on heritage and the environment, but scholarly studies that have explored these issues remain comparatively rare: in their survey of the past two generations of research into ecology, tourism and landscape, Greer, et al. include no studies that address issues of heritage, despite their attempts to be comprehensive in their assessment of the field (Greer, et al. 2008: 10-12). Likewise, much of the literature on hazards (Tobin and Montz 1997, K. Smith 2000, Cutter 2001, Blaikie et al 2003) rarely connects it to issues with which heritage is concerned. The exceptions are few and far between: Oliver-Smith (1992) in his study of a landslide in the Peruvian Andes has detailed the impact of sudden and traumatic loss of cultural sites, monuments, traditions, and rituals, showing how these losses impact on the cultural identity and cohesion of a community, and Read (1996) has examined the rebuilding of Darwin, Australia after its obliteration by Cyclone Tracy in 1974. A more recent disaster such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami also destroyed cultural sites and buildings and displaced communities across the entire Indian Ocean basin, from the east coast of Africa to the southern coast of Bangladesh to the western islands of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, detailed by Rico (2011). Thus a considerable amount of work remains to be done in creating these linkages. In this dissertation I aim to redress that imbalance, and explore not just ‘what happened’ but why and how it happened: how these cultural processes came to be formed in the first place, and how the specificity of a local culture in its environment shapes the response to the risk, loss, and recovery upon the upheaval and reorganisation of that environment. Consequently I aim to re-create a space for the natural environment at the table, reading it not just as a backdrop or stage setting on which heritage sites, monuments, traditions, and beliefs are then acted out, but as a deeply integrated, generative factor in the creation and sustenance of those sites, monuments, traditions, and beliefs. If much work on heritage has ‘forgotten’ about the environment or neglected its role in the construction of heritage, then in this effort to craft a new form of ‘heritage ecology,’ which I detail in the next section, I want to remind us not just that it is there, but that we would not be -27- here without it. In this the arts have much to contribute: when asked by a journalist if he painted ‘from nature,’ the artist Jackson Pollock once replied, “I am nature.” (Krasner 1964-1968). 1.3 Heritage Ecology: Foundations and Aims The developmental system consists of the organism and all the developmentally relevant aspects of its environment, micro- as well as macroscopic, biotic as well as inanimate. The system—the organism and its developmental environment—emerges through the interaction (hence constructivist interaction) of many different kinds of resources or interactants … These interactants define, constrain, and influence each other as interactants, for any factor’s role in the system depends on its relations with the others. There is no single, centralised control of the processes of development. Rather, it is precisely the interactions of these changing components that give rise to (constitute) the changing system. The environment here is not just a place or a supplier of materials; it is an integral part of a constructive system. For me, the developmental system, existing as it does on a variety of scales of time and magnitude, gives a synthetic alternative to both developmental and evolutionary dualisms. (Oyama 2006: 55) As this thesis examines the relationships between cultural heritage and the environment in order to understand the mutual interactions between them, it adopts the premise that a full understanding of the nature and roles of cultural heritage in a society cannot be understood without an account of the complex landscapes—social, physical, symbolic, and economic— which give rise to them and to which they give rise in turn. Responding to, yet departing from, accounts of heritage which focus on the built environment or works of antiquity as the primary forms of heritage, the focus here is on understanding heritage as a process as much as a given assemblage of sites, artefacts or buildings. Drawing on Laurajane Smith’s (2006) work on the uses of heritage as much as it does the founding documents of heritage studies (Hewison 1987, Lowenthal 1985, and Wright 1985), this ‘interactionist’ or ‘integrationist’ approach—what I summarise as the ‘heritage ecology’ approach—invokes a systems-based interpretation of heritage such as Oyama has articulated in evolutionary biology (Oyama 2006). Rather than focusing solely on one aspect of heritage—such as material culture, discourse or performance— it aims to unite these aspects to account for the complex process of mutual creation and recreation undergone by historic sites, monuments, buildings, practices, traditions, and beliefs, in -28- a way that has recently been pioneered by Hicks and DeSilvey (2009). Within the environmental framework in particular—the above research questions of how heritage is transformed after a natural disaster, how heritage contributes to rebuilding after a disaster, and how heritage itself is rebuilt following that disaster— the ‘heritage ecology’ approach assumes that none of these questions are truly separable from one another, nor are their answers. First, a note on terminology. When I use the term ‘heritage ecology,’ I am indebted to the term ‘cultural ecology’ first developed by Julian Steward, an approach that examines the underlying relationships between a society and its environment: an examination that differed from traditional human and social ecology in “seeking to explain the origin of particular cultural features and patterns which characterize different areas rather than to derive general principles applicable to any cultural-environmental situation” (Steward 1970: 36). Steward’s conception of culture however, suffered from such generality as to imperil its usefulness, in that he understood the ‘cultural core’ of a society to be “the constellation of features which are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements. The core includes such social, political, and religious patterns as are empirically determined to be closely connected with these arrangements” (Steward 1970: 37). Therefore in modifying his phraseology from ‘cultural ecology’ to ‘heritage ecology’ while retaining his interest in environmental foundations, I aim to do two things at once. First, I aim to productively limit the scope of this approach to examine those tangible and intangible aspects of cultural heritage now commonly acknowledged and defined by national and international protocols, broadly understood as those sites, monuments, beliefs, and traditions from the past which have been handed down to the present. In so doing, I aim to widen its scope in a metaphorical direction to offer a revised interpretation of heritage: an interpretation that allows for those very sites, materials, constructions and relations to be understood as part of the ecological process. This interpretation can contribute usefully to heritage studies in general; by developing it in the context of disasters specifically, it can therefore provide a lens onto the workings of societies in their ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ manifestations (after Hoffman and Oliver- -29- Smith 1999 and Cavell 1984), and the ways in which cultural heritage exists as a living entity in society. Furthermore, in bringing the term into heritage studies, I argue that ‘heritage ecology’ offers a way of looking at cultural heritage from two distinct but interrelated perspectives, which I propose throughout this dissertation: the first is to examine a site, monument, or tradition within its physical environment and local ecosystem, explicitly acknowledging and grappling with the fact that heritage is partly created and conditioned by the specific environmental factors in its physical landscape (including, but not limited to, changes and upheavals in that landscape, such as disasters). The second perspective is to examine those sites, monuments, practices, and traditions as part of the creation of that landscape: in other words, as an agent in that ecosystem. This metaphorical extension of ecology provides numerous advantages of interpretation and understanding; advantages discussed at the end of each chapter and again at the end of the dissertation. But furthermore, this approach takes the complex interaction between heritage and society as an ecosystem in itself, arguing that like the society in whose care it rests, the heritage is never a stable entity, rather, it is always undergoing a process of creation and recreation. This process takes place over varying timescales and for varying reasons, each of which constitute (after Oyama 2006) a ‘constructivist interactant’ meriting analysis and synthesis into the unfolding narrative of the ecological context, a context that may well include disaster. Though the machinations of political bodies (states, governments, ideologies) have typically been the prime target for researchers looking to understand the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of cultural heritage after crisis, recent work such as Breglia’s (2006) study has argued that the constituencies of these political bodies are equally integral to analysis: redefining the archaeological assemblage of the Yucatan peninsula as the ‘heritage assemblage,’ she takes this assemblage as “a multi-sited object of study through which we may interrogate how ruins or other landscape features become heritage, for whom, and why this is important for the state and its multiple audiences and constituencies” (Breglia 2006: 11). Oyama’s conceptualisation of the system and Breglia’s conceptualisation of the assemblage share many productive links, not the -30- least of which the assertion of elements undergoing a constant process of becoming: asking how an archaeological ruin or other site or monument in a landscape operates is to ask how the factors that construct it have done so, and how they have constructed other elements in turn (over all timescales: before, during, and after the disaster in question, and crucially, how they impact on future disasters). It is also to acknowledge that such elements in a system (e.g. the discourse that New Orleans is an ‘unnatural’ city, a discourse I examine in Chapter 2) are indeed constitutive, reinforcing elements of that system, rather than simply inadvertent byproducts of it. On this view, the system emerges from the interactions of its elements, be they material, discursive, or performative: this is as true for cultural heritage as it is for any given ‘natural’ ecosystem. Nor, moreover, should the two be taken as distinct from one another, especially in a region where the complex landform and ecological pressures have been as salient a factor in the creation of the city as in New Orleans (Kelman 2003, Colten 2004, P.F. Lewis 1976). For if the many different relations between individuals, societies, communities, and states to the sites and products of their historic past are taken as operators in their own right, then they may be usefully reassessed not just as the backdrop to the ecosystem (indeed, there is no such thing) but as elements and agents that are integral parts of the ecosystem. Under this lens—following from Laurajane Smith’s (2006) analysis of the ‘uses’ of heritage cited above—additional elements for study emerge as well: concepts central to heritage studies such as materiality, authenticity, commodification, representation, and infrastructure among others may be reconsidered as constructivist interactants with their own origins, trajectories, and contingencies rather than as fixed entities whose properties, principles, and effects remain the same across time, space, and communities. This reallocation of human agency, not merely reflective but creative towards and within its environment—as I argued in the last section—leads me to synthesise these approaches into the conceptualisation of ‘heritage ecology.’ To be clear, this dissertation remains focused on the heritage, not on the environment, but nevertheless it retains the premise that neither can be considered without one another, especially in the context of disaster. To study a traumatic event -31- in heritage ecology is to ask how a community has created the conditions for it, has witnessed and experienced its emergence, has responded to it in its aftermath, has mitigated against subsequent events in future (or has failed to), and has, in the end, imagined and recreated it as a part of its past. This approach takes an event—including the construction or the idea of an event—as an interactant in itself, leading to a productive reassessment of its constitutive boundaries and inquiring more deeply when an event begins and ends (or even rejecting the grounds for such terms). As Oyama has argued, “the point is not that a system is predictable or unpredictable, self-righting or not, by nature (if you will), but that all outcomes are interactively constructed, and ‘balance’ or stability is related to the particulars of the situation” (Oyama 2006: 59). But such is the nature of the ecological approach: it must also take its own presence as an interactant in constructing the system under inquiry, acknowledging, after Heisenberg (1927), the limits of the observer. 1.4: Research Methodology In thinking about self-reflexivity in this approach, this section details the methods I employed in researching heritage in post-Katrina New Orleans. Because the devastation was not just widespread but what Kolb has called a “classic complex-systems failure,” in which “all the systems necessary to survive and recover from it—the drainage pumps, the first responders, the communications systems, the power grid—ultimately failed, one by one” (Kolb 2006: 110), it impacted on every walk of life and livelihood, and presented challenges to the recovery process that were multi-local, infrastructural, and contingent upon political and bureaucratic forces often outside any form of control. Assessing the role of culture and heritage specifically, therefore, has required a double mindset. It has required an understanding of those issues and developments in the rebuilding process that have pertained specifically to heritage (e.g. legislation passed, facilities repaired, resources allocated, preservation orders garnered, demolitions stayed or granted) and those wider, nonspecific developments which have indirectly but no less crucially created the -32- conditions or the ground on which heritage-related developments have been made possible (e.g. the general return of population, the basic restoration of services and infrastructure, the release of United States federal ‘Road Home’ grants for homeowners seeking to rebuild). Furthermore, because accurate information can be difficult to obtain in a post-disaster zone (and can evolve faster than the researcher’s efforts to stay abreast of it), I have had to rely on what Wylie has called the “concatenation of inferences that are based on principles drawn from a range of collateral (independent) fields” (Wylie 1989: 99). This approach, in which conclusions are reached by invoking multiple, potentially conflicting, sources and lines of documentation, takes a form of pragmatic scepticism as its default position. Ever since being informed by a municipal policy analyst that figures submitted to the US Congress regarding the number of displaced individuals were enhanced in order to speed relief funding (Informant A 2007), this scepticism about many of the ‘facts’ circulating in the post-Katrina landscape has proved useful. That said, while I am aware of the contingent nature of much of the information with which I have worked, I also believe that a year spent in the field (spread out over the four years from 2005-2009, when I stopped collecting data) as well as the length of time between the original disaster and the time of writing and analysis have created the ground for the critical distance necessary to separate what data has been worthwhile and what has not. Within this context of a complex disaster, the methods I have used have been attentive to several categories of data, broadly organised into three categories: discourse, material culture, and performance. In considering discourse, I have examined the verbal and visual languages used in describing, interpreting, and representing the disaster. This has included written accounts (both contemporary and retrospective) of the hurricane’s impact and the recovery, ethnographic interviews conducted by myself and other researchers, commentary and analysis from journalistic and documentary sources, and public statements and documents made by municipal, state, and federal authorities. But as Heller (2008) has argued, discourses also include the images and symbols that create iconographic landscapes, a salient feature in post-Katrina New Orleans. -33- These images, as I show in Chapter 2, have not just represented the storm but accomplish a range of functions: they critique and satirise it, they serve as a form of public memory, they offer an outlet for reordering and recalibrating dominant themes or stereotypes, and they serve as a catalyst for public debate and dissent. In addressing material culture, I have concentrated both on the many complex transformations wrought upon the extant material cultural heritage (including both the built environment and portable artefacts such as musical instruments, artwork, and archives) as well as the creation of new material culture in the hurricane’s wake, such as reimagined storm debris, or memorial sites and monuments. Particularly cogent and widespread has been the direct and permanent loss of material heritage, and the subsequent response which often takes the form of the valorisation or canonisation of that heritage. As I detail throughout this dissertation, however, material culture is never constructed or used independently of its contexts, but taken in temporary isolation it is a useful focal point around which a fuller analysis can be organised. Finally, in examining performative practices, I have explored those cultural practices which involve the conscious display of meaningful behaviour (whether rote, skilled, or spontaneous). This includes not just musical or artistic performance on the level of an individual craftsperson or culture-bearer, or even on an ensemble of culture-bearers such as a brass band or a Mardi Gras Indian tribe, but on a wider collective level as well: the creation and exercise of civic identity via citywide festivals and commemorations such as Mardi Gras during Carnival season or the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. McNulty (2008) has argued these festivals were integral to reconstructing a sense of local identity after the storm (an argument I examine more fully in Chapter 4), so I interpret what was performed there—not just an individual musical composition or parade float, but also the impulse behind their creation—in the wider context of the recovery. -34- Examining these three broad types of data has required a range of methods, drawing on approaches developed by fields as diverse as anthropology, history, literary criticism, urban studies, human and cultural geography, and ecology. These have included site visits; local and regional environmental assessments, interviews with local actors and organisers in the culture and policy sector; attendance at and documentation of events such as the Katrina anniversary services and memorial dedications; close readings of contemporary and historical traditions and practices; interpretation of literary sources such as novels, poetry, and nonfiction accounts of New Orleans’ history before and after the storm; and the collection and integration of relevant media sources such as print journalism, television, and documentary works (including new media technologies such as blogs and social-networking sites). This last method, the use of secondary sources, is prevalent for two reasons: first is my limited access to the rebuilding process in those months that I have not been in New Orleans. Following events and developments in the city remotely has been crucial to constructing the larger narrative, and journalism provides a unique, real-time perspective that I was able to then corroborate during my periods of fieldwork. Second, in developing the heritage ecology approach, I take any one event (whether the reopening of a restaurant, a second-line parade, or a homeowner moving back home) as itself a form of data in helping create and arrange the larger narrative about the rebuilding process. Recognising that events themselves are data and not merely containers of data has therefore necessitated being methodologically flexible in order to account for the diverse range of types of events and developments that have occurred in the past four years. Especially in the context of post-disaster research, as I have argued above, this kind of adaptability of methods that van Meijl argues for— “the need to be flexible and operate contextually” as well as the requirement to “engage complex social realities and to detach themselves from the perplexities arising from their involvement in the social field of informants” (van Meijl 2005: 235)—becomes even more crucial. In situating itself within the growing body of literature on post-disaster scenarios, this dissertation is -35- therefore also intended to serve as a critical reflection on that practice and to contribute (both in its successes and its shortcomings) to the development of that field. Four brief caveats. First, on citations: because newspaper articles are typically shorter in length than academic articles and monographs, I have not cited their page numbers directly when quoting from them, rather citing only the author (byline) and date in question. The bibliography contains full source material for all journalistic sources. Second, the use of the word ‘reported’ in this dissertation does not signal journalistic practice but instead signals a personal conversation or interview with an informant, the subjects and dates for which are listed as sources in the bibliography. Third, on spelling: because this dissertation was written in the United Kingdom I have kept to UK spelling for my own text; when quoting sources from the United States, however, I have kept the original spelling. The fourth caveat is the most significant, regarding tracking events in real-time: because I began assessing and observing the rebuilding process from the day that Katrina made landfall (as I describe in the Acknowledgments), monitoring what has happened as it has happened has been a complex, and often conflicting, task, to say the least. My understanding of this process has advanced at times slower than the rebuilding process and at times in parallel with it; it has never, however, outpaced it, and never will. As Erikson has eloquently argued, researchers “will never be able to take the true measure” of Hurricane Katrina because it is still in motion, still taking form. We call it ‘Katrina’ because it came to public attention as a hurricane, but the story of Katrina is not one of wind and waves and storm surges or even of collapsed levees and collapsed institutions. The story of Katrina is what those winds and surges did to the persons and communities caught in their path, and the dimensions of that occurrence are only now emerging in enough detail to begin the process of understanding. (Erikson 2007: xvii-xviii) Erikson’s insights came two years after the storm; mine nearly five, and still ‘the story of Katrina’ is only beginning to emerge. In the time it has taken to write each chapter new events and developments have impacted the data and insights at work in all the others, providing a working lesson in writing about ecological relationships (however metaphorical). Inaccuracies as a result -36- of this ongoing balancing act are of course my own responsibility. Moreover, the inability to analyse events which will prove salient to the rebuilding process in the future (the forthcoming ‘Katrina!’ exhibition at the Louisiana State Museum described in Chapter 6 is an apt example, or the new Jazz Museum planned for the Old Mint (Spera 2009)) has required that I state carefully what it has been possible to analyse and what it has not. In so doing I have aimed not to mistake one for the other; where this has proved not the case, as with all errors, I take full responsibility. 1.5: Chapter Outline Having set the stage theoretically, the following chapters more fully examine the role of heritage in rebuilding New Orleans. Chapter 2 provides a distilled history and historiography of New Orleans both before and after Hurricane Katrina, focusing on Katrina as a pivotal moment in the city’s history. It explores the social, cultural, and environmental history of New Orleans in order to account for the complex repercussions that the storm created, focusing specifically on the construction of culture and heritage in the nearly three centuries of settlement in the region. After giving an overview of Katrina’s widespread impacts on the city as a whole, I look more closely at the way the storm has resulted in a complex transformation of the physical landscape into a symbolic landscape. The most salient contribution this chapter makes, however, is the analysis of the discourse of the ‘unified field’ of New Orleans culture, a discourse that has both shaped and been shaped by the rebuilding process in crucial ways. Having interrogated this discourse, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 then investigate specific sectors of heritage in detail, examining food, music, and architecture, respectively. If Chapter 2 serves as a staging ground for the analysis, these three middle chapters comprise the main data sources for the dissertation. Food, music, and architecture are colloquially held as the ‘Holy Trinity’ of New Orleans’ culture (just as celery, onions, and peppers are held as the Holy Trinity of local cuisine), as Cannon notes: “Ask any random tourist … what’s special about New Orleans and you’ll hear about the Holy Trinity of New Orleans travel marketing: food, music, architecture. They’re not -37- wrong, either. But what we need always to remember is that all of these institutions … are the products of miscegenation.” (Cannon 2005: 141) Consequently, while the storm’s effects were distributed across the city without regard to specific sectors, those three sectors have faced impacts and challenges in the recovery that cannot be replicated or assimilated across each other—necessitating therefore a deeper analysis. These chapters closely examine the roles of the culinary arts, music and performance, and the historic environment in order to provide a ground for understanding the long-term consequences of the storm on the city’s heritage. Chapter 6 examines these consequences in the context of Katrina’s impacts on public and private memory, looking at the complex landscape of memorials, anniversaries, and practices of remembrance in New Orleans after the storm. Investigating the ways that Katrina has become both a tangible and intangible aspect of the city’s history and culture, this chapter also looks at scales of memory from the local to the regional to the national. This approach involves analysis of the sites of memory (lieux de mémoire, after Nora 1984-1982) as well as the examination of sanctioned forms of remembrance such as museum exhibitions both in and outside of New Orleans. It concludes with a reconsideration of representation, commodification, and authenticity in the post-Katrina landscape. Chapter 7, the conclusion of the dissertation, offers a brief analysis of a previous disaster, Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and the questions it raises about how and when disasters end. Outlining selected avenues for future research both on Hurricane Katrina in particular and on cultural heritage more generally, the chapter then restates the contributions of this dissertation to heritage studies, paying specific attention to specific themes in heritage in need of reassessment, and rearticulating the advantages of the heritage ecology framework. Finally, the chapter concludes with a meditation on the future of crisis—arguing that crisis is not a deterministic agent, but a cultural and societal choice. The Afterword reflects on the near-impact of Hurricane Gustav on New Orleans in 2008 and the contingency of research, reconsidering how culture and nature can coexist. It will come as no surprise that this meditation concludes that—properly understood—they always have. -38- Chapter 2: The Deaths and Lives of New Orleans, Louisiana I remember watching the news after Katrina hit and thinking—outside of the hot grief I felt for all those homegrown refugees and old ladies being plucked from rooftops and, Jesus, that poor kid being stripped of his snowpuff dog—thinking: There it goes, my past. Washing away in the flood, godspeed. —Miles 2008: 78 2.1: Introduction Having set the context for research into cultural heritage and the environment, and the broad outline of the heritage ecology approach, I now turn to my case study of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the many complex transformations it has undergone after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Setting the local historical and cultural context accounts for both the severity of the storm and its significance for heritage studies. Doing so requires a number of prior steps, however: first, I give an historical and historiographic overview of New Orleans, looking at the many social, economic, and environmental factors in its nearly 300-year history that have rendered it a place of cultural uniqueness within the United States. Second, I examine the discourses surrounding the expression and construction of cultural heritage in New Orleans, looking specifically at the synonymy of the historic past (the heritage) and contemporary culture. Third, having set the stage for the storm to enter, I look at Katrina’s impacts on the city at large—its direct landfall, the evacuation of the populace, the damage to its infrastructure and services, and the reordering of its physical landscape into a symbolic landscape—to illuminate the implicit challenges against which the specific forms of heritage I address in the subsequent chapters are pitched. It is necessary first, though, to explain the limits of this research: why this dissertation examines only New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and, given the physical extent of the event (Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3), neither the rest of the affected region nor the subsequent storm, Hurricane Rita, which followed Katrina three weeks later, also devastating coastal communities. -39- Figure 2.1: Satellite image of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, 28 August 2005. Figure 2.2: Satellite image showing Katrina at 9.15am EDT, hours after landfall, 29 August 2005. -40- Figure 2.3: Flood impacts of Hurricane Katrina upon coastal wetlands of southeastern Louisiana. -41- Much of the decision stems precisely from this extent: as an examination of the impacts of the storm on cultural heritage across the entire region is outside the scope of this dissertation, I have limited it to the specific setting in which the results would be most rewarding for heritage studies. As Erikson (2007) above noted, the storm is, simply, too large to cover in one research project. Brinkley has argued that “The magnitude of the Great Deluge was so great, the implications for the Gulf South so mindbogglingly huge, it was impossible to tell what happened to every town or hamlet” (Brinkley 2006: xvi). Moreover, the impacts on other regions such as the Florida, Mississippi and Alabama coasts were primarily economic and infrastructural, unlike New Orleans where the impacts on culture have remained at the forefront since they first emerged within days after the storm (Clarke 2007, Fentress 2008). This is not to claim that those areas have completely recovered or are unworthy of analysis of this sort. Far from it. Indeed, much of the Gulf Coast is still strewn with absence—of homes and businesses not rebuilt, of the bare foundations of former buildings, and of the barrier islands in the Gulf which suffered severe degradation from the storm (detailed in the Afterword). Many heritage sites in this region moreover were damaged or destroyed in the storm, such as the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, the Pleasant Reed house, one of the first houses in the region built by a freed slave, or Beauvoir, the former home of Jefferson Davis (Ohr-O’Keefe 2009, Williams 2005). But because these impacts were spread out across a much larger area, I argue that New Orleans presents a better opportunity to examine this range of impacts given that for nearly 300 years it has remained a close, hot, insular space that has enjoyed a unique set of cultural norms, traditions, and practices, a uniqueness that a focused analysis can more readily assess. As the writer Benjamin R. Ford puts it, “…my native New Orleans, where dialing a number found on a bathroom wall yielded you a discussion about po’ boys, was a truly weird city.” (Miles 2008: 78) This ‘truly weird’ aspect is one that has always drawn visitors to New Orleans, and characterises its gravitational pull—“New Orleans is a garden,” pianist Allen Toussaint remarked, “and I’m a plant there and I must be rooted” (quoted in Yentob 2006)— -42- and which has therefore been a signal concern for actors involved in the rebuilding process over the past four years. Such ‘weirdness’ is better experienced than explained, but in this section I chart four specific historical factors that have contributed to the construction of the city’s identity: colonialism, migration (including Creolisation), exceptionalism, and past disaster. These specific factors lay the groundwork for the entry of the storm, and for its impacts upon the lives of New Orleanians. For “the shared desire to be here post-Katrina,” Reid concludes, “despite all the problems, defines what it means to be a New Orleanian.” (Reid 2007) 2.2: History and Historiography of New Orleans For many first-time visitors to New Orleans, a common initial impression is that it does not ‘look like’ other American cities. Not only does its urban layout, seen in the figures throughout this chapter, reflect a complex pattern of settlement in relation to deltaic wetland topography and four major bodies of water (the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne, and the Gulf of Mexico), but its vernacular architectural styles have evolved in an equally creative manner in order to adapt to this environment (detailed in Chapter 5). As Rose notes, “…there are four mutually exclusive directions in this city: Uptown, downtown, lakeside, and riverside. There are no other cartographical orientations except, maybe, ‘toward the French Quarter.’ For once, this anomaly is due, not to the city’s near pathological embrace of eccentricity, but by terrestrial necessity” (Rose 2008a: 86). Historical and political factors also account for much of this eccentricity: as New Orleans has experienced numerous colonial masters—first France, when the city was founded in 1718 by Jean de Bienville, then Spain after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, then briefly France again in 1801 before becoming part of the emerging United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803—its contemporary urban geography, street names, varying population densities, and local customs reflect those differing regimes and influences. Even the name of its most famous neighbourhood is a misnomer as a result of different regimes, as the French Quarter’s brickwork and wrought-iron architecture is more -43- accurately Spanish: though it was originally founded by the French on the highest and most strategic point in the riverbend, the present-day Vieux Carré (as I refer to it) was rebuilt in the Castilian style after it suffered two fires in 1788 and 1794, when it was still under Spanish control. A consequence of New Orleans’ history as a European colony was the constant influx of settlers from all parts of the world—not just French and Spanish colonists from those regimes. This factor, arguably the most crucial in the historiography of the city, has given rise to nearly all of its unique cultural forms, and retains considerable contemporary resonance (Fussell (2007) and Donato et al (2007) have argued new forms of migration into the city have arisen not despite but because of Katrina). As the port at the mouth of the Mississippi River, the largest river in North America, from its earliest days New Orleans has served as a port of both departure and arrival, disembarkation and exploration. Colonists from Europe, slaves from West Africa (described by Sublette (2008) as the single most influential group of migrants), refugees from Caribbean islands such as Spanish Cuba and Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), and settlers from the United States met in New Orleans, bringing with them divergent languages, religions, beliefs, customs, and skills that clashed and commingled over generations to produce the urban ‘gumbo’ celebrated today (a metaphor examined in Chapter 3). Traditionally, different migrant communities inhabited different parts of the city, such as les gens de couleur libres, individuals of mixed French and African or Caribbean descent who settled what is now the Tremé neighbourhood in the Seventh Ward (R. Campanella 2006, Elie & Logsdon 2008), or the Isleños, descendents of migrants from the Canary Islands who settled in Plaquemines Parish. As many of these formerly distinct geographical and cultural boundaries have since blurred, they have in the process given rise to a widespread heritage of mixed bloodlines in New Orleans: the emergence of individuals and communities of what is now termed Creole descent. “Creolization,” argues Dessens, “the process of mixing the various cultures (sometimes called métissage), shows that the blending of European, African, and West Indian traditions … made the Afro-Creole culture of New Orleans as unique as later musical genres such as jazz music.” (Dessens 2007: 154-155). -44- Spitzer has argued that “…when we speak broadly of Creole New Orleans or the process of cultural creolization, it is in the widest, deepest embrace of race, ethnicity, class and the mingling of these categories that has long characterized New Orleans as a Catholic city on the northern rim of the Caribbean, south of the more culturally rigid, English-speaking Protestant South” (Spitzer 2003: 102). Indeed, Creoles occupy a complex and important position in the history of race relations in New Orleans, in the American South, and in the United States as a whole, as Hirsch and Logsdon (1992) have detailed. Their presence in municipal society in particular has contributed to the discourses of exceptionalism and uniqueness in New Orleans. The idea of Creolism extends past the fact of blood, and becomes a metaphor for the tangible and intangible heritage of the city: Lastrapes has argued that Many of the things we, as residents, value as evidence of New Orleans’ exceptionalism are also evidence of a long history of accepting mongrelization as a cultural norm. Our musical traditions and our carnival traditions, the two aspects of New Orleans culture that are often extracted and sold to the world as our heritage, are products of miscegenation. Even white Mardi Gras, with its historical roots in white supremacy, is a mash up of carnival traditions appropriated from European, Caribbean, and Latin American sources. (Lastrapes 2009) Musical and Carnival traditions are examined in more detail in Chapter 5, but for now it is important to develop this discourse of exceptionalism. Percy suggests that “the peculiar flavor of New Orleans … has something to do with the South and with a cutting off from the South, with the River and with history. New Orleans is both intimately related to the South and yet in a real sense cut adrift not only from the South but from the rest of Louisiana” (Percy 2001a: 11-12). Some writers contend further that this alleged isolation extends not just to Louisiana but to the United States as a whole, given the city’s European, African, and Caribbean roots: New Orleans is “[a] place freer than the rest of the country,” Marsalis writes, where elegance met an indefinable wildness to encourage the flowering of creative intelligence. Whites, Creoles, and Negroes were strained, steamed, and stewed in a thick, sticky below-sea-level bowl of musky gumbo. These people produced an original cuisine, an original architecture, vibrant communal ceremonies, and an original art form: jazz. (Marsalis 2005) -45- Horne has argued that New Orleans “has always seen itself … as somehow secret from the rest of America, [an] instinct that had nurtured a musical and culinary culture as different as the flora and fauna of the Gálapagos is from the continental mainland of South America.” (Horne 2006: 319). And this difference has served as the stage on which wider issues of rebuilding have played out since its first days: writing three weeks after the storm, the editors of the largest newspaper in the city, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, argued that At no point in its nearly 300-year history has New Orleans been mistakable for other cities. … Although it’s true we are concerned how the future New Orleans will look, we are even more concerned about how it will feel. It will not feel like home unless it feels strangely foreign to everybody else. (New Orleans Times-Picayune 2005) The ecological dimension is key: as Marsalis signals, the discourse of exceptionalism stems partly from the environmental history of New Orleans, in that the city is exceptional insofar as its existence is profoundly contingent. By continuing to exist despite all the environmental hazards arrayed against it, it has become at once exception and rule. The geographer Peirce Lewis famously characterised New Orleans as “the impossible but inevitable city,” summarising the paradox that its location at the mouth of the Mississippi River virtually guaranteed some form of settlement (for the purposes of trade and strategic control, among other factors), but that the settlement was in a constant struggle with its landform, topography, and proximity to water (P.F. Lewis 2003: 19). This struggle has often been romanticised—Percy suggests that “The River confers a peculiar dispensation upon the space of New Orleans. Arriving from Memphis or Cincinnati, one feels the way Huck Finn did shoving off from Illinois, going from an encompassed place to an in-between zone, a sector of contending or lapsing jurisdictions” (Percy 2001a: 12)—but the true history is more complex than these accounts suggest. Indeed, the nearly-300-year history of New Orleans reads like a litany of loss: fires, floods, hurricanes, cholera and typhoid epidemics, environmental degradation, racial segregation and riots, postwar economic depression, population loss, political neglect, corruption, and indifference. White (2006) suggests that “hardships resulting from a brutally hot and humid climate, several plagues, -46- and countless hurricanes, floods, and other disasters led to a special appreciation for life” in the city (White 2006: 86). So chequered is New Orleans’ past that Colten titled his history of the city Unnatural Metropolis (Colten 2004); in sum, Codrescu has argued that “the history of New Orleans is a long series of historical horrors that mitigate against its existence” (Codrescu 2006c: 36). That a city or community can be marked by disaster is nothing unusual, as Davis (1999) has shown in his study of Los Angeles, but to consider it a recurring point of pride, public memory, and even identity-formation within the cultural landscape suggests that more is at stake. For disasters do not just impact on a place but are mutually created by that place. In other words, such elements in a system (e.g. the discourse that New Orleans is not just an exceptional but an ‘unnatural’ city, that its life in the cultural imagination trades upon the perpetual threat of destruction from its risk-prone environment) are indeed constitutive, reinforcing elements of that system, rather than mere byproducts, inadvertent or not, of it. “Human cultures are not built on untouched nature,” Lähde argues: “they are built in the processes that make their very existence possible” (Lähde 2006: 81). Nor should the two be taken as distinct from one another, especially in a region where the complex natural environment has been as salient a factor in the creation of the city and its identity as this one, described by Codrescu as “a bowl set amid barely contained waters in a fetid swamp” (Codrescu 2006c: 36) I return to this point in more detail in Chapter 5; but for now it is important to note that to speak idiomatically, as heritage research often does, of ‘the historic environment’ is to elide the fact that the environment itself is capable of rendering or imbuing a place with history: consequently to reread ‘the historic environment’ is not just to savour wordplay but is to reinvest the heritage-making capacity of natural processes and phenomena, no matter how destructive, back into the history of a site. 2.3: What We Talk About When We Talk About Culture Having set a context for the impact of the storm on a place whose cultural uniqueness is rooted in identifiable factors—colonialism, migration, exceptionalism, and past disaster—I turn -47- now to the way in which these factors, taken together, have contributed to the contemporary culture of New Orleans. More specifically, in this section I detail the synonymy of cultural heritage and contemporary culture in New Orleans, showing how the traditions and practices of the past have in many ways been handed down with little change to the present, and how present cultural forms and expressions have come, post-Katrina, to be seen as an anchor for a past that is even today threatened by the flood, and likewise as an opportunity to reclaim that past when the waters have risen. In so doing I detail and critique the idea of the ‘Holy Trinity’ of New Orleans’ culture—its food, music, and architecture—in preparation for the three main data chapters to come. As noted above, much of the present-day discourse surrounding expressions, artefacts, and practices of New Orleans’ cultural heritage stems from the history of interaction and commingling between differing ethnic, racial, religious, national, linguistic and migrant groups. And while the ‘heritage’ that is spoken of frequently refers to just this history of interaction, the term ‘culture’ refers to this heritage as well. ‘The culture of New Orleans’ is a phrase that implies nearly any form of artefact, material object, expression, performance, or identity characteristic harbours the abovementioned senses of uniqueness and exceptionalism in relation to the rest of America. Even culture as it applies to language and dialect plays a role: lamenting the widespread scattering of New Orleans’ residents shortly after the storm, Robinson (2006) wrote that “I doubt there’s anywhere else in this country you could find so many black people who look white or so many white people who look black. I know there’s nowhere else you could find all the Creoles and Cajuns, nowhere else you could hear that odd New Orleans accent that sounds more like Brooklyn than Biloxi.” Certain specific uses of ‘culture’ warrant consideration, however: Miller and Rivera (2007) and M.-R. Jackson (2006) adopt an interpretation of culture as the concatenation of sociocultural traits, examining the construction of cultural identity through demography, racial and ethnic group, and class. They argue that lack of economic opportunity among lower-income communities in neighbourhoods such as Tremé, the Seventh Ward, the -48- Lower Ninth Ward, the Bywater, and Central City has imposed limitations on mobility, leading both to a rootedness in place and a strong sense of identity within a specific neighbourhood or social network such as a Mardi Gras Indian tribe (detailed in Chapter 4). Zedlewski argues, “Vibrant arts and culture in New Orleans shined the one bright beacon on an otherwise depressed landscape for low-income families. Indeed, many of the cultural practices and traditions that made New Orleans famous can be traced back to the city’s poorest citizens and their ancestors. Arts and culture were key to New Orleans’ unique character.” (Zedlewski 2006: 7) The implicit association of culture with demography is not new; often elided in this account, however, is that these lower-income and predominantly African-American communities are the backbone of labour for the service and hospitality industries patronised by the middle- and upper-class and predominantly white tourist industries. These communities are the wellspring of the creative activity that is then appropriated and reproduced by popular media, booster agencies, and convention-booking corporations (a point I return to in Chapter 7)—in other words, though ‘the culture of New Orleans’ is often produced by specific socioeconomic and ethnic groups, it is frequently ‘produced’ in this commercial sense for others—usually tourists or visitors to the city, colloquially referred to as ‘outsiders’—to consume. Though the storm renewed, briefly, national attention to racial and class disparities in New Orleans, they had been in place long before the storm, as Penner and Ferdinand (2009) detail (I return to this point in Chapter 7.). Put succinctly, Lipsitz writes: “…the pleasures of New Orleans come from a crucible of undeniable pain. Ninth ward poet and journalist Kalamu ya Salaam reminds us, ‘living poor and Black in the Big Easy is never as much fun as our music, food, smiles, and laughter make it seem.’” (Lipsitz 2006: 460) Another widespread interpretation of ‘the culture of New Orleans’ focuses less on demography and more on materiality, finding ‘the culture’ in its physical expression. Characteristic of this approach is to look at three separate but related phenomena, what has been referred to as the ‘Holy Trinity’ of New Orleans’ culture: its food, its music, and its historic architecture. Though accounts diverge over the precise origins or locations of these material -49- phenomena (given that their evolution has never been straightforward nor has it ceased even in the present day, as Edwards (2008) has noted), writers, apologists, critics, and commentators from all backgrounds frequently claim that these three ‘fields’ or ‘sectors’ or spheres of cultural activity do more to set New Orleans apart than anything else. When examined individually, as the subsequent chapters do, it is useful to see how each culture ‘sector’ developed into its contemporary form both pre and post-Katrina, as this approach aids researchers attempting to chart both histories and historiographies of specific cultural forms. But when they are taken together, these three sectors reveal another aspect of the discursive construction of ‘the culture of New Orleans,’ an aspect that has recently emerged under a variety of names. Variously labelled ‘Creole urbanism’ by Wagner (2008), ‘cultural synesthesia’ by Piazza (2005), ‘mixing it up’ by Tolson (2006), and the product of ‘miscegenation’ by Cannon (2008) as noted in Chapter 1, this approach unifies both the socioeconomic and the material strands of cultural identity to create a form of culture that both accounts for and moves fluidly between the two. As Cannon suggests, “…miscegenation, which we believe to be beautiful and good, need not involve actual fucking. It stands as a cultural paradigm, indeed, as an axiom for measuring a special quality in all New World artifacts and social practices: the ‘quality’ of an American work is to be judged by the degree of its miscegenation” (Cannon 2008: 142). This aggregate conception of culture and heritage thus operates less as a singular linear phenomenon than as an ecosystem of relationships that are understood as a single entity: to invoke therefore ‘the culture of New Orleans’ is not to overtly attempt to include every aspect of its expression but is instead to refuse to exclude any aspect. “New Orleans culture is of a piece,” Piazza argues, You can’t really lose one part of it without losing the whole thing. The music is part of the parades, and the basis of the dancing that you see, or do, at the parades. The parades are part of the rhythms of the year, and of life—the anniversaries, holidays, birthdays, and funerals. … It amounts to a kind of cultural synesthesia in which music is food, and food is a kind of choreography, and dance is a way of dramatizing the fact that you are still alive for another year, another funeral, another Mardi Gras. (Piazza 2005: 32-33) -50- The synonymy is more difficult to not find than it is to find; examples of this mode of understanding have come from artists, writers, critics, musicians, corporations, tourism boards, journalists, and politicians alike. A few examples suffice to illustrate this theme: playing at a concert in WC Handy Park in Memphis a few months after the storm, the musician Cyril Neville (of the Neville family of musicians) exclaimed that “There won’t be no New Orleans without the second line clubs, without the Mardi Gras Indians. Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Wards, is the heart, the roux of that gumbo they call New Orleans music and without that roux, you know there ain’t no gumbo, y’all.” (quoted in Mugge 2006). Moreover, Carlos Prieto, director of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, has referred to the musical culture of New Orleans as a ‘recipe’ (Kasten 2009), and Dillon has suggested that “the local ingredients, the cooking styles, the dishes ... along with jazz, zydeco, and Cajun music make New Orleans New Orleans” (Dillon 2008). Linking this integrated vision of culture into an urban framework, Wagner has developed the theory of ‘creole urbanism’ as a means of explaining the uniqueness (if not idiosyncrasy) of certain forms of expression while recognising the conditions from which they have emerged. Citing five key factors—the social and economic diversity of neighbourhoods, the unique urban morphology and topography, a rich and diverse architectural heritage, a tolerance for blight and decay, and the continued use of the street as a space for performance and festival (all topics examined throughout this dissertation), he argues that ‘creole urbanism’ is “the everyday interplay between historic urban neighborhoods with a density of social life that promotes a unique street culture rooted in an ethos of diversity and assimilation” (Wagner 2008: 175). It is this ‘everyday’ aspect that is most significant, the seamless integration of past and present in New Orleans that has simultaneously contributed to the evolution of the city’s cultural traditions but which has itself also continued to evolve. The actual culture of New Orleans has developed differently than the idea of ‘the culture of New Orleans,’ however, which operates as an emergent discourse with its own characteristics independent of the social or material forces under description. References to ‘the culture of New Orleans’ (regardless of what aspects are -51- specifically referred to) serve as rallying cries, arguments, catalysts for social movements, and sites of political protest—suggesting that the phrase has taken on a life of its own, has become an epiphenomenal metonym to include everything worthy of preservation and conservation. Nor has its force suffered either in the frequency or intensity of its use on account of the potential contradictions inherent in the use of such a complex term. Consequently the advantage of adopting an ecological approach to account for a cultural heritage that is deeply integrated within its present-day society is that it enables—even requires—a discussion of that heritage on two different levels concurrently. Even if a more nuanced theoretical language that does not depend on dichotomising them has not yet been developed (as I argue in Chapter 7), the ecological approach nevertheless guarantees a conception of intangible and tangible heritage in the same stroke, recognising that it is impossible to understand a work of material culture without also examining the conditions that gave ground to it, just as it is to consider a specific urban or environmental landscape without taking account of its specific features and deposits (even if some of those features may ultimately reside in metaphor). Moreover, it recognises the lateral aspect of the heritage as described by Piazza above, acknowledging that many forms of cultural expression were not created nor do they continue to exist in isolation, but rather draw on surrounding influences both in their conception, execution, and interpretation. This approach makes possible the discovery and articulation of the relationships between creole urbanism and ‘sector’-based heritage: those histories and ecologies of specific cultural sectors, such as culinary arts, music and performance, and the built architectural environment. If “food is a kind of choreography,” as Piazza has argued; then it is true both literally (in cooking and eating it) and metaphorically (in interpreting and analysing it). While this integrationist view of culture is not unique to New Orleans, it has become more frequently articulated in the wake of the storm, reinforcing Hoffman and Oliver-Smith’s claim that “Disaster exposes the way in which people construct or ‘frame’ their peril (including the denial of it), the way they perceive their environment and their subsistence, and the ways they -52- invent explanation, constitute their morality, and project their continuity and promise into the future” (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002: 6). In this sense, disaster impacts on the city’s historiography as much on the city itself. Any residual surprise that defences or critiques of the city’s culture, or even its right to exist in its risk-prone landscape, have proliferated since the storm (e.g. Piazza (2005) and Shafer (2005) respectively) must be supplanted instead by the expectation that they must arise: it is only when a culture is placed under the greatest threat of loss that its advocates are most required. Hence the disaster creates a new kind of historiography: the historiography of cultural defence, reclamation, and justification. This historiography brings out commonplace details of a place into a new light, illuminating its previously quotidian ‘forms of life’ or cultural expressions with newfound urgency, but also creating a discourse whereby those forms of life may well be lost or irrevocably transformed should no mitigating action be taken. This discourse arose in no more ubiquitous form in post-Katrina New Orleans than in those accounts fearing the potential ‘Disneyfication’ or ‘theme park-isation’ of the city, a discourse that recurs throughout this dissertation. The disaster also created—or more accurately revived—an already extant and flourishing historiography of the ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ city (Younge 2006, Baum 2006), itself a play on the local idiom that New Orleans is ‘the city that care forgot.’ Interpreting the destruction of the great American city of decay (detailed by Roach 1996 and Kelman 2003) and as a culmination revitalised this discourse from a staid, received fact (in the same manner as the fleur-de-lis, discussed below). It furthermore helped shape the post-disaster rebuilding efforts by diverting the flow of resources (economic, political, nonprofit, and volunteer), and by shaping the public debate about preservation and restoration. It proved furthermore that disaster and culture were inextricably intertwined, and that, especially in the years prior to the reinforcement of the flood defences, any debates about the future of the city’s culture were suffused with contingency. For as Hurricane Rita showed three weeks after Katrina, natural phenomena remain indifferent to human attempts to master them. -53- Figure 2.4: The flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, detail of greater New Orleans region, 30 August 2005. -54- Figure 2.5: Hurricane Katrina flood depth estimation, 31 August 2005. Figure 2.6: Hurricane Katrina flood depth estimation, 20 September 2005. -55- 2.4: Hurricane Katrina: Origins and Impact And in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, thoughts of another storm were unconscionable. Before examining specific transformations of the physical landscapes of New Orleans, this section contextualises the subsequent chapters by giving a brief overview of the hurricane’s growth and impacts. In this respect, Kolb’s earlier claim that the storm occasioned a “complex-systems failure” is especially salient—for no one perspective or discipline enjoys a monopoly on how to account for disaster, rather, all disciplines contribute equally to writing its history. Before proceeding, it is therefore important to set literary and terminological boundaries—to clarify what is meant by the use of terms such as ‘Katrina’ and ‘the storm.’ Systematically, the specific series of events that together comprise the present-day disaster can be broken down as follows: • the formation of Tropical Depression Twelve over the Bahamas on 23 August 2005, • its strengthening into a Tropical Storm and naming as TS Katrina on 24 August 2005, • its further strengthening into a Category 1 hurricane and first landfall in southeastern Florida on 25 August 2005, • its entry into the Gulf of Mexico, strengthening from a Category 3 hurricane into a Category 5 hurricane on 28 August prior to • its second landfall in southeast Louisiana at Buras at 6.10am on 29 August 2005, • its entry into New Orleans, Louisiana at approximately 9.13am, 29 August 2005, • its accompanying storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne, and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (‘MR-GO’) • the municipal levee breaches and the flooding of New Orleans, beginning 29 August 2005 and not fully drained until early October 2005 (Figures 2.4, 2.5, 2.6), • the forced evacuation and gradual re-entry of the city’s populace, • and, finally, the combined impact of the above hazards on the city’s physical, social, and economic landscapes. Accounts such as Graumann et al (2005), Brinkley (2006), Horne (2006), and McQuaid & Schleifstein (2006) add further layers of detail, but because the present study is not atmospheric, oceanographic, or civil-infrastructural, it is not useful in this context to separate these events so finely: therefore subsequent references to ‘Katrina’ and ‘the storm’ refer to the combined progression of events except where specifically noted (some residents have taken to separating the event of the hurricane from the event of the flooding, referring instead to the latter as ‘the -56- federal flood’ in order to foreground the collapse of the levee walls: the specifically political nature of the disaster). ‘Katrina’ here therefore refers not merely to the atmospheric conditions that grew out of Tropical Depression Twelve in August 2005, but to all direct and indirect human and environmental transformations that have happened in the region since. Likewise, in histories that have been written since the storm—conversational, popular, literary, and media- based—a tendency has arisen to anthropomorphise Katrina into a ‘her.’ This tendency is not without historical precedent, as Steinberg (2000) notes: the National Weather Service first began naming hurricanes after women in 1949, a tendency that was only made gender-neutral decades later, but not before the damage to the public perception of the environment had been done. “Transforming what had once been known across America as ‘Florida hurricanes’ into female storms,” he writes, “served to naturalize further the destructiveness of those calamities.” That was something city boosters in hazard-prone areas—in their efforts to soft-pedal disaster—had been working for since the late nineteenth century. Women hurricanes were routinely described in the 1950s as wild, capricious, fickle, whimsical, and erratic, creating the sense that nature was literally out of control, when of course, economic development, driven by private property, was as much if not more than nature to blame for disaster. (Steinberg 2000: 68) This dissertation avoids this representation except in citing secondary sources, favouring the value-neutral ‘it’ over the gendered ‘her’ (while acknowledging that some writers do refer to ‘her’ ironically). 2.5: Transformations in Landscape “[It] is possible,” writes Thomas Campanella, examining cities destroyed by disaster or conflict, for a city to be reconstructed, even heroically, without fully recovering. Put another way, resilience involves much more than rebuilding… Broken highways can be mended, buildings repaired and made taller than before, communications systems patched back together. But cities are more than the sum of their buildings. They are also thick concatenations of social and cultural matter, and it is often this that endows a place with its defining essence and identity. (Thomas Campanella 2006: 142) The interpretation is crucial: to reconstruct a place is not necessarily to rebuild it or vice versa, any more than it is to repair, renew, or restore it. Rather, the layers of difference between the -57- concepts as much as the terminology used to communicate them often reveal political agendas that shape reconstruction projects far beneath the surface of the rhetoric. Viejo-Rose has argued that “The word ‘reconstruction’ is misleading for while in a post-war or post-disaster scenario it can be motivated by desires to restore and remake a place exactly, it can also seek to re-imagine place, constructing a new vision that reflects changed power structures – economic, ideological and political – or simply to modernize and improve infrastructure” (Viejo-Rose 2009: 13). While the discourse of the ‘re-’ in post-Katrina New Orleans is examined in more detail at the end of this chapter, in order to differentiate this research from the terminology of reconstruction increasingly in use in analyses of post-conflict situations, I adhere to the term ‘rebuilding.’ Figure 2.7: Undated aerial photograph of flooded New Orleans (September 2005). -58- In this respect physical infrastructure has played a central role, for as Kolb argues, “the key event was a technological failure: the collapse of the canal walls” constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers (Figure 2.7, Kolb 2006: 110), a collapse that imbued the disaster with its political resonance (Horne 2006), and which more than any other event has led to the aggregate disaster which is now referred to as ‘Katrina.’ Over the past four years, specific aspects of this infrastructure have been repaired; a partial list includes the reinforcement of the levees that were breached in the storm (and levee walls on both sides of the Mississippi River), the construction of a floodgate at the northern entrance to the Industrial Canal, and the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. Undoubtedly, these infrastructural repairs must be completed in order for public confidence to remain high enough to sustain migration back into the city. But in order to account for the ‘thick concatenations of social and cultural matter’ Campanella identifies, and to develop the approach of heritage ecology, it is crucial to examine those features in the physical landscape that have undergone profound transformation as a result of the storm and which have since become part of the cultural landscape. This includes those features that did not exist prior to the storm: for if New Orleans enjoyed an iconography of diverse elements prior to Katrina, then Katrina left behind a host of new icons and markers which have transformed the physical landscape of streets, neighbourhoods, and entire city blocks into a symbolic landscape. This transformation is not necessarily permanent, as tell-tale signs of the storm’s impact do undergo gradual erasure, but in the first years after the storm six symbolic figures in particular emerged with their own properties, trajectories, and cultural associations. They are: the security X left by security teams, the waterline of the storm (and with it, cracked and dried mud), the stairway to nowhere, the overgrowth of abandoned properties, debris left by the storm, and the fleur-de-lis. The first five markers have reflected the experience of returning to a ruined landscape, but the sixth is notable precisely because, as the primary symbol of the city, its meanings that were in existence prior to Katrina have been reinvested and reinvented. Examining these figures sets the stage for the most widespread post-Katirina discursive formulation: the word re. -59- Figure 2.8: The security ‘X’ diagram, detailing building hazard codes. From Moye (2009). Figure 2.9: Thomas Mann, “Markings No. 3.” Selected work from Storm Cycle (2006). -60- 2.5.1: X Marks the Spot Left by state and federal army and police units in the immediate weeks after Katrina—in search of both the living and the dead—the security X (Figure 2.8) was a shorthand notation spray-painted onto the front of a building and denoting four critical pieces of information for first-responders. The top quadrant recorded the date the building was checked; the left quadrant, the specific unit that checked the building; the right quadrant, the presence of any hazards; and the bottom quadrant, the number (if any) of dead bodies found in the building, a tally which would occasionally include animals. This image acquired its power after the storm partly due to its sheer ubiquity: nearly every building in the city within the flood zone was branded with the X. While some residents returning to New Orleans have viewed it as a symbol of a painful past— symbolising evacuation, separation, isolation, and the fear of returning home to a devastated city, a damaged home, and other trials known and unknown—others over time have adopted it as a symbol of resilience and defiance against the complex natural and political calculus that created the disaster. Moreover, because the symbol was unwillingly bestowed, it was seen as a ‘brand’ on houses both abandoned and inhabited, and has remained even for years after the storm a fixture of the urban visual landscape in New Orleans. As Rose (2007a) noted two years after the storm, “the hieroglyphs of catastrophe still deface the city’s surviving housing stock like some demented 90-square mile contest of post-diluvian tic-tac-toe. X, zero, X, zero, ad infinitum.” Even as the ‘X’ transformed the house into a site of loss, however, the X itself has undergone transformation and appropriation. One of the first major appropriations has come by visual artists; in his 2006 exhibition Storm Cycle at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the sculptor Thomas Mann displayed a piece entitled “Markings No. 3: ‘X’” which featured a photographic montage of eight different X-es overlaid onto the carved-out slats of a real X from a flooded house (whose original location was not specified) (Figure 2.9). “I found these markings to be visually interesting and full of import,” he wrote. “I especially like the ones with the contrasting color combination. New Orleanians are very fond of painting their homes in -61- bright tropical colors and this made for striking color sequences.” (Mann 2006) Other artists and photographers have followed suit; the ubiquity of the symbol and its instantaneous reference to a suite of loss has even inspired a multimedia exhibition, not yet realised as of this writing in early 2010, devoted to just the symbol (Davis-Moye & Associates 2008). 2.5.2: The Waterline “Though the water had gone down again,” recalls the writer Clive James, “the thick tide mark left by the thousands of gallons of spilled oil was still there on the walls, at an impossible height. Everything up to that sinister Plimsoll line had been either washed away or else ruined where it stood.” (James 1990: 179). Though his description of ‘the fatal black stripe’ refers to the devastating floods that impacted the city centre of Florence, Italy, in 1966, James’ account could, with little loss in translation, refer to the landscape of New Orleans after Katrina: The whole low-lying little principality of the popolo minuto had been soaked with poisons. Sections of the historic centre which lay a few feet higher had suffered less, but more than enough. The cost to the art works and the books was devastating. The human cost was worse than that… (ibid.: 179) Given the urban topography of the city and the equalisation of the water table with that of Lake Pontchartrain, the waterline left by the floods in New Orleans affected homes and other structures at or beneath sea level, leaving a citywide marker that, as the floodwaters were drained, slowly trailed down the sides and interiors of buildings (Figure 2.10, 2.11). As ubiquitous as the security X, the waterline differed in its symbolic meaning in part because it signified the trace of the flood itself, not just the human intervention afterward. But it was more than just a signifier; chemically and physically, it was the trace of the flood, as the acquisition protocol of the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC later observed (detailed in Chapter 6). With the floods, however, came mud: a thick, noxious skein that rested on surfaces as the waters receded, and that dried to form a greyish-brown cracked mud-scape that became a residual subject for photographers and journalists looking to document the strangeness of the post- Katrina landscape (Jordan 2006, Sayler 2006, Spielman 2007). The waterline has also served as -62- the subject for a musical composition entitled ‘The Long Black Line’ by the musician Spencer Bohren, who notes that at its premiere in 2006 at the first Jazz and Heritage Festival after the storm, “…the entire audience had risen to its feet, openly weeping.” (Bohren 2006). And despite its ubiquity—or even because of it—the waterline has become a battleground on which debates over future heritage have been staged: one letter-writer to the Times-Picayune argued that it, too, was worthy of preservation as part of the new cultural heritage of New Orleans. While on a tour of the city, she realised that …rain, paint and elbow grease have been erasing all signs of the peak flood levels. The brown lines have mostly disappeared. Given the notorious shortness of human memory, it seems to me that we will make a huge mistake if a program isn’t undertaken soon to install permanent Aug. 29, 2005, floodmarkers in every damaged neighborhood. What better way for city officials to remind the public that, despite the best intentions of the Corps of Engineers, levees are never fail-safe? (Bahr 2008) -63- Figure 2.10: Photograph of the flood waterline on the side of a house, 24 August 2006. Figure 2.11: Political cartoon by Jack Ohman satirising the waterline as metaphor. 2006. -64- Figure 2.12: Remains of staircase of destroyed house at 1630 Reynes Street, 22 December 2007. Figure 2.13: Remains along Highway 90, Pass Christian, Mississippi, 11 September 2007. -65- 2.5.3: Stairways to Nowhere A further transformation in the landscape came in the wholesale removal and relocation of houses by the floodwaters, leaving only the steps or the front stoop behind (Figure 2.12). Especially prevalent along Highway 90 on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where the storm surge reached its peak impact (Figure 2.13, Williams 2005), these ‘stairways to nowhere’ became powerful symbols both of the loss of home and identity, and of the uncertainty of the rebuilding process. (I address another transformed home implement, the Katrina refrigerator, in Chapter 4; it has not been possible to analyse temporary homes themselves, such as the much-reviled FEMA trailers depicted in Figure 7.2) It furthermore became a site of contestation when acted on as a symbol: in September 2008, the sculptor Dawn DeDeaux proposed to the Vieux Carré Commission (VCC), the historic neighbourhood association, an art project that would place stylised (though life-size) forms of these stairways in selected locations throughout the Vieux Carré (Figure 2.14), including in Jackson Square (as noted in Chapter 1, the symbolic heart of the city). Though the intent of the intervention was to raise awareness for those neighbourhoods in New Orleans such as the Seventh Ward and the Upper and Lower Ninth Ward that had not recovered like the Vieux Carré had, members of the VCC argued the installation would make a mockery of the historic nature of the Quarter, and claimed that it would set an unreasonable precedent for other artworks; then-Chairman Ralph Lupin argued that approval of this project would spawn “a proliferation of 21st-century modernist works that would screw up the square” (quoted in Eggler 2008c). Though the project was ultimately vetoed, residents responded angrily: in a letter to the Times-Picayune, John M Barry, the author of the seminal history of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, called for a reversal of the decision, arguing that DeDeaux’s installation …is an extraordinarily powerful and deeply moving work of art that resonates deeply. It should be displayed where the most people can see it. That makes Jackson Square the right place. It could provide significant benefit to the city by reminding visitors of what occurred here three years ago, and what continually is threatened. … The rejection was a bad decision, and the Vieux Carré Commission needs to reverse itself. It needs to remember the French Quarter is part of the city, not some island unto itself. (Barry 2008) -66- Figure 2.14: Illustration of proposed art installation “Steps Home” by sculptor Dawn DeDeaux. Figure 2.15: Photograph of mould in the interior of a house, 29 October 2005. -67- 2.5.4: Overgrowth Weisman has theorised what a world in which humanity suddenly disappeared would be like, detailing the unchecked growth of natural processes and the reclamation of areas of human cultivation. “Could nature ever obliterate all our traces?” he asks, “How would it undo our monumental cities and public works, and reduce our myriad plastics and toxic synthetics back to benign, basic elements?” (Weisman 2007: 5) Though his project is sourced in a romanticised view of natural spaces—he suggests that there are still “a few earthly spots where all our senses can inhale a living memory of this Eden before we were here” (ibid: 6)—a localised version of this process took place in many of the neighbourhoods in New Orleans after the storm. As residents were separated from their homes for extended periods of time, local flora began to grow unfettered in these ruined landscapes, particularly in areas like the Lower Ninth Ward which had suffered the worst devastation (as detailed in Chapter 6). While grasses, weeds, and vegetation began to overtake many of the structures and newly vacant lots from the outside, inside the structures flowered diverse species of moulds and fungi, feeding off ideal conditions for growth: darkness, warmth, humidity, and isolation (Figure 2.15). “The mold,” Horne noted, “whether toxic or merely revolting, was everywhere. Red, black, green—within days of the flooding and only more luxuriantly after the waters receded, huge blooms of it ran like wallpaper from floor to ceiling. Mold infiltrated every cabinet, refrigerator, and bookbinding” (Horne 2006: 211). Rebuilding a home thus required extensive treatment if not outright destruction and removal of the biocolonised structures (locally referred to as ‘gutting’). While historic and nonhistoric structures alike are by nature vulnerable to this kind of damage, a frequent local attitude after Katrina was that homeowners would return to their homes only to have to ‘go to war’ against what had overtaken it, engendering a psychological conflict between their domestic environment and their natural environment (Piazza 2005; McNulty 2008), and furthermore, as noted in Chapter 1, reinscribing the vision of a natural disaster as a solely natural phenomena—a consequence of disasters for which there is no intentional agent, as Drees (2003) has noted. -68- Figure 2.16: Undated photograph of Katrina landfill by C.C. Lockwood. Figure 2.17: Photograph of installation by Henrique Oliveira, Center for Contemporary Art. -69- 2.5.5: Debris Disasters do not just transform material culture, however: they also create it. These two processes are interlinked, as the case of debris makes clear—debris here taken as matter that was once part of a structure, edifice, or object that has been physically reconfigured into a different state, a state that then takes on new and different social, psychological, and political uses. Linenthal (2005) has described how after disasters communities embark upon the veneration of debris, in which the physical remains of a structure such as a house or a wall undergo a process of social transformation: after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, he writes, some individuals suggested that “rubble from the Murrah Building be used as or in a memorial. Such rubble— immediately both a sacred relic and a commercial commodity—was understood to be a material way for visitors to ‘touch’ the event…” (Linenthal 2005: 63-64). Unlike ruins more generally, which are often taken to belong to an agency, government, or private landowners, debris tends to eschew ownership: the removal of this dimension along with the fascination of the visibly mortal (as Dekkers (2005) has argued) imbues the debris object with a fetishistic quality, suitable therefore for realigning its aesthetic or symbolic connotations. One year after Katrina, the city of New Orleans released statistics claiming that the storm had created an estimated 35 million cubic yards of debris (in their terms, equated to 10 full Superdomes), with only 25 million cubic yards remaining to be collected from the streets, buildings, parks, and other areas (City of New Orleans 2006). In sum, the total volume of Katrina debris generated across the region— estimated by Luther (2008) at over 100 million cubic yards over an area of 90,000 square miles across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama—might have been thought to belie the more subtle realignment that Linenthal has described, but this has not proven the case. Dawdy (2006) has argued that the landfill that opened east of New Orleans to contain this debris (Figure 2.16) will, in time, become its own archaeological site. “[It] promises to soon rival the most impressive prehistoric mounds of the Mississippi Valley,” she argues. -70- It stockpiles a wealth of knowledge about the lives of early twenty-first century New Orleanians. It is actually a mound complex, with different multistory piles sorted into building materials, household appliances with toxic elements, brush and tree cuttings, and piles with a mixture of everything else, from mold-ruined furniture to uneaten shrimp po’boy sandwiches. (Dawdy 2006: 21) In the meantime, prior to these future excavations, some forms of debris have been retained. Across the Gulf South, the majority of these pieces of debris have re-emerged as artworks, often crafted out of the scavenged remnants of whatever broken furniture, household objects, architectural features, automotive parts or other belongings were destroyed (Longman 2005, Berkes 2006, Miss Malaprop 2007). (I own a small business-card holder made from storm debris, purchased at the Bywater Art Market in September 2007.) Many artists who have transformed debris into purchasable commodities—such as jewellery, furniture, or new artworks—exhibit their wares both at public markets and on the Internet, though these objects tend to remain modest in size and price (Shayt 2006). But the reimagination of debris into new kinds of material culture does not just appear at trade stalls. When the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans installed its 2008 exhibition Something From Nothing, the show included a large-scale piece by Henrique Oliveira in which the stuffing from discarded mattresses and bedding had been reconverted into an automobile-sized cloud floating above the atrium of the CAC (Figure 2.17). “Despite its softness,” MacCash (2008a) argued, “it’s an uncomfortable object to contemplate because it is in a nasty stained and tattered state and because it calls to mind the Crescent City’s current struggle with its homeless residents.” Moreover, works by artists such as Jacqueline Bishop, Thomas Mann, and Jana Napoli (among others) staged and executed in the first year after the storm reflect the immediate need to appropriate and reclaim material culture from its disorganised, ravaged, decontextualised state into a state whereby old meanings could be honoured and new meanings could be formed. Bishop’s work with baby shoes found on the streets of New Orleans over the winter and spring of 2005-2006—taken, she reported, only when it was clear that no identification of the owner was possible—explores loss, intimacy, and familial relations (Bishop 2006a, 2006b). Mann’s work Storm Cycle, as noted, reassembles debris -71- into new sculptures, each representing iconic images of New Orleans’ history and culture, while at the same time reinscribing and questioning the post-Katrina iconography such as the security X (Mann 2006). Jana Napoli’s work Floodwall, first opened at the Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge, reassembles 710 drawers she collected from the streets of New Orleans into a variety of installations featuring audio devices containing the recorded stories of their prior owners and exploring memory, decay, and lost narratives (Figure 2.18; Napoli 2005-2010). “We were driven to create a wailing wall that builds intimate and homely detritus from a world destroyed into a wrenching cry of grief,” Napoli said. “This emotional endeavour quickly grew into a sculptural and historical work allowing the people of New Orleans to tell their own story about what they value and why.” (quoted in Marszalek 2007) Figure 2.18: Floodwall installation by Jana Napoli. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 21 July 2007. -72- Figure 2.19: Emblem of fleur-de-lis (and flooded streetlamp) on souvenir poster. 9 January 2008. Figure 2.20: Political cartoon by Steve Kelley depicting the fleur-de-lis as symbol of New Orleans. 2006. -73- 2.5.6: The Fleur-de-lis Taken together, all of these elements—the security X, the waterline, the vacant staircase, natural overgrowth, and storm debris—have contributed to the rise of a new symbolic landscape in New Orleans, a landscape in which any one of these elements metonymically represents the storm, and the landscape in general becomes a backdrop for further dramas to be played out. That national film productions have used ravaged neighbourhoods as scene settings for other post-disaster dramas, as I detail in Chapter 7, is more than mere cinematographic opportunism; it suggests that the city has been reimagined yet again as a destination for death, loss, and decay. Paradoxically, however, in the midst of this landscape whose new symbols typically signify loss, one former symbol has reemerged with associations and connotations it did not and could not possess prior to the storm: the fleur-de-lis, the icon of the city (Figure 2.19). Originally an emblem of French colonial rule in the region under the Bourbon royal family, the fleur-de-lis serves now both “as a fashion statement and as an innocuous pledge of allegiance to the city and its distinct cultural heritage” (Otte 2007: 831; Otte notes that its history was not always so innocuous, being also used in the antebellum period to brand slaves). It is represented on a wide range of material culture, adorning clothing, jewellery, furniture, tourist souvenirs, artwork, and the official flag of the city (Rose 2009b). One of its widest forms of representation is as the symbol of the city’s professional football team, the New Orleans Saints, whose success in the 2006-07 playing season upon the reopening of the Superdome and their return home a year after the storm was itself taken as a milestone for the city’s recovery, and further reinvested the fleur-de-lis with additional symbolic meaning. (That, since this writing in early 2010, the Saints have won their first-ever Super Bowl may well inspire further research into this additive symbolism, a gruelling project indeed) For since the storm, the fleur-de-lis has become a symbol of resilience, of rebuilding, and of survival (Figure 2.20)—as well as a thinly veiled rebuttal against early critics who decried the city’s chances of recovery (e.g. Shafer 2005). To make, sell, wear or display a fleur-de-lis was no longer just to show civic pride: it was to make -74- an implicit visual argument about the right of the city to exist, and to contest the implication that undue risk alone is an insufficient reason to abandon a dwelling-place. It is now, also, post- Katrina, the most popular tattoo design for residents and visitors alike (Otte 2007, Anand 2008). 2.6: Renewing New Orleans Heller (2008) and Viejo-Rose (2009) have argued that in cases of armed conflict and regime change, symbolic landscapes are subject to creation in many different contexts and forms. New landscapes are often deliberately constructed for a variety of purposes: to quell mnemonic opposition, to silence countervening discourses, and to establish a confluence of history, culture, and law as a visual or discursive singularity. And indeed, sites and cities emerging from conflict bear similar traumas upon their physical landscapes, such as the bullet holes that still riddle the side of the National Library in Sarajevo, Bosnia. In cases of natural disasters, however, as Clive James above noted in Florence, symbolic landscapes such as have emerged in post-Katrina New Orleans are typically created inadvertently—there is no intentional agent driving or overseeing the manifestation of the waterline, for example, seeking to impart a specific political or ideological meaning. Rather, the symbolic dimension to the iconographic is added afterwards, in a retrospective process of constructing meaningful referents in a profoundly changed, often unrecognisable landscape. This process gives rise to a frequent phenomenon in disaster scenarios, the emergence of a discourse of time demarcated in relationship to the disaster—in other words, as noted above, Katrina impacts not just the history but the historiography of New Orleans by demarcating it into pre-disaster and post-disaster, or colloquially phrased, ‘pre-K’ and ‘post-K’. In examining the sense of place in post-Katrina New Orleans, Miller and Rivera have suggested that “The disaster landscapes exist not only as a structure but also as a parallel to the ‘normal structure’ (predisaster) as individuals constantly refer back to it as a reflexive notion of the way reality ought to be represented” (Miller and Rivera 2007: 144). -75- In such contexts, natural disasters, like political regimes, do impart unique symbolic effects onto the landscape that can then be mobilised into a particular set of agendas or purposes by varying stakeholders—even if one disaster may have several different effects (or even absent ones) depending on the distributed multilocality of its impact. Due to its different topography the Mississippi and Alabama coastline, for instance, saw comparatively little flooding but comparatively greater damage from the storm surge, which led to a branding marked by the total obliteration of structures rather than their flooding—thus inscribing a different visual metonymy of absence than in New Orleans. The memorial response varied accordingly; while its city leaders also held traditional organised commemorative services of the kind detailed in the New Orleans context in Chapter 6 (Bohrer 2007), the city council of Biloxi, Mississippi also chose to monumentalise the impact by marking the peak height of the storm surge on municipal light poles (Creel 2008). Whether certain kinds of natural disasters always entail specific symbolic effects—whether earthquakes leave telltale visual signatures as would hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, or volcanic eruptions, and whether those are taken up as similar symbolic referents— are questions outside the scope of this dissertation. But in this context the local use of these symbolic effects must not be understated, given their lack of intentional authorship, their nascent ambiguity, and their subsequent openness to interpretation and reinterpretation. In this sense, they too behave as texts, therefore it is worth investigating how they function. To conclude this chapter, and to set the stage for the three main data chapters on specific forms of cultural expression in New Orleans, I investigate a discursive sign that emerged almost immediately after the storm and which has characterised the rebuilding process ever since: the linguistic particle re-. -76- Figures 2.21, 2.22: Photographs of first-year anniversary commemoration service of Hurricane Katrina, with ‘Renew, Rebuild, Restore’ slogan, 29 August 2006. -77- Figure 2.23: T-shirt with the slogan ‘renew orleans’ (undated). -78- Many of the challenges of writing any post-Katrina narrative, whether scholarly or lay, journalistic or literary, can be refracted through this overworked linguistic particle. Though again, as with the visual signatures of the storm, the grounds for its appearance cannot be ascribed to a single intentional agent, the wake of the storm brought a marked rise in the use of words preceded by the addition of re: an abbreviated list includes words such as rebuilding, reconstruction, repairing, renewal, revival, restoration, revitalisation, relief, return, rebirth, remembrance, repopulation, and recovery. (As an aside, with the exception of this section, these words are used unironically in this dissertation.) The Mayor’s office under then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin chose it for the theme of the first three commemorations of the storm, with the slogan RENEW, REBUILD, RESTORE (Figures 2.21, 2.22) on the first anniversary; the slogan RECOVERY AND REBUILDING on the second; and the slogan RETHINK, RENEW, REVIVE on the third. In a like manner, one of the most popular items of apparel as the rebuilding process took shape were t-shirts (and other items) whose sale benefitted the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund (detailed in Chapter 4), with the logo ‘renew orleans’, whose visual design foregrounded the particle even as it punned on the portmanteau of the city’s name (Figure 2.23; Ropeadope 2006). But more than just referring to the physical, social, and infrastructural work of rebuilding the city and the concomitant sense of restoring the city to its pre-Katrina past—itself a contested prospect, as Miller and Rivera (2007) argued above—this particle also reinscribed the sense of historicity back into the discourse of post-Katrina New Orleans. For the re functions to reify what came before it, enshrining it and venerating it—as Viejo-Rose (2009) signaled above, for a site or structure to be re-constructed requires that it be originally constructed in the first place, invoking an aspect of the city’s past that warrants intervention and salvage after the disaster. Buried within in the syntactic work of the particle is the suggestion, however latent, that this kind of disaster had not only happened before but could well do so again: the use of the ‘re’ harbours an implicit warning that the environmental risks the city faced might well return under the right conditions, and in even more devastating form (as nearly transpired with Hurricane -79- Gustav in 2008). Rarely acknowledged in public discourse, this aspect of the re underwent a process of implicit forgetting in favour of the other, more uplifting terms which it proceded. Granted, as the floodwaters inhabited the city, municipal leaders would hardly have entertained a public discussion about the impending re-destruction of the city. But the re also served as a locus of public knowledge, in that it inscribed a form of cyclical, longue-durée cognition, reinscribing in the public imagination (as argued in Chapter 1) the understanding that there is no such thing as a natural disaster: that the human-made, technocratic elements that contribute to a disaster are latent in a given landscape, manifesting when the conditions are ideal. In this sense, amid its heritage of disaster detailed above, the ‘re’ suggests that New Orleans does not experience new disasters, only reinventions of old disasters in new contexts. Thus for a traumatic event like Katrina to strike a historic city whose historic value depends in part on its antihistoricity—the discourse that it is an unnatural city, defying the odds even though the deck is stacked against it—for a traumatic, even historic event to take place here is only to recapitulate that sense of antihistory back into its cultural framework. To ask what the impact of mitigating against that history would be is not obscene, even counterfactually: were New Orleans rebuilt to be the model of clean, sanitised, low-impact settlement, of habitation with nature rather than against it, would it cease to be New Orleans? Would it be possible to mark a day in which this ‘unnatural’ metropolis became natural, or naturalised, and would that day warrant a celebration or a period of mourning? Whether these considerations suggest in turn that such cyclical thinking, the close interrogation of the ‘re’, could be put to constructive use in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, however, is another question—one that is taken up in the examination of specific sectors of cultural devastation and recovery. To these sectors in the next three chapters, examining the celebrated pillars of New Orleans’ cultural heritage, I now turn. -80- Chapter 3: Hurricane Katrina and the Culinary Arts In New Orleans, food is culture. Food is family. Food is comfort. Food is life. —Bienvenu & Walker 2008: 10 Prologue: Tacos or Po-boys? Amid these rebuilding efforts, the summer of 2007 saw a peculiar controversy arise about one aspect in particular. After Katrina, as Fussell (2007) has documented, unskilled labourers from Mexico and Central America began to immigrate to New Orleans in search of work. Forming the backbone of much of the manual labour involved in physically rebuilding the city— gutting, roofing, plastering, and so forth—these labourers were accompanied by economic enterprises that sought to cater to their specific needs (as workers often with little English- language ability or few social networks in the city). Among these enterprises were taquerias, mobile taco trucks that would drive to high-traffic areas during the workday lunch hour and serve freshly made tacos both to these workers and to locals alike, quickly becoming regular (if transient) features of the landscape (Figure 3.1). In July 2007, however, health inspectors from Jefferson Parish changed local laws regarding food distribution permits in order to forcibly relocate the taquerias out of Jefferson Parish and into neighbouring Orleans Parish. Widely criticised both in and by local print media for the decision, the Jefferson Parish Council’s decision sparked off a controversy in which the field of debate was less concerned with the alleged reasons behind the legal decision (ostensibly, to regularise sanitation and economic activity in the parish) than with issues of culture. Speaking out in support of the Jefferson Parish Council’s decision, then-City Councilman Oliver Thomas wondered publicly, “How do the tacos help gumbo?” (quoted in Elie 2007) -81- Figure 3.1: Tres Banderas taqueria. Undated photograph by John McCusker. Thomas’ words are remarkable: not only did they betray a resistance to the incorporation of another influence into the city’s celebrated mosaic of culinary traditions, they set up a false polarisation between culinary traditions (Latin culture means tacos, New Orleans means gumbo), artificially antagonising them and derogating the efforts to make those individuals undertaking the strenuous manual labour of rebuilding the city feel welcome in an unfamiliar setting. The Jefferson Parish Council—and Thomas—were met with an overwhelming show of public support for the taquerias (and the labourers, as Meeks (2007) notes), including by the editors of the Times-Picayune, whose editorial entitled “Tacos and po-boys can coexist” closed with this claim: “New Orleans is no stranger to food on-the-go—from Lucky dogs to po-boys to sno-balls. And a city that has melded French, Spanish, African, Italian, Irish, Vietnamese and a host of other cultures to beautiful effect ought to be willing to add one more.” (New Orleans Times- Picayune 2007) The argument takes two approaches: first, it pays homage to the city’s rich culinary heritage as a field on which citizens of all backgrounds can gather and commune, and second, it looks towards a future in which this heritage does not remain static or fixed. Rather, the outcry -82- claimed, the culinary arts in New Orleans must continue to evolve because that is precisely what has always happened: the present culinary heritage could not have evolved without just these kinds of encounters over years of immigration and experimentation. This chapter investigates that heritage of the culinary arts as a heritage in which tradition and improvisation merge in complex ways, nowhere more than in the post-Katrina context. In looking at the history of New Orleans’ culinary arts I establish a ground on which the transformations wrought by the storm can be understood; this analysis shows that Katrina’s impacts in this sector have resulted in both small- and large-scale changes to the city’s physical fabric of the culinary arts, but have also led to a revitalised local and national interest in that heritage as a result. After an overview of the literature taking food as a cultural signifier of identity, iconicity, and a sense of place, I provide a brief history of New Orleans’ culinary traditions prior to the storm. Then, I detail the specific impacts of the storm on three aspects of the culinary sector in particular—the impacts on the city’s restaurants and subsequent issues faced by local neighbourhoods, the impacts on specific recipes and the attempts to reclaim those forms of heritage, and finally, the new forms of culinary arts and craft that have emerged as a result of the storm. This broader picture sets the context for an examination of two specific forms of infrastructure that have emerged since the storm to support foodways in the city, food museums and public markets. Examining these two forms reveals the political and historical complexity of assessing foodways both before and after the storm in an urban context where a meal is (as noted above) never just a meal. The conclusion of this chapter adopts the metaphorical ecology of heritage in order to account for the impacts on the extant heritage and the evolution of new styles, reconsidering tacos and gumbo. For tacos help gumbo not just by nourishing the individuals that have undertaken the physical work of rebuilding New Orleans, but also by reinforcing its history, its heritage, and its image as a unique place where diverse traditions productively collide and commingle to produce new outcomes, new ideas, and new opportunities. In other words, tacos help gumbo first by being made, and then by being eaten. -83- 3.1. Foodways and Heritage Responding to a dearth in early scholarship on the culinary arts (Beriss & Sutton 2007: 4- 7), recent years have seen a corresponding rise in studies exploring the role of foodways in creating and sustaining memory, identity, and community (Caplan 1997, Warde 1997). Due in part to their rich, multi-sited avenues for analysis—studies of culinary arts and foodways approach a range of topics: recipes, restaurants, staff and personnel, menus, local providers and farmers, wider cultural and urban contexts of food, senses of space and place, and of course, the act of consumption itself—foodways are a subject into which heritage studies has yet to make an explicit entry. As Sutton (2001: 6) argues: This ability of food to both generate subjective commentary and encode powerful meanings would seemingly make it ideal to wed to the topic of memory. Memory and its oft forgotten alter-ego ‘forgetting’ generate popular interest and commentary while simultaneously encoding hidden meanings. Like food, memory is clearly linked to issues of identity: gender, class, and other. Yet one roams far and wide in scholarly studies of food to find discussions of the perception of foods past. Sutton does concede the nostalgic impulse often offered by food (2001: 7), a topic I return to later, but his claim can be extended to heritage studies more broadly. As Trubeck has suggested in her work examining culinary contexts and taste in France, concepts such as terroir and goût de terroir, far from simply being identifying labels on packaging or romanticised descriptions of a favourite food, are instead “…categories for framing and explaining people’s relationship to the land, be it sensual, practical, or habitual” (Trubeck 2008: 18). Food then reflects a system of relationships regarding physical, economic, symbolic and mnemonic landscapes: certain dishes signify certain places, just as the skill involved in preparing those dishes is a marker of traditions handed down from generations—a heritage of culinary craft, understanding, and knowledge. Moreover, culinary tourism can be a powerful economic driving force for a city or region, heralded by development agencies as part of the heritage of a place. Consequently when these different landscapes are disrupted by disaster, then they too alongside the physical landscape become equally in need of repair. Few studies have undertaken -84- the task of integrating these issues into post-disaster frameworks, however, tending to focus instead on the physical and infrastructural challenges faced by emergency authorities in re- establishing lines of supply, sanitation and food security (Pyles et al 2008; Hom et al 2008; Dalton et al 2008; and de Haen and Hemrich 2007). I here redress that need, arguing for a revised understanding of the role of culinary arts as a salient (if distributed and multi-sited) feature of a heritage landscape in the rebuilding process after a disaster. To do so, however, an overview of food in this particular place is in order. 3.2: New Orleans Cuisine, Past and Present There is no history of New Orleans cuisine. No two accounts agree perfectly; rather, every two accounts converge and diverge in the narrative of influence, experimentation, improvisation, source of materials, and historical timing (equally of the arrival of new immigrant populations and of when to add water to dough). In a context in which diversity is the rule, rather than the exception, to write any one authoritative history of the city’s culinary traditions is to embark upon an endeavour which is as misguided as it is impossible. Indeed, the only constant theme serving as a common ground across histories of New Orleans’ cuisine is change—providing a provocative, if elegaic, backdrop to a history which attempts to write Katrina’s effects into the larger narrative—consequently, following the principle of Borges’ map, the only source of these histories would necessarily be the cookbooks of New Orleans’ cuisine themselves. That said, wider trajectories within the history of New Orleans foodways—migration, materiality, and metaphor—do merit analysis. As noted in Chapter 2, Dessens (2007) has detailed part of the early history of widespread migration from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America which led to the assemblage and intermingling of races, nationalities, and customs in New Orleans. Creolisation, as noted, was not limited to bloodlines. -85- Cookery… follows the same syncretic principle, where the African and European practices mix, borrowing from the local products. … Creole cuisine, defined as a mixing of influences, had been ‘created from the cultural memory of cooking in African combined with the acculturated tastes and ingredients from indigenous peoples in the Caribbean.’ The refugees are credited with introducing into Louisiana a ‘new emphasis on the culinary arts,’ as they did on other forms of less prosaic arts. (Dessens 2007: 157-8) This process of migration, resettlement, and adaptation, chronicled here at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, has recurred throughout New Orleans’ history. “More than any history book,” writes Bustillo, “New Orleans’ cuisine has memorialized the waves of immigration that shaped and reshaped the old colonial port. The Creoles’ jambalaya remade Spaniards’ paella with Caribbean spices. The Cajuns’ gumbo melded andouille sausage with African okra and sassafras leaves from Choctaw Indians.” (Bustillo 2007) Though the substantial differences between contemporary Creole and Cajun cuisine are frequently elided in popular discourse (the former refers to local dishes descending from French haute cuisine cooking such as daube glacé; the latter is more rustic, spicier food whose ancestry is linked to the southward migration of French Acadian settlers from Canada), they have still come to represent New Orleans on a national and international scale. With this heritage has come an emphasis on tourism (which dates at least to the 19th century (Boyer 1994: 326)), as the styles of cooking that characterise New Orleans cuisine often may only be sampled in New Orleans (due partly to the combination of local ingredients and local expertise)—adding a dimension of urgency to the rebuilding efforts after Katrina in order to preserve this heritage from loss due to displacement of a chef, the loss of an ingredient, or the closure of a beloved restaurant. The second factor characterising New Orleans’ cuisine are its physical spaces, in that the history and historiography of New Orleans’ food is intertwined with the historic restaurants, bars, hotels, saloons and even private residences in which these drinking and dining establishments are found. As historians such as McCaffety (2001) have noted, restaurants across the culinary spectrum in New Orleans—from haute cuisine establishments like Brennan’s, Galatoire’s, and Commander’s Palace to the corner bars and po-boy shops found in every neighbourhood in the -86- city—have become, like the dishes they serve, synonymous with the city’s culinary heritage in particular and its cultural heritage in general. Referring to a handful of restaurants in the Mid-City neighbourhood, Piazza argues that “Each of these restaurants is, in all its idiosyncrasy, part of a larger fabric, a culture of food, but whose meaning extends beyond food, as may be said of almost all aspects of New Orleans culture. A family is a culture, a language is a culture, and the food of New Orleans is a language…” (Piazza 2006: 22) Many of these establishments are situated in buildings that would be eligible for historic preservation by national statutes, yet it is their continued operation both before and after the storm that imbues them with their resonance of heritage. But these spaces are not confined to within the walls of a building: as I detail in Chapter 4, the street itself is a space where New Orleanians have long met to cook, eat, and socialise. For now, however, it is important to note that during public processions throughout the year residents are prone to erect impromptu cooking equipment in the neutral ground between streets and cook and sell food from there. This tradition reflects more broadly, as Piazza (2006) and Wagner (2006) have noted, the intertwining of forms of local culture in New Orleans: a musical event becomes an opportunity to take part in a culinary tradition. The seamlessness of these aspects of culture is reflected in the most ubiquitous metaphor used to refer to the city’s culinary heritage in particular and its cultural heritage at large: the metaphor of New Orleans as a ‘gumbo.’ This phrase, found across levels of discourse, has long been used as shorthand for the commingling of nationalities, ethnicities, architectural styles, religious beliefs, culinary traditions, and musical influences in the city. “When writers, ethnographers, cultural historians, or journalist [sic] cast around for a metaphor to describe the racial/cultural/spiritual hodgepodge that makes up New Orleans,” McKinney writes, ...the most common one they seize upon is the indigenous stew ‘gumbo.’ Creole cuisine offers up particularly apt figures of speech because form fits content: Creole cuisine, with its blending of French, Spanish, African, Native American, Caribbean and Acadian elements, expresses the very make-up of New Orleans’ present-day population. (McKinney 2006: 11-12) -87- Percy offers one example, suggesting that “the city is a most peculiar concoction of exotic and American ingredients, a gumbo of stray chunks of the South, of Latin and Negro oddments, German and Irish morsels, all swimming in a fairly standard American soup. What is interesting is that none of the ingredients has overpowered the gumbo, yet each has flavored the others and been flavored.” (Percy 2001a: 12) McKinney later refers to gumbo as ‘the truly multicultural dish’ (McKinney 2006: 12); after the storm, however, gumbo (illustrated in Figure 3.2) has been used both in a celebratory framework and as a provocation. To refer to New Orleans as a ‘gumbo’ in this sense is both to centralise and re-privilege its intangible heritage in the veins mentioned above, at the same time as it is to critique attempts to rebuild the city in any way that would jeopardise this heritage. In other words, to speak of gumbo in its metaphorical sense is to raise the spectre of a poorly made gumbo: the inauthentic city, the ‘Disneyfied’ New Orleans. In order to more closely examine this relationship, the next section details the impacts of the storm. Figure 3.2: Pot of gumbo (recipe by author), 20 February 2010. Photograph by Helen Mort. -88- 3.3. Katrina’s Impacts on the Culinary Industries “It is an understatement,” Anderson argues, “to say that Katrina took life out of New Orleans’ famously alive restaurant culture. Before Katrina, New Orleans had arguably more great restaurants per capita than any city in America. After Katrina, New Orleans was eighty percent under water. For a brief eternity, there were no restaurants.” (Anderson 2008a: 69) Anderson suggests that three years after the storm, there was no greater evidence of the city’s recovery than “around tables where food is served today,” but even as of this writing in early 2010 the devastation still lingers in complex ways. The most central aspect of the storm’s impacts in this sector was, paradoxically, its multi-sited aspect: Katrina destroyed with equal fury physical buildings, structures, and equipment; disrupted production industries such as agriculture and seafood; rerouted or cut lines of supply on which restaurants are dependent; scattered trained personnel (chefs, managers, and wait staff alike) across the country and jeopardised their livelihoods; eradicated local customer bases; and devalued both property-based and liquid assets. Due to the complexity of these impacts, no restaurant or bar emerged unscathed in some way from the storm. To open this totality up for analysis, I first consider Katrina’s impacts on restaurants, impacts that one food critic has claimed are resolved (Fitzmorris 2007); I then examine the impacts on the food itself and the way Katrina recalibrated local and national attitudes towards specific dishes; and finally, the way in which Katrina gave rise to new culinary styles and initiatives that otherwise would not have existed but for the storm. -89- Figure 3.3: Dooky Chase Restaurant, Orleans Avenue, 8 May 2006. Figure 3.4: Angelo Brocato Ice Cream Parlor, Carrolton Avenue. Undated photograph. -90- 3.3.1: Impacts on Restaurants “If I don’t get back on that corner,” said restaurateur Leah Chase, owner of the then- destroyed restaurant Dooky Chase, “there is no neighborhood” (quoted in S. Johnson 2006). Nor were her words, nine months after the storm, an exaggeration. Dooky Chase (Figure 3.3) has long been one of the most eminent Creole restaurants in New Orleans: on the corner of Orleans Avenue and North Miro in the heart of the historic Tremé neighbourhood it has long been patronised by locals, visitors, and even American presidents alike (Hammer 2007). In this sense, it is one of the restaurants that ‘speaks’ New Orleans in the way Beriss & Sutton (2007) above characterised. But examined more closely, Chase’s claim expresses the challenges of the rebuilding process, namely, rebuilding the way that a restaurant operates on multiple levels at once. For a restaurant is less a building or a kitchen per se than a catalyst for what happens inside and around it: the production of culture itself, and the building of community that shares that culture. As Beriss & Sutton have argued, “Restaurants can define urban landscapes, reflecting and shaping the character of neighborhoods or even the reputation of whole cities and regions. In many cases, restaurateurs and their clients collaborate self-consciously at a variety of levels in creating this thoroughly postmodern performance.” (Beriss & Sutton 2007: 3) In this instance, Dooky Chase operated on three overlapping levels: as a restaurant synonymous with the city itself (the level of representative iconicity), as an anchor of activity for a particular neighborhood of that city (the level of local community), but equally, as a site for the sharing of traditions, forms of knowledge, and memories within and across generations (the level of heritage). Restaurants and bars have long played these roles in New Orleans independently of disaster; as Nossiter noted on the reopening of Angelo Brocato’s Italian Ice Cream Parlor in Mid-City (Figure 3.4), “tastes, collectively remembered, underpin the social fabric here, as much as any precious monument or institution.” (Nossiter 2006) -91- Restaurants and bars in New Orleans faced challenges rebuilding along these intangible axes as well as the conventional economic and infrastructural ones, though in the immediate aftermath of the storm they adopted unanticipated and unconventional roles: as meeting points, relief agency headquarters, locations for information exchange, and resupply depots for citizens, law enforcement, media personnel, and emergency workers alike. Due to the damage to their facilities, some restaurants physically relocated to outside their walls, setting up operations in the neutral ground (the local term for the median of a street, used throughout this dissertation) in order to provide meals for emergency personnel and first responders—in one instance, as Prudhomme recalled, of red beans and rice, a traditional New Orleans dish. (Prudhomme 2006: 72). Such actions illustrate the claim that a restaurant is more than its building and that a meal is more than just bare nourishment, but as well provide a counterpoint to the tradition (mentioned above) of cooking in neutral grounds during parades and processions. Cooking and eating in the middle of a storm-ravaged street became a response to, even a protest against, the devastation surrounding it, both literally and symbolically. Inside the restaurants that were still operational (even if on a reduced scale) after the storm, however, other roles were emerging. Codrescu has described the conversion of Molly’s at the Market, a bar on Decatur Street in the Vieux Carré, from a casual watering hole into a haven for all responders, including security personnel, journalists, and revelers from the annual Southern Decadence Festival: “Molly’s stayed open throughout [the aftermath],” he writes, “and it became much more than a bar; it was a community center, a clearinghouse, a gathering place for the world press, and a space for solace, comfort, and a drink” (Codrescu 2006a: 10). Nor was Molly’s an exception, being spared by its location on high ground and enjoying its access to donations and deliveries of alcohol. McNulty has noted the widespread nature of this phenomenon, describing how in the aftermath of the storm, “through all the darkness and fear, the best moments of encouragement and happiness came more often from bars and restaurants than anywhere else. The city’s eating and drinking -92- places were the fires around which we circled for reminders of the city’s life and culture before the storm, for company and sometimes literally for warmth.” (McNulty 2008: 74) The storm thus transformed the physical site of the restaurant or bar in radical and unanticipated ways; across the city, but especially in the areas where relief operations were staged, they became more than places to eat and interact with others. In a sense, they became a place to interact first and then eat. “Those returning flocked to restaurants,” note Beriss & Sutton, seeking the camaraderie of other New Orleanians, and conversing with complete strangers at bars and at nearby tables about their experiences. Sharing emblematic local foods in reopened restaurants proved to be an essential part of reconnecting with the city … If eating out was a major part of social life in New Orleans before Katrina, after the disaster, eating in restaurants turned into one of the central ways the city’s social fabric was to be rewoven. (Beriss & Sutton 2007: 1-2) Restaurants were thus imbued with social and political urgency, furthermore creating a space whereby public and private memories of experiences during the storm would not only be generated but where they would later become part of the fabric of that institution. These memories have become as much a part of any one restaurant or bar’s heritage as any history of what dishes have been served, who has dined there, or which family has owned and operated it. McNulty has also suggested that privately, the experience of visiting or discovering a recently- reopened restaurant for the first time became as well a cause for and source of celebration, feeding into the narrative history of each of those establishments and also becoming a part of their intangible heritage (McNulty 2008: 81-82). Normally this process would be unremarkable, in that restaurants open, close, and reopen on a regular basis, but the catalysing force of the storm—the way life was impassably divided into pre- and post-Katrina, as noted in chapter 2— has rendered the post-Katrina encounter of a restaurant qualitatively different than a pre-Katrina visit to the same one. As the recovery process began to take shape, Chef Emeril Lagasse (2006) argued New Orleans’ restaurants were the main inspiration for rebuilding the city, offering anecdotal testimony from restaurant owners and patrons alike. Local and national fanfare followed the -93- rebuilding process of the restaurant industry; Bienvenu and Walker report that “Each time one of the city’s world-class restaurants reopened its doors, it would immediately become packed with patrons desperate for some sense of normalcy, and longing to celebrate their traditions amid the ruins” (Bienvenu and Walker 2008: 10). In particular, Beriss & Sutton have noted that “[the] reopening of the totemic old-line Creole restaurants was celebrated as a sign of the city’s resilience” (Beriss & Sutton 2007: 2). Yet this gesture of metonymic linkage between specific restaurants and neighbourhoods and the city’s identity (such as Galatoire’s in the Vieux Carré) has replayed a recurrent narrative, detailed in Chapters 2 and 4, that the Vieux Carré is the most suitable representation for the tourist economy, as opposed to lower-profile, yet more traditional neighbourhoods (DeMond & Rivera 2007). For the fanfare that accompanied these reopenings obscured underlying challenges that the rebuilding process had not addressed, such as the fact that “the city’s African-American cultural framework had been dangerously damaged” (Beriss & Sutton 2007: 2-3). Despite these occluded challenges, the storm renewed national and international interest in the ‘brand’ of New Orleans’ cuisine—interest which was quickly developed by the Bring New Orleans Back Commission Cultural Committee and the state Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism (further detailed in Chapter 7). Both these institutions cited Cajun and Creole cuisine as major draws for tourism and subsequent post- storm development (DCRT 2006, BNOB Cultural Committee 2006). Such citations have extended Boyer’s (1994) acknowledgment of the long tradition of culinary tourism in New Orleans: yet the post-Katrina culinary tourist would dine out with a purpose, to actively contribute to the rebuilding process. Questions over the role of tourism have, as I note throughout this dissertation, been paired with questions about authenticity. In other sectors, the concern behind this question has stemmed from the fact that it remains unresolved: that four years on, the rebuilding process is not yet complete. But critics have begun to argue otherwise with respect to the culinary arts: in the summer of 2007, two years after the storm, Fitzmorris declared the recovery of New -94- Orleans’ restaurants complete insofar as all establishments that were intending to reopen had done so and all those which had closed had closed permanently (Fitzmorris 2007). No uncertainty, in other words, remained in the physical landscape of the city’s culinary industry. Two developments have reinforced this view: the first came when Zagat published its first ratings of local restaurants post-Katrina, encouraging readers of its famed restaurant reviews to travel to New Orleans and patronise its restaurants as “[the] patriotic thing to do” (Pope 2007). The second development came in July 2008, when the Times-Picayune resumed its reviews under the stewardship of Brett Anderson (whose work appears in several places in this dissertation). Anderson claimed that during the first long phase of recovery, his efforts were better spent reporting on the rebuilding of restaurants than critiquing their meals, service, or décor: “If I started back pontificating about whether the panéed rabbit was up to snuff,” he said, “I would have been missing the bigger story, which was about recovery” (quoted in Severson 2008). While Fitzmorris’ assertion, and Anderson’s decision, provide an ideal way to account for this sector— if the narrative is bounded on both ends, with delimitations on the impact and the recovery— they remain incomplete. For neither takes into account the other landscapes which overlap in the production and consumption of food: the symbolic, the mnemonic, and the social, as noted above. In order to explore this overlap more fully I now consider recipes. 3.3.2: Impacts on Recipes If the restaurant operates as a space through which people flow—in which residents and visitors can reconnect with identities, memories, and communities alike—then it serves as a social and cultural catalyst as much as a site of economic exchange and consumption. “[In] a world in which self-identity and place-identity are woven through webs of consumption,” Bell and Valentine have argued, “what we eat (and where, and why) signals, as the aphorism says, who we are.” (Bell and Valentine 1997: 3) But what, where, and why we eat is not enough, either; how we prepare it, too, is an integral aspect of this signaling process—especially in New Orleans, -95- as I argued above, with its long history of mingling culinary styles and traditions that have given rise to its collective contemporary kitchen. That thousands of kitchens in private residences across the city, however (not just in restaurants and bars), suffered damage in the storm entails a corresponding kind of damage to the individual psyche. For families scattered across the country in the weeks and months after the storm, what they could not eat equally signalled ‘who they were,’ in that the absence of ingredients and utensils necessary to prepare beloved dishes, dishes crucial to a sense of maintaining their identity under dislocation and extreme stress and was as powerful a force as any sense of political or ideological disruption. Patti Tobias, a New Orleans resident whose family relocated to Alaska, has noted that what she craved most in her absence were “things only New Orleans has”, which included “Patton’s hot sausage, the Swiss bakery, po-boys at the corner store and pralines.” (quoted in Tilove 2008). Both residents that had returned to New Orleans and families and communities remaining in diaspora faced numerous challenges to their ability to prepare the dishes that would reaffirm their links with the city. Amid this adversity, however, individuals and institutions continually attempted to relocate and reassemble their collections of recipes that ‘signaled’ New Orleans. For those suffering physical and emotional separation from the city, the recipe became more than a mere scrap of paper on which were scrawled measurements, temperatures, and ingredients. For considered more fully, the recipe serves as a bridge between text, material, and performance. It is at once a written document and a record, a memory of a particular dish or meal transcribed; it is an archive passed down continually through generations; it is a physical artefact with its own material history (and for those recipe collections that survived the storm, a materiality transformed by the floodwaters, mould, and rot); and most importantly, it is a set of instructions on how to prepare a dish: an expression of craft, community, and identity. This last aspect became the most salient after the storm, as individuals and communities sought to heal their traumatised identities through the cooking, eating, and sharing of food. The recipe box in particular—a frequent talisman sought by returnees to the city once the floodwaters receded— -96- became an archive of personal and collective memory, of remembrance of meals past but also of family and neighbourhood continuity and heritage. One former resident of Lakeview noted that in her searching on the Internet to find lost recipes, “I wanted to provide something of normality for my kids and my husband and to feel like we’re not on the road anymore.” (Brooks 2006: A7) This section therefore examines several initiatives put forth to reclaim this sense of identity and heritage as found in recipes in order to delve into this process more deeply. The first major initiative put forth in order to reconnect New Orleanians with specific local dishes, and thereby with their identities in diaspora, was the simultaneous effort to restore lost archives (personal and institutional) and to assemble new ones. The process began quickly: even before the floodwaters had receded, the Times-Picayune mobilised its resources to reclaim readers’ recipes that had been lost, damaged, or abandoned in the storm. Bienvenu and Walker detail how “a frenetic dialogue immediately commenced with readers” seeking to replace their recipe collections, and by October 2005, two months after Katrina made landfall, the newspaper had inaugurated a print forum dedicated to the sharing, exchange, recovery, and reclamation of recipes (Bienvenu and Walker 2008: 10). Over time “Exchange Alley” grew large enough that residents began to call for more; “As dozens of these letters arrived,” write Bienvenu and Walker, “a portrait began to emerge of a community trying to rebuild its rich culinary history, one lost recipe and one comfort meal at a time.” (ibid: 12). Eventually resulting in a new cookbook of many of these entries—in other words, a new archive whose entries were assembled not just out of the recipes lost in the storm, but the narratives of readers undergoing the storm and reporting their losses as well—its authors claim that their cookbook “tells the story, recipe by recipe, of one of the great food cities in the world, and the determination of its citizens, in the face of adversity, to preserve and safeguard their culinary legacy.” (ibid. 2008: 13) Such claims must be taken with a grain of salt, given the necessarily selective and fragmentary nature of writing any narrative, much less the narrative of disaster (as Blanchot (1995) has argued). It is important to note, however, the trope of ‘one meal at a time’ or ‘one recipe at a time’—or one anything ‘at a -97- time’, whether rebuilt house, debris-cleared street, musical note—was widespread in the discourse of rebuilding. The curators of an exhibition at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (detailed below) echoed it as well, claiming that in feeding New Orleanians, local restaurants were “…healing the spirits of the city one meal at a time.” (Southern Food and Beverage Museum 2007). The second major initiative, taking place on the one-year anniversary of the storm, was Justin Lundgren’s ‘Katrina Dinner 2006’ project. Inspired by the Passover Seder and intended to reach displaced New Orleanians all over the country, Lundgren had proposed a multi-course dinner to be held on August 29, 2006 featuring traditional dishes, readings, rituals, blessings, and local musical selections to play during the meal. “How powerful would it be,” Lundgren wrote, if every New Orleanian currently living in Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and every other town across the country sat down at the same time to recognize the losses of the last year and to reaffirm their connection to the city? … The entire New Orleans diaspora could sit down simultaneously, fork in hand, to tell the world that this was a special place, a special community, one worth fighting to restore. (quoted in Walker 2006) Followed by five ritual questions which were intended to reaffirm local identity in diaspora—why are we gathered here tonight? why did this happen to us? should we live somewhere else? will the city ever be the same? and what can I do?—Lundgren’s initiative (not repeated in subsequent years, and unfortunately, no images of the ritual survive) did not just reflect the desire for the abovementioned integrative aspect of New Orleans’ culture to be made manifest. This initiative aimed furthermore to create a collective diasporic memory of the storm, and therefore to be able to generate and distribute a marker of that identity as residents in exile. Local chef and activist Poppy Tooker gave her recipe for ‘Diaspora Gumbo’ to the project: “Along with New Orleans essentials—red beans and rice and jambalaya,” she wrote upon its dissemination, “Diaspora Gumbo was designed as a formula wherein you’d ‘pick your diaspora by choosing from the following foods, depending on personal preference and availability to obtain ingredients in your evacuation site.’” (Tooker 2006) This recipe raises a provocative question about the immaterial nature of recipes, which I examine further at the end of this chapter, but for now it is sufficient -98- to note that Lundgren’s initiative further aimed to educate non-locals into New Orleans’ cultural traditions: by introducing local quotidian cultural practices into an extraordinary context, the ritual would become, upon its completion, both an occasion for mourning the missing city and an argument about identity politicised as a result of disaster. The third initiative is a newfound cultural and economic culinary festival, the ‘Po-Boy Preservation Festival,’ launched in late 2007 by the Oak Street Association in the Carrolton neighbourhood and repeated each year since. Celebrating one of New Orleans’ most famous and iconic meals—the po-boy is a sandwich made on light, flaky sandwich bread, and traditionally filled with fried shrimp, oysters, catfish, or roast beef alongside tomatoes, lettuce, and hot sauce (Figures 3.5, 3.6). Featuring local musicians such as Walter ‘Wolfman’ Washington who performed in support of the preservation effort, this festival sought to raise awareness of the vulnerable web of local livelihoods and traditions that contribute to making a po-boy. The po- boy embodies New Orleans partly because the bread for its construction is made only in the city and only by specific bakeries; for this reason, the po-boy is largely unavailable outside of New Orleans, further reinforcing its local iconicity. The concern, however, over escalating development by national chains making inroads into New Orleans’ streets and stomachs post- Katrina spurred on the organisers in part, said Jim Elliot, because “Po-boy shops get to that neighborhood feeling we have in this city … If those places go, we start looking more like Anywhere USA.” (quoted in McNulty 2007b). The fear that local tradition will be displaced by mass-market ones has played into rebuilding efforts in all sectors, the fear of losing local distinctiveness is intertwined with the fear of losing local economic activity. Yet Elliot’s words reflect the antinomious fear to that of the ‘Disneyfied’ New Orleans—if one interpretation of Disneyfication holds that the city becomes a parody of itself suitable only for tourists, then the converse interpretation holds that in becoming Anywhere USA, New Orleans becomes a version of no city at all, with not even a lost distinctiveness to distinguish it from other cities in the region. That said, the plethora of vendors (and eaters) that have attended the festivals suggests -99- that Elliot’s fears are overstated—but it is important to consider the collective effort to preserve a dish that, as McNulty (2007b) argues, is hardly in need of preservation at all. Like any iconic food (such as tacos or gumbo), the po-boy is best preserved by being eaten, not by being enshrined in a museum; I return to this tension at the end of the chapter. Figures 3.5, 3.6: Advertisements of the Po-Boy Preservation Festival, 2007, 2008. -100- 3.3.3: New Styles and Enterprises If the underlying response in the culinary sector after the storm was to return to the roots of local cooking, to try to reclaim local traditions in order to reconstruct an identity that could weather the storm’s individual and collective impacts—in some cases as a corrective to culinary styles that had already gone ‘far afield,’ as Severson (2008) notes about Chef John Besh—this response was matched by the creation of new styles, dishes, and enterprises that would not have existed but for the storm. These new creations have done as much to shape the culinary landscape of the city post-Katrina as those that have looked to the historic past for their inspiration. In this section I discuss selected cases of these initiatives to illustrate the ecological work of disaster: how as much as it can transform or destroy forms of heritage, it can simultaneously create new forms of heritage that occupy an important place in the evolving cultural landscape. The first new form of culinary heritage, arising immediately with the storm, was the Meal-Ready-to-Eat (MRE) emergency ration originally produced for the American armed forces, and post-Katrina, distributed widely by relief agencies and personnel. Keeping in tradition with New Orleans’ history of culinary experimentation, New Orleanians who had not evacuated began to develop new ways to manipulate the much-reviled, self-contained meals. The experience of eating an MRE is best left undescribed in this dissertation; suffice to say, the swiftness and gratitude with which residents employed the bottle of Tabasco hot sauce provided in each one was matched only by the desire to improvise upon the material culture of the ration itself. “The pouches and heating elements included in each MRE,” McNulty writes, “could easily be put to use to make a poached egg—not an easy trick to otherwise pull off in a house with a destroyed kitchen and no gas or electricity.” (McNulty 2008: 79) The MRE has become one of the iconic emblems of the aftermath, its plastic pouch reimagined into different forms of use by fashion designers. Shayt (2006) details how artists Heather Macfarlane and Mark Kirk used scavenged electrical cord to turn empty MREs into purses for sale, and later, deposition into the -101- Smithsonian Museum’s collection of Katrina artefacts (Shayt 2006: 367), detailed in Chapter 6. Other widely publicised new products included the Restoration Ale produced by Abita Breweries, and Absolut Spirits company’s ‘Absolut New Orleans,’ a flavoured vodka whose bottle was etched with a symbolic harmonica; profits from both beverages were donated to organisations such as Habitat for Humanity, the Tipitina’s Foundation, and the Louisiana Restaurant Association Education Foundation (Figures 3.7, 3.8; Faller 2007; Walker 2007). Amid this kind of improvisation, however, new restaurants and enterprises began to open across New Orleans, such as Hicham Khodr’s Table One in the Uptown neighbourhood (since closed) and Donald Link’s Cochon in the Central Business District, the latter of which has received critical acclaim for its emphasis on locally sourced pork and produce and innovative nouveau-Southern dishes. Furthermore, displaced chefs who were unable or chose not to return to New Orleans after the storm have opened New Orleans-themed restaurants across the country (a qualitatively different practice from extant restaurants expanding into new markets post-Katrina, as Anderson (2007b) details). Former residents of New Orleans opened restaurants in Katy, Texas, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee, serving traditional Cajun and Creole food, and frequently decorated with memorabilia and artefacts from the city. (Weber 2007, Braly 2007) Cultural dissonance experienced on both sides (by the diasporee and by the host community), however, have in some cases necessitated a degree of refinement to local custom: the head chef of The Augusta restaurant in Oxford, Iowa has noted that his experience relocating to a region with a different palate “…has told [him] not to make a spicy gumbo.” (Harrington 2008) But recalling the above arguments about restaurants, these restaurants are more than just eateries in the mercantile sense: due to the nature of their origins, these establishments serve as sites in which the public memory of the storm is promulgated and sustained. To patronise a restaurant founded by a Katrina evacuee is to be reminded that the effects of a natural disaster are no longer local, in that the restaurant would not have existed in that context but for that disaster. “We may never have ended up here,” said Halperin, “if it weren’t for Katrina.” (Harrington 2008) -102- Figure 3.7: Abita Springs Restoration Pale Ale. Undated photograph. Figure 3.8: Absolut New Orleans flavoured vodka. Undated image. -103- For proprietors who could not necessarily invest in a new establishment (regardless of its location), however, Katrina provided the opportunity to re-brand old menu items with new Katrina-themed names. The Little Tokyo restaurant (which had been a French steakhouse named Chateaubriand prior to the storm) changed the name of one of its traditional sushi dishes to the ‘FEMA roll,’ and Slim Goodies, a diner that reopened weeks after the storm, served a large ‘Contractor’s Breakfast’ and a ‘Katrina Combo’ among other similarly titled items (Andrews 2005), a practice that has been called “unappetizing” (McNulty 2007a). Even alcohol was not spared; Jumonville (2006) notes the ‘Katrina-Rita martini’ at the restaurant Bacco, a cocktail made of “Herradure, Triple Sec, Lemon and Lime Juice with a splash of Blue Curacao” (Jumonville 2006: 18). These practices have largely subsided, but it is important to understand their flip attitude not just as examples of the satiric gallows-humour present throughout New Orleans after the storm. Rather, they are also a coping mechanism in that they reflect a collective desire to display control over its impacts. This practice is not unique to food: as noted in Chapter 2, the tattoo industry reflects the widespread practice of residents and visitors (frequently volunteers) acquiring hurricane-themed tattoos as a means of ‘owning’ their experience of grief, displacement and loss. In the initial aftermath, to consume a Katrina-named or Katrina-themed meal was to ‘consume’ the storm; to overcome or show control over the loss and adversity it created by ingesting (and later excreting) its namesake. Such dishes—like Lundgren’s Katrina Dinner, but in a complementary way—thus brought a powerful psychosocial force to the otherwise hyperbolic discourse of ‘rebuilding New Orleans one plate at a time.’ The most famous meal in the city, however, is gumbo, so to conclude this section I examine the role of gumbo in representing New Orleans after the storm. As Roahen (2008) notes, locals and visitors alike have been arguing for years about what is a gumbo (both which ingredients constitute gumbo and how it is prepared), but to ask this question post-Katrina has invoked a range of new and different narratives about gumbo-making and gumbo-eating. One primary method of representing New Orleans to the rest of the country post-Katrina came (as -104- detailed in Chapter 2) in the use of gumbo both as a metaphor and as an argument. In this context, one of the most celebrated instances came in the introduction of the FOX network television series K-Ville, a fictional police drama set in New Orleans in the months after the storm (Lisco 2007). Rose (2007b) has amusingly described how the tradition of a neighborhood ‘gumbo party’ depicted in the show never actually existed either pre- or post-Katrina—unlike, for instance, a crawfish boil—but that this naïve, yet earnest, depiction on-screen led many New Orleanians who enjoyed the series to inaugurate the tradition during its weekly broadcast. Residents would gather each Monday night during the run of the series for bowls of gumbo (displacing, he points out, the decades-old tradition of red beans and rice on Mondays) and a collective viewing and satirising of the much-beloved drama. Acknowledging that part of the appeal of the party is the local willingness to celebrate for any reason—that an excuse to celebrate is never necessary but is always welcome—Rose still suggests that it is “amazing, really, that nobody thought of it before.” (Rose 2007b) Unfortunately for those who enjoyed their newfound tradition, and the opportunities for ridicule it provided, K-Ville was cancelled in early 2008 due to the Writer’s Guild of America strike, but the ‘gumbo party’ remains a provocative window into the city’s love affair with its cuisine. It reveals that the dialogue about the future of the city’s culinary arts after the storm drew in part on the stereotypes of what constituted ‘typical’ or ‘unique’ New Orleans dishes, a stereotype that in this instance residents were swift to embrace. Moreover, the question for both local and national audiences alike became therefore not merely what is gumbo but what is its importance—in other words, why gumbo? And finally, it suggests that ‘consumption’ of the storm is not limited to dishes named after Katrina, but includes as well the appropriation of narratives (including inaccurate ones) about the storm. It illustrates the capacity of a culture emerging from disaster to write and to rewrite narratives about that loss, and to (as Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (1999) argue) reassemble itself both historically and historiographically: a process that will too in time become part of its heritage. -105- 3.4: Culinary Infrastructure At the time of this writing, four years after the storm—with the first-responders eating in the neutral grounds having departed, restaurants having reopened or permanently closed, recipe- collection initiatives having shed their immediate urgency, and the resurgence of the tourist and convention industry to the city—it would seem that the narrative of the reconstruction of the culinary arts in New Orleans had concluded, putting to rest early fears that an irreplaceable aspect of New Orleans’ culture would be lost. But the challenges have not disappeared, rather, they have shifted location: in keeping with the challenges faced by the other culture sectors, the subsequent developments and challenges facing the culinary arts since Katrina have been primarily infrastructural. Prior to concluding this chapter, this section examines two developments in particular. First are the new institutions devoted to foodways that have opened: the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFAB) in the Riverwalk shopping centre in the Central Business District, and the Museum of the American Cocktail (MOTAC), a separate museum sharing facilities with SoFAB. Second are the local farmers’ markets and community agriculture groups across the city that have taken the storm as an opportunity to promote local produce, some re-emerging since Katrina and others emerging for the first time. 3.4.1: Culinary Museums Sponsored in part by the Southern Foodways Alliance, a regional culinary advocacy and preservation organisation, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (Figure 3.9) was founded in 2004 but opened its doors in June 2008 having been delayed by the storm. (The museum opened a temporary exhibition in New York City in the meantime.) Curatorially, the museum adopts an object-and-text-oriented design (along with facilities for tasting rooms and lectures), with a permanent exhibition entitled Laissez-Faire, Savoir-Faire on the foodways both of the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans. A major display in its permanent exhibition is its St Joseph’s altar, a shrine of Sicilian Catholic origin erected on St Joseph’s Day (19 March) with -106- offerings of food that are later redistributed into the community and to charity (Figure 3.10). The altar occupies a central place in the museum’s layout, serving as a focal point for its exploration of a tradition that comes from one distinct religious tradition but which has been adopted by the city. Despite the extent of the storm’s impacts, however, the shadow of Katrina does not loom overlarge within the museum: a small gallery exhibits photographs of beloved places, restaurants, and individuals lost in the storm (Figure 3.11). As these photographs are hung outside the main exhibition space, however, in a small side hall, the museum downplays the presence of the storm, as visitors to the museum easily pass by the hallway unaware it exists. Given the history of the museum’s efforts to publicise New Orleans’ plight after Katrina—it created the exhibition entitled Restaurant Restorative, a travelling (and later virtual) photography exhibition detailing the recovery of the city’s restaurants, what it propagandistically called “the first and best way to rebuild New Orleans” (Southern Food and Beverage Museum 2007: 1)— this curatorial departure remains unexplained. Figure 3.9: The Southern Food and Beverage Museum, 19 June 2008. -107- Figure 3.10: The St. Joseph’s Altar, Southern Food and Beverage Museum, 19 June 2008. Figure 3.11: Details of Katrina damage, Southern Food and Beverage Museum, 19 June 2008. -108- The Southern Food and Beverage Museum thus initially organised an effort to represent the storm, only to scale it back once the doors opened. The Museum of the American Cocktail, however, housed within the SoFAB, does not refer to Katrina at all. Its collection of historic bar implements, glasses, newspaper clippings, recipes, advertisements, liqueurs, and other evil spirits makes no reference to the storm; itself not unusual except insofar as (like SoFAB) the storm delayed the opening of the museum (exhibits had been displayed in the meantime at the Pharmacy Museum in the Vieux Carré, and in Las Vegas and New York (Raisfeld and Patronite 2006). But the storm is present nevertheless. The exhibition cites the apocryphal claim that the cocktail was invented in New Orleans, apocryphal because the precise origin is unclear, as Grimes (2001) argues, despite the numerous notable cocktails such as the Hurricane, the Sazerac, and the Ramos Gin Fizz that have come from the city. (The first of these drinks adheres to a famous local slogan: ‘In New Orleans, we don’t run from hurricanes, we drink them!’) This appeal to a specific vision of history constitutes a classic instance of celebrating a selective past in the interests of satisfying a present political agenda; to label New Orleans as the birthplace of the cocktail is simultaneously to reinforce the city’s claim to culinary uniqueness and to centralise the role of that institution as a part of the infrastructure of maintaining that claim. Channeling this invented history thus creates an invented heritage, in the service furthermore of tourism and economic regeneration. That said, one argument holds that this is the purpose of infrastructure: to support and enable the activity of a community without adversely impacting on the expression of the culture in that community. But it is notable that neither institution, as by-now established parts of the city’s culinary infrastructure (in terms of promotion and advocacy, collection and curation of material culture, and education and outreach with seminars and other programmes), takes a prominent lead in writing the effects of the storm into the history of which they too are one part. Though the storm conditioned their creation and execution, evidence of its impact in the contemporary displays of both museums remains absent. . -109- 3.4.2: Public Markets The other primary form of infrastructure that has emerged since the storm, the public farmers’ markets, has taken a more vigorous approach. This was partly due to the immediacy of their need: “The infrastructure collapse of the entire population being forcibly evacuated from the city,” said Richard McCarthy, of the non-governmental organisation MarketUmbrella.org, has meant that we have had to reinvent what our city is, and what our food distribution system looks like. So the market became immediately after the storm the place where funders would connect with grantees, where relief emergency organisations would find access to food. We were one of the first places you could buy fresh food in New Orleans before grocery stores could reopen, because of course all we need is supply, demand, and a parking lot. (Dillon 2008) Since Katrina these markets have grown in size, number, and frequency, and have sought to advance the recovery process by serving not just as a point of integration for a neighbourhood (like Dooky Chase cited above) but by serving as an incentive for those who have not yet decided to return to the city or to that neighbourhood. While these markets cannot compete on the same commercial scale as mechanised food distribution points such as national or even regional supermarket chains, this is not their aim. Rather, like restaurants in the immediate aftermath of the storm, they serve as places where residents come together to socialise, share information, and obtain supplies, offering an opportunity to serve all of these functions at the same time as displaying and contributing to the vitality of their respective neighbourhoods. In her report on the revival of the market system, Dillon (2008) quotes the public market organiser in Mid-City reinforcing the trope that Mid-City is known as ‘the heart of New Orleans, the heart of our recovery from Katrina’; boosterish though it may be, the literal truth of such a statement is subservient to the claim to cultural legitimacy it makes—especially to those residents of Mid- City who remain in diaspora. That measure of cultural legitimacy is further provided by the presence of New Orleans musicians at these markets, demonstrating furthermore the ‘unified field of culture’ described in chapter 2; at the newly-formed Sankofa Market in the Lower Ninth Ward in August 2008, the food vendors, clothing and craft artisans, religious organisations, and -110- public health representatives were joined by the Pinettes Brass Band who played traditional New Orleans brass music during the hours the market was open (Figure 3.12). The combination of these elements creates a singular phenomenal experience: a sensory infusion (sights, sounds, tastes, and smells) combined with the epistemological awareness repeated by market organisers and staff that this is a tangible illustration of the recovery process. Figure 3.12: The Pinettes Brass Band at the Sankofa Market, Lower Ninth Ward, 9 August 2008. -111- This aspect is compounded when the market is held inside a building that is part of the historic built environment, such as the original French Market in the Vieux Carré, a public produce, meat, seafood, and dry goods market originally built in 1781 and renovated in the 1970s under then-mayor Moon Landrieu. This renovation was one step in the ‘Disneyfication’ of the French Quarter, argues Souther: Landrieu “directed the renovation of the French Market into a festival marketplace, fashioned a flagstone-paved pedestrian mall from the streets bordering Jackson Square, and tried, unsuccessfully, to stage historical sound-and-light shows.” (Souther 2007: 809). Since Katrina, however, that trend has been reversed: the French Market Corporation (the private corporation responsible for the management of the market) has undertaken a $5M renovation to restore part of the facility to its former use as a fresh food market. Schwartz notes the significance of this restoration, in that “in addressing current needs, the French Market sought out past solutions and the reintroduction of fresh food” (Schwartz 2008:53). One sweets vendor even expressed the importance of specific foods to a sense of history and heritage: “Everything is indigenous to here,” Loretta Harrison said, “Pralines came right into the market by slaves. These are old products. It’s just like the red beans and rice and the gumbo, it makes New Orleans what it is. We can’t forget it.” (quoted in Schwartz 2008: 53) The fact that both museums and markets provide a physical meeting place in which residents may reconnect with their history and their heritage—to visit Loretta Harrison and purchase a praline entails more than a simple economic transaction—does not occlude the fact that the creation and maintenance of this infrastructure is politically determined. The French Market bears an uneasy relation to other neighbourhood markets—especially those which occupy equally historic structures as designated by the HDLC and the NRHP—such as the celebrated Circle Food Store on Claiborne Avenue, or the still-derelict St Roch Market building on St Claude Avenue (Figures 3.13, 3.14). Because St Roch has not yet been renovated, even despite a pro bono initiative to provide a blueprint for a sustainable renovation (Project New Orleans 2006)—community activists have instead held a market and neighbourhood festival in -112- the neutral ground behind the shuttered structure. The disparity between the renovations in the city’s tourist centre and the need for rebuilding projects to take place in less-redeveloped neighbourhoods contributes to the public sentiment that the municipal government tends to act in the interest of some areas rather than others, and that (as noted in Chapter 2) because the Vieux Carré ‘stands for’ or represents New Orleans more readily than a neighbourhood such as the Eighth Ward (where St Roch is located) then it will correspondingly receive prioritised resources. This sentiment has played out in numerous ways across the city—the public market system is but one arena—since the storm it has reinforced the view that portions of the city’s heritage are more marketable and worthy of preservation than others. As George Orwell might have phrased it, all heritage is equal, but some heritage is more equal than others. -113- Figure 3.13: Circle Food Mart, N. Claiborne Avenue and St. Bernard, 14 November 1954. Figure 3.14: St Roch Market, St. Claude Avenue (undated, 2006). -114- 3.5: Ecologies of the Table Since the storm, the culinary arts have played manifold roles in creating, reviving, and sustaining individual and communal links to cultural heritage. The physical space of the restaurant itself—in whatever form it takes, including a propane-fired grill in the middle of a street—has served as a site for the production of both personal and communal memory and identity. Furthermore, as sites for the creation and sharing of a heritage that is deeply tied to traditions handed down for generations, restaurants across the city have sought to preserve and maintain those links both during and after the disaster, cleaving to their status as part of the city’s heritage as the foundation for their recovery from loss. The re-forging of those links explains in part the innumerable spontaneous outbreaks of emotion (weeping, jubilation, and profound relief) residents experienced across New Orleans when their beloved restaurants began to reopen. Those links were not confined to the restaurant, however, as the individual meal itself became a signifier of meaning far beyond its component ingredients; as I have argued, to prepare a gumbo or mix a Sazerac cocktail after the storm became not just a literal part of the rebuilding process (giving residents the physical strength to continue rebuilding their homes) but an emotional and spiritual part as well, a powerful act of asserting one’s local—and hence political—identity, resilience, and resolve. These meals have had to undergo their own adjustments (e.g. diaspora gumbo, made with whatever ingredients are available wherever one was displaced), but they have remained faithful to their origins while evolving into a new form of documentation of a city whose cultural identity was not erased so much as reassembled. As Codrescu notes, this reassembly is not just local to southeastern Louisiana. In his humorous ‘Letter to America,’ written as an open letter to families across the United States who hosted Katrina evacuees in the weeks after the storm, he noted that a number of significant changes would occur as a result of their hospitality. Chief among them, he suggested, was that “Your food will get better”—as though this happened through an osmotic process catalysed by the presence of a New Orleanian in their household (Codrescu 2006b: 271). (Figure 3.15; -115- Piazza’s 2008 novel City of Refuge includes scenes involving fictional characters experiencing just this aftereffect.) Codrescu’s words recall the debate about tacos and gumbo detailed at the beginning of this chapter: even as he reinscribes the metonymic relationship between food and New Orleans (just as Oliver Thomas did), he simultaneously sets up an artificial polarisation between ‘our’ food and ‘your’ food—but here based on a framework of inclusion rather than exclusion, wherein, from the perspective of heritage ecology, the role of constructivist interactants is not simply recognised but embraced. Such a stance suggests furthermore that New Orleans’ heritage of diverse traditions collectively producing new forms of cuisine does not need to take place within the conventionally assumed geographical boundaries: the process of creolisation is not limited to those specific places in which Creole restaurants (of any kind) are found. As the earlier example of the Augusta restaurant shows, creolisation can take place in regions as remote and culturally distinct from New Orleans as midwestern Iowa. Figure 3.15: Political cartoon by Walt Handelsman on the effects of hospitality towards displaced New Orleanians. 2005. -116- For this process to function, however, certain elements are required. The primary one that I have detailed is infrastructure—physical and conceptual systems by which individuals, materials, ideas, and resources may be transferred and mobilised. A crucial element within this framework is the role of craft and expertise. In each of the three main data sources I consider (food, music, and architecture), a major aspect of the heritage put at risk by the storm is located in the opportunity to pass down expertise of traditions developed over hundreds of years and innumerable encounters with divergent practices, moulded over generations into a cultural form and expression that can is indissoluble from an individual or a community’s identity. As Spitzer (2003) and Elie & Logsdon (2008) have shown, residents such as Wayne Baquet who are simultaneously craftsmen, architects, plasterers, and musicians serve as a point of reference for a community and a social group (in some cases, a social group as large as the entire city) in which they are revered not just for their skills but for their moral and cultural authority. The same is true in foodways: “At the market,” Wolnik writes, “chefs are rock stars. People stare and whisper when they pass; they sidle up to them to overhear their conversations and even dare to approach and discuss a dish that had been prepared the last time they went to the fabled restaurant, much like a teenage fan would recite lyrics to a bass player.” (Wolnik 2006: 112). Keitumetse (2009) echoing Bourdieu (1993) calls these individuals “knowledge-storers,” a term similar to the term “tradition-bearers” used by the Sweet Home New Orleans organisation (discussed in Chapter 4) to describe displaced musicians (SHNO 2009). Within the culture sector, these individuals serve not merely as a metaphorical form of infrastructure but as a literal form as well, in teaching, advocating, publicising, promoting, and developing their respective skills and trades, whether they be culinary, musical, or architectural. Though Leah Chase’s restaurant may have expanded and renovated since the storm, it is the meals she and her staff continue to make using traditional knowledge that serves as the true locus of the heritage (and which has given efforts such as the Exchange Alley recipe archive its moral urgency). This exercise of craft is both reflection on and instantiation of a heritage that -117- cannot be replaced when an individual leaves the community (for whatever reason: voluntary or involuntary displacement, retirement, sickness, or death)—an aspect of rebuilding efforts that accounts for conservation efforts by other nodes of institutions such as the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, recording the life histories of tradition-bearers such as the Creole Wild West Mardi Gras Indian Tribe, among others (LEH 2008). Many initiatives of culinary recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans have centered on efforts to recover or reassemble their past—as Harrison said above, those food products “make New Orleans what it is. We can’t forget it” (Schwartz 2008). The emphasis on restoring heritage as a focal point of the recovery presents a uniquely different impetus for local tradition-bearing restaurants than those faced by chain restaurants: the impetus not just to survive economically but to survive in the New Orleans tradition. As Chef John Besh has said, “If I’m not responsible for making a good gumbo, who is?” (quoted in McCaffrey 2006) In this context, institutions such as the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and the Museum of the American Cocktail can, in fact, be seen to be significant agents in the recovery process, as they have served as locations whereby craft and expertise in foodways (through lessons, demonstrations, classes, and exhibitions) can be developed, disseminated, and shared. The task furthermore for restaurateurs has been not just to preserve their restaurants’ presence as viable businesses, but more importantly, their position in the historic culinary landscape of New Orleans. The heritage at stake in the disaster and the recovery is larger than the walled spaces in which individuals gather and consume together, existing in a complex web of relationships whose actors involve material culture, immaterial history, and social and communal performance simultaneously. In this sense, foodways have been challenged by the recovery process but have challenged received notions of heritage in turn: dwelling between tangible and intangible forms of culture with no loss in translation, they have made a critical contribution to revising an outmoded conception, and therefore have reinvested new thought into the wider heritage ecosystem. -118- Challenges remain, however. Despite much of the national media interest in rebuilding culinary traditions (as noted above), this interest has obscured the underlying structural challenges in post-Katrina New Orleans: ongoing lack of access to food (as Schwartz 2008 notes) and the reluctance to build supermarkets in devastated areas, both of which threaten to stifle the encounters with culinary heritage that lead to its call for preservation after the storm. These challenges require a sustained analysis from all the perspectives cited at the beginning of this chapter. To conclude this chapter, however, one final illustration is warranted. After his reviews resumed, Anderson followed the reopening of Mandina’s restaurant in the Mid-City neighbourhood, a restaurant which not only rebuilt two years after Katrina but which (like Dooky Chase) expanded its facilities. In this process, the physical space changed dramatically, as two houses at the rear of the restaurant (historic homes, ironically) were demolished to enlarge the building, increasing both the seating inside and the parking outside. But as Anderson (2007a) notes, upon reopening, the changes to the building could not necessarily be tied to changes in the restaurant, and confirms likewise that a restaurant is more than just the sum of its walls: [Customers] were greeted to a paradoxical experience peculiar to post-Katrina New Orleans. The building has been subjected to architectural logic and modernity, and the change is shocking. But like so many of post-Katrina New Orleans’ rebuilt buildings, it adheres closely enough to its former self to play tricks on the mind. Once Mandina’s fills with New Orleanians, it becomes difficult to remember how exactly it is different than it was. (Anderson 2007a) The heritage of the restaurant is less its technical specifications as the continuance of its use. Wittgenstein has argued that “the meaning of a word is in its use” (Wittgenstein 1972: §43); the meaning of a bowl of Mandina’s celebrated turtle soup is, likewise, in its eating. Whether forced by contact with other traditions or by disaster, the culinary arts remain in a process of constant evolution, and must do so in order not just to survive, but to thrive. Consequently when Oliver Thomas asked how tacos can help gumbo, it is clear now that residents held him accountable not just for his cultural insensitivity, but for a more fundamental oversight: how, as a native New Orleanian, could he not have understood the answer to that question in the first place? -119- Chapter 4: Music in Post-Katrina New Orleans In New Orleans, a parade rolls in, much like, well, a hurricane. Parades have a lot in common with hurricanes in that city—the preparation, the speculation, the long wait punctuated by reports of the coordinates… then at last, and never on schedule, it makes land fall, roaring in and pushing over everything in its path. It moves forward then it hovers and when it makes up its mind, it moves on down the road and nothing it touches is the same. —Varnado 2010 Prologue: The Locked Gate Many ‘hearts’ of New Orleans’ musical culture beat in the city; as many, if not more, as the number of neighbourhoods. But one that has beat longer than most is Congo Square, a small plot of land in the present-day Armstrong Park (named after Louis Armstrong, the city’s most celebrated musician, and arguably most famous resident). For most of New Orleans’ early history, Congo Square was the only place in the city where marginalised communities—Native Americans, enslaved African-Americans, and free people of color (gens de couleur libres)—could gather in order to worship, exchange goods, perform music, and commune (Johnson 1991). “Listed on the National Register of Historic Places,” the National Park Service describes, “Congo Square holds special symbolic importance to Native Americans and African-Americans because of the role the site played in New Orleans’ musical and social heritage.” (National Park Service). While the precise spot of Congo Square in Armstrong Park remains open to question, like the location of Karl Marx’s chair in the British Library in London, the vicinity is marked by a plaque (Figure 4.1) which notes that the gatherings in that spot eventually gave rise to the contemporary musical forms widespread throughout the city today: jazz, blues, and rock and roll. Consequently when the main gates to Armstrong Park off Rampart Street, the historic line of division between the French Quarter and the Tremé neighbourhood, were closed and locked after the storm, the impact of such a decision proved to be more than just logistical. Residents, activists, and musicians alike immediately protested the decision, claiming that to lock those gates in particular was not just to cut off access to a main north-south walking path—“I try to walk through Congo Square, except that I can’t,” the singer John Boutté publicly lamented at a -120- concert three years later (Boutté 2008)—but proved an underlying sentiment about the Nagin administration’s attitudes towards rebuilding the city’s musical culture. The journalist and critic Larry Blumenfeld has suggested that “the lock on the door of Armstrong Park is the most potent metaphor for the rebuilding process” that he knows (Blumenfeld 2008). Figure 4.1: Plaque noting the vicinity of Congo Square in Armstrong Park. Undated photograph. Figure 4.2: Reopening of the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts, 9 January 2009. -121- In January 2009, however, after months of delays and $27M of federal, state, and municipal recovery funding, Armstrong Park was unlocked on the night of the grand reopening of the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts (Figure 4.2). With remarks by then- mayor Nagin and a second-line by the Original Pin Stripe Brass Band, the crowd of thousands paraded around the statue of Louis Armstrong—whether in deference or in apology is open to debate—before attending a concert entitled the ‘New Orleans All-Star Revue’ featuring some of the city’s most notable contemporary jazz, soul, and blues singers. “This is the start of what I predict will be a year of unprecedented construction in the city,” Nagin said. “It signals to the world that the cultural arts in New Orleans are back bigger, better and stronger than ever before.” (Krupa 2009b) Nagin’s triumphalist words belied the reality of the musical arts at that point in the rebuilding process, a reality which this chapter outlines and analyses. As Lolis Eric Elie retorted, “The park has always been more about potential than reality. … Now that it will be unlocked we’re reminded of what it could be, but its reopening will not change daily life in the Tremé” (quoted in Blumenfeld 2009). Elie’s concern has been borne out, as he has noted: at a public meeting in August 2009 organised by the Nagin administration to discuss potential improvements to the park, residents of Tremé instead gathered to decry the fact that they had not been consulted in the planning process (Elie 2009). Of the many different aspects of culture put at risk by the storm, music has received the most attention in post-Katrina New Orleans—it is, through its deservedly rich heritage as well as a conscious branding campaign, the most visible (locally, nationally, and internationally) form of culture in the city. As musical traditions of all forms are foundational to the city’s identity, history, and economy, they have conditioned the debate about the rebuilding of culture and heritage in the years since the storm. This chapter thus examines in detail the impacts of the storm on the city’s musical culture—its tangible and intangible aspects, its performative and carnivalesque aspects, and its improvisational and generational aspects. It explores the way that music has been taken as a barometer for cultural reconstruction at large (Tolson 2006), and the way it has been -122- deployed by local, state, and nonprofit actors in order to reclaim a sense of identity and livelihood. Furthermore it details a range of case studies drawn from different sites and sectors in order to develop an interpretive framework that can account for the reciprocal impacts of disaster on the city’s culture and vice versa. Finally, it argues that the storm has contributed unexpected political impacts to the region, reinvesting the cultural landscape with a sense of purpose clearly expressed through tangible, intangible, and human (skill-based) initiatives and materialities. Such is the advantage of the interpretive lens of heritage ecology, assessing the physical impact in the same stroke as the social and cultural impact of the disaster. As Raeburn has argued (addressed in more detail at the end of this chapter), disaster has already helped to shape the city’s musical identity as early as 1915, and has helped to re-shape it once again nearly a century later (Raeburn 2007). One terminological caveat: in using the discourse of the ‘unified field’ of New Orleans culture previously discussed, I here conflate the differences between musical, performative, and festival culture for concision in the argument. Too many festivals exist to address each one directly in the space I have; the nature and extent of any one post-Katrina Mardi Gras celebration alone could fill numerous research projects. In including as many as possible I hope to provide a wider context of understanding the reciprocal impacts of the storm on heritage. 4.1: Music and Heritage As with the wider impacts of the storm, Katrina’s impact on the musical arts was catastrophic, and was heralded in the local, national, and international media as one of the most tragic aspects of the disaster. With commentaries appearing within days of the storm mourning and denouncing its impacts (Marsalis 2005, Allen 2005, Rice 2005, Osbey 2005), music featured prominently both in terms of the measurable losses feared and in the immeasurable questions raised. These losses occurred across numerous domains but three in particular merit attention, the focus of this section: the loss of material culture (including instruments, sheet music, vehicles, -123- and other equipment), the loss of infrastructure (including residences, venues, and support services), and most importantly, the loss of individual lives and livelihoods (including musicians, agents, and promoters with expertise in performance, education, and outreach). The combined impact of these losses presented a nearly intractable set of challenges for the repair of New Orleans’ tattered musical fabric; shot through the tapestry of these losses were threads of uncertainty and anxiety about the city’s future. Again, in the weeks following the storm commentators questioned not just whether the city would be rebuilt but if so, whether its Disneyfication would be primarily musical in nature, with only the cheap, pre-recorded caricatures of brass band and traditional jazz music filling the tourist-choked streets. Though these questions would loom over the rebuilding process until well into its fourth year, the main concern has been not material but human: “…if the plans for the future of the city don’t include its humblest residents,” Sublette has argued, …the communities that created jazz in the first place will be dispersed – and the country will have lost a good bit of its soul. These communities – the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, the various Carnival organizations, the Mardi Gras Indians – have been developing continuously in one place for 300 years. Already [in October 2005] there’s a growing diaspora – to Lafayette and Baton Rouge, La., to Houston, even to Utah. We’re not just watching history disappear; history is watching us disappear. (quoted in Blumenfeld 2005) 4.1.1: Material Culture With over eighty percent of the city flooded, the impacts on the material culture of the musical industry were severe, and in some cases, irrecoverable. Musical instruments and equipment of all materials and origins (from the ‘historic,’ such as instruments played by musical legends and which resided in both private and museum collections, to the contemporary, such as instruments played on a daily basis by working musicians) were lost or damaged in the storm, or were corroded beyond repair in the floodwaters. “We had almost five feet of water on the first floor of both houses,” recalled bassist George Porter, Jr., -124- …My warehouse, where my equipment and stuff was, got several feet more than that. I had a whole lot of equipment downstairs in a courtyard. I lost a PA [portable amplifier], I lost three sets of drums, seven bass amp cabinets, all my Ampeg stuff that I have an endorsement with, the rack of PA amps, like six amps in that rack, some mixing decks, a 24 channel and a 16 channel set. My live operation is pretty much (heh) history. I hadn’t thought about it that way.” (quoted in Offbeat 2005: 19) By comparison, Porter was in some sense fortunate; most of his bass guitars survived both the flood and looters in an upstairs room. After the evacuation, other musicians returned to the city owning nothing more than the clothes on their backs, much less the instruments that defined them and brought them an income (ibid.) In other cases, ephemera such as original editions of sheet music, films, recordings, interview transcriptions, photographs, letters, records, and manuscripts pertaining to musical history were damaged or destroyed; like instrumentation, these archives were found in both public and private hands, frequently in the hands of musicians themselves such as Danny and Blue Lu Barker (Raeburn 2005-2006, Fensterstock 2007). The most widely noted archive of this kind was the collection of Dr Michael White, a clarinettist and professor of music at Xavier University, who had been collecting historic music ephemera over his lifetime—including, famously, the mouthpiece to Sidney Bechet’s clarinet—only to see nearly all of it lost in the flood. Repeatedly profiled in both local and national publications due to the extent of the loss, White was widely seen as one of the keepers of the city’s archival memory, and his loss thereby reflected far more than the loss of personal assets. Rather, it reflected the loss of a generation of priceless historical artefacts and materials that would have fuelled leagues of enquiry and scholarship into musical history—a loss that then became refracted into a collective loss of memory and identity. “It was like there was in a spiritual sense a death, and I did not expect to find that,” White said. “It was part of me and part of this tradition and all these people—just gone.” (quoted in Marinello 2007: 26) As losses of personal archives of this sort (including, as noted in Chapter 3, an archive such as a recipe box) have been compared to the burning of libraries (ibid.), the implications of the loss of such an archive continue to resonate, with the void of knowledge produced by such a loss growing over time. -125- 4.1.2: Musical Infrastructure As devastating as the loss of material culture was the widespread obliteration of the infrastructure needed to support the musical industry: concert venues in which to play, spaces in which to practice, unions and trade associations in which to find economic security, advocacy, and legal representation, and medical support services such as clinics and mental health centres. Bars, clubs, and concert halls across the flooded portions of the city—such as the celebrated nightclubs The Lion’s Den, owned by the singer Irma Thomas, or the Mother-in-Law Lounge, owned by the late Antoinette K-Doe, widow of the late singer Ernie K-Doe—faced, like all structures, weeks of saturation in chemical-laden floodwater followed by colonisation by moulds and other biohazards, leading to a scarcity of venues for musicians who had returned to the city attempting to find places to gig. Even those venues that did not suffer directly from the flood (typically those located on high ground in neighbourhoods such as Uptown, the Vieux Carré, the Faubourg Marigny, and Algiers) faced challenges in repairing structural wind and debris damage and in regaining basic electricity and water lines. The earliest known venue to ‘officially’ reopen was the Maple Leaf on Oak Street in the Carrolton neighbourhood, whose owner, Hank Staples, singlehandedly cleaned out the venue and installed an electrical generator in order to provide lighting and power for sound equipment, opening its doors in late September 2005 to a concert by Walter ‘Wolfman’ Washington attended by over 200 people. (Mugge 2006) Lastrapes (2008) details the New Orleans Recreation Department restricting access to its facilities, curtailing the ability of Casa Samba, the city’s only professional samba ensemble, to gather. This lack of space inhibits the creation, refinement, and dissemination of musical culture, as does the ongoing lack of musical licensure in known corridors (Dungca 2008). On a larger scale, the Mahalia Jackson Theater (described above) required over three years and $22M to refurbish and reopen (having suffered damage to the roofing, seating, stage, hydraulic machinery, and orchestra pit), and became, due to its notoriety in this regard, a symbolic touchstone for public expression and frustration about the slow pace of the rebuilding process (Krupa 2009b). -126- The Mahalia Jackson Theater in particular was singled out as indicative of the city’s priorities, in that its facilities to support opera, dance, ballet, and orchestral ensembles—in other words, ‘high’ culture from out of state—were rebuilt as a higher priority than the Morris FX Jeff Municipal Auditorium next door, which since its opening in 1929 had catered to the local traditions of high school graduation ceremonies and Carnival balls (Eggler 2008b, Krupa 2009a). As of this writing in early 2010, the continued closure of the Municipal Auditorium still casts a shadow over its neighbour, and it is unclear when the lights will be turned on once more. Other crucial forms of musical infrastructure, as noted above, were heavily damaged or disrupted after the storm—such as the loss of medical care for musicians, which has become one of the most publicly visible both for the musical community and the city at large, and the subject of intense debate and controversy. (To develop this argument I address the Charity Hospital debate in more detail in Chapter 5.) But the most basic, and the most important, of all these infrastructural needs was residences: houses and apartments in which to live. A need as central as this has been applicable to all sectors of the population after the storm, but for musicians the need to find adequate housing was frequently expressed in terms of the city’s future. Trumpeter James Andrews (of the Andrews jazz family) succinctly put it, “The people you want to play with that have the New Orleans sound, they have no fucking place to stay if they do come back. If I didn’t have a place to stay I wouldn’t come back either. Where are the people going to live when they come in?” (quoted in Offbeat 2005: 26) Similarly, like venues and beloved restaurants; some noted residents’ homes such as Fats Domino’s flooded house in the Lower Ninth Ward became causes célèbres for recovery efforts. This issue is addressed in more detail in the next section. 4.1.3: Lives and Livelihoods With the city not just flooded but nearly emptied, questions about the ability to return immediately began to arise. These questions were compounded by the immediate uncertainty of relocation: Horne describes the evacuation process resulted in some families placed on buses and -127- airplanes, separated from other family members, and not informed of their destinations until hours into the journey or even their arrival (Horne 2006: 79 and 179). This was true of musical and nonmusical families alike; even those who had destinations in mind—friends or relatives in neighbouring cities or states, perhaps an acquaintance’s vacant property—had little expectation of the length of exile that nearly all of New Orleans’ residents would endure. For some musical ensembles, the diaspora endures even as of this writing; two members of the Soul Rebels Brass Band still regularly commute to New Orleans from Houston (Spera 2010). But in the immediate aftermath, one of the initial difficulties for members of musical groups was locating one another in the first weeks after the storm: bands of all sizes and genres were scattered across the country, unable to perform or earn income in order to return to their homes until they were reunited. Phil Frazier, tuba player for the Rebirth Brass Band, said, …everybody spreaded out, it was kinda hard to work normally, like we usually do. Like the little gigs, we had simple gigs we used to do in New Orleans for the little people, like somebody would call and book Rebirth for a party for this Friday, you know, it was a local gig by our regular community, and it was no problem. They could say, we got a couple hundred dollars for the Rebirth to come play, sure, we be out, come play at your house, play a jazz funeral, whereas now, somebody say I need you to come play for a little party—well, we so far out, it’ll cost you more money, and you’ll miss them kinda things, doing things for the little people, them local things like we used to do. (quoted in Mugge 2006) Like Frazier and other Rebirth members, many musicians spent the initial displacement in the nearby metropolis of Houston—as DeParle (2006) and Godoy (2006) note, Houston received the majority of diasporees of any municipality. Trombonist Glen David Andrews (cousin of James Andrews, quoted above) noted this sudden cultural integration caused occasional friction (Swenson 2008), but the hospitality Houstonians showed has endured longer than any resentment. Trumpeter Kermit Ruffins recalled that All the musicians of Houston is opening their home to us like you wouldn’t believe. They really have been taking care of us, since then all the way to now. Far as getting my drummer a new set of drums, getting my bass player a bass. Helping get my piano player an electronic piano so that we can… I mean, you wouldn’t believe the love we got from those musicians. You wouldn’t believe. God bless their hearts. (quoted in Mugge 2006) -128- Figure 4.3: Map of displaced tradition-bearers, Sweet Home New Orleans. August 2009. Figure 4.4: Musicians’ benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, 20 September 2005. -129- The musicians’ advocacy and relief organisation Sweet Home New Orleans—in partnership with other NGOs in the city such as the Renew Our Music Fund, initially known as the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund—has estimated that of the approximately 4500 tradition-bearers in New Orleans pre-Katrina (musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, and Social Aid and Pleasure Club members), as of October 2009, four years after the storm, 80% had returned to the city, and those that had returned had done so at “more than double the rate of the general public.” (Sweet Home New Orleans 2009). Even so, the exodus from neighbourhoods such as the predominantly African-American Seventh Ward and Ninth Ward— remained higher than for other, less affected areas (Figure 4.3). This loss translates into a number of consequences for these communities, primarily the impact on upcoming generations of musicians. As pianist John Autin has lamented, The black neighborhoods are the incubator neighborhoods. That’s where there are neighborhood bands and neighborhood bars. That’s where the churches are. Those are the places where the feel of the music is taught from generation to generation. That’s where the brass bands and the rappers and the R&B singers come from in New Orleans. Great musicians who really have a groove and a feel keep coming out of New Orleans. (quoted in Alper 2006) These neighbourhoods were particularly vulnerable before the storm (and have been historically, as disasters such as Hurricane Betsy, discussed in Chapter 7, have proved), and will remain at risk unless long-term flood-mitigation measures are enacted. Such an unmitigated risk has, as I noted in Chapter 2, continually deterred individuals and families from returning home. Further inhibiting the return of musical diasporees to New Orleans has been the decreased opportunity for non-musical employment within the city—Sweet Home New Orleans estimates that in the current recession, “40% of SHNO clients surveyed have lost a job or had hours reduced by a non-music employer” (Sweet Home New Orleans 2009: 15)—compounded with increased opportunity for housing and for employment available in other major cities such as Houston, Omaha, and Atlanta (Horne 2006: 183). As Spera has argued, The question of what happens to the music community in a way is putting the cart before the horse. … on the one hand people say you need the musicians to come back to -130- build that environment that has always drawn people to New Orleans in the first place. But on the other hand, the musicians are by and large in the same boat as everyone else. Their homes are destroyed, the services aren’t going to be restored in those neighborhoods for a long time to come, and they found themselves in other environments which, some of them are finding, aren’t so bad. (quoted in Mugge 2006) Those who have returned have found the landscape of musical employment disrupted in that, not only have non-musical employment opportunities decreased, the audiences necessary to support live music have not necessarily returned as fast as the musicians themselves. The music community will continue to require subsidies for wages, living expenses, and rental assistance until the level of tourism and its influx of spending grows large enough to once again support a live music industry—which could be years away from the present day (Fensterstock 2008a, Sweet Home New Orleans 2009). 4.2: Renewing Our Music With instruments destroyed, venues dissembled, homes flooded, and bandmates scattered, in the days after the storm it appeared the musical community had been torn apart with little hope of repair. But as extensive as the losses were, within those first few days the corresponding interest in the plight of the city’s tradition bearers had sparked national and international outcries to rebuild the city’s culture, frequently citing its musical traditions in particular. “Since the media storm that brought the fate of Gulf Coast victims of Hurricane Katrina into the consciousness of the world, there has been renewed interest in New Orleans culture,” Michael White, the clarinettist profiled above, has argued (White 2006: 91). The following section examines the forms of reclamation that the musical community in New Orleans has both benefited from and sponsored itself, looking particularly at targeted aid and relief, the new music itself created in response to the storm, new forms of material culture, new initiatives and infrastructural developments for the music industry, and the revival of festivals and performances. It concludes with an ecological interpretation of these processes on two levels, before progressing to the more specific case studies. -131- 4.2.1: Benefit Concerts and Compositions As noted in Chapter 2, the media storm White describes began immediately after the atmospheric one. Four days after the storm, on 2 September, the NBC network aired the televised “A Concert for Hurricane Relief” programme in which nationally recognised actors, filmmakers, writers, musicians and performers raised funding for relief organisations (during which event the rapper Kanye West famously exclaimed that “[then-President] George Bush doesn’t care about black people!”). The organisation Music Aid Northwest staged a Hurricane Relief concert on 6 September that raised over $21,000 for the Gulf region (Bailey 2008), and on 17 September came the “Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Concert,” a five-hour benefit at the Lincoln Jazz Center in New York hosted by New Orleans native Wynton Marsalis (PBS Previews 2005). Three days later, on 20 September, two simultaneous concerts featuring New Orleans musicians entitled “From the Big Apple to the Big Easy” were held at Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall (Figure 4.4); George Porter, Jr. of the original Meters recalled that on that evening, “The Neville Brothers did their traditional Jazz Fest ending, then the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth Brass Band came out from each end of the stage and we were doing ‘When the Saints Go Marching in.’ It was killer. We had the two rhythm sections onstage with the Dozen and Rebirth, Irma [Thomas] and other New Orleans artists all playing together.” (Offbeat 2005). October 10 saw a benefit in Chicago called “Rock and Rebuild: A Hurricane Katrina Benefit Concert” that raised over $12,000 (Swanson 2008); a complete list of such benefits would be impossible to procure, as they were organised not just at the national level but at the state, city, university, and school levels as well. Communities across the United States banded together to raise funding for relief organisations ranging from the American Red Cross to specific musicians’ relief agencies in particular. Trumpeter James Andrews has said of a benefit concert he performed at that “All the money that we raised was going to the Red Cross. The people in those spots have been very generous because they know our situation. One thing about the whole thing is that it shows how big New Orleans music is and how many fans we have in -132- the whole world because people are pouring their hearts out to New Orleans musicians now.” (quoted in Offbeat 2005: 24) The performance of traditional songs in relief concerts became commonplace after the storm, and—as Raeburn (2007) has argued with respect to Randy Newman’s ‘Louisiana 1927’— needed. “When I sing [‘Time Is On My Side’],” Irma Thomas noted, “I will be representing the mindset of thousands of people who have lost everything—who have lost everything” (quoted in Yentob 2006). But for every traditional song that was reinterpreted or reinvested with new meaning after Katrina—Pareles argued during the 2006 Mardi Gras that “A song like ‘Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans’ now echoes with the knowledge that some natives of the city will never return” (Pareles 2006a)—twice as many songs inspired by the storm (all stages, including the evacuation, the diaspora, and the return) have appeared. (I do not here consider the scores of musical benefit albums, mostly compilations and re-recordings of traditional songs, produced after Katrina, such as Nonesuch 2005 or Rounder Records 2005). These range from compositions such as Bohren’s ‘Long Black Line’ discussed in Chapter 2, to jazz albums to orchestral works, to live choral ensembles setting famous remarks from the storm to music (Samuels 2008). Fensterstock has succinctly characterised those new compositions that appeared just in the first year: “Like the literal flood she also wrought, some of them are awful. Some are funny. Some are deeply powerful. Some only reference the hurricane obliquely, and some came from people who don’t even live here.” (Fensterstock 2006: 34). Composers as diverse as Luna Pearl Woolf, Dr John, Michael White, George Winston, and Terence Blanchard authored new works in the wake of the storm (each listed in the Bibliography), fulfilling an early prediction by White himself: “While some predict the demise of century-old cultural traditions,” he wrote, “others believe that tragedy will inspire musical creativity or lead the New Orleans sound farther, influencing other styles wherever displaced musicians reside.” (White 2006: 91) One characteristic is true of nearly all of these new compositions, however: they are taken not just as landmark works of expressive culture but as singular, notable events in the rebuilding -133- process. When Codrescu wrote in his open letter to America that “your food will get better” as a result of hosting New Orleanians (detailed in Chapter 3), White’s observation suggests that he could well have added “music” alongside “food.” Indeed, this process was borne out immediately after the storm. Christopher Hayes, manager of the Red Hat Jazz Café in Houston, noted that on taking in displaced musicians from New Orleans, his approach to musical curation changed radically: “We had no idea it was that… it would have that impact. And so it made us change our format. From… we were just like a smooth jazz venue, and now we’re just a Kermit Ruffins venue, I guess.” (quoted in Mugge 2006) 4.2.2: New Material Culture Even though cash infusions would temporarily stabilise musicians who had lost both their homes and their livelihoods, such subsidies would not be sustainable over the long-term, and charitable donations would inevitably fall off as other events surpassed Katrina in the national consciousness. Out of this realisation in the nonprofit sector came coordinated efforts to provide a more durable programme of works for musicians in need: the Tipitina’s Foundation remobilised its “Instruments A’Comin’” initiative wherein musical instruments were collected as donations from across the country and redistributed to musicians who had lost their own in the storm. Though the initiative had existed prior to Katrina, during its first year after the storm the Foundation collected over $500,000 worth of instruments it then distributed to local schools on the one-year anniversary of the storm. “Everyone got to see the full circle,” said Adam Shipley, the Foundation’s music director. “Here are the kids, here are the instruments, here are the New Orleans music legends” (quoted in Spera 2006). Executive director Bill Taylor later echoed this sentiment, adding that at the follow-up distribution on the second year anniversary, …when the storm was still fresh, we had all the interns on stage with Ivan Neville, Leo Nocentelli, Donald Harrison, plus Robert Mercurio of Galactic [Records, a recording label]. I think they were teaching the kids to play ‘Hey Pocky Way.’ When you see that, the passing of the torch, the passing of New Orleans culture to the next generation, those, for me, are the moments. (Coviello et al. 2008: 25) -134- Similar initiatives were since launched as Rose (2008b) details, but they have not been met in all cases with equal acclaim. Indeed, the presence of charitable donations has inflamed tensions over local ownership, both of the instruments and of the heritage to which they will contribute. One local music retailer protested in the Times-Picayune that the influx of free instruments to local schools and musicians had unfairly flooded the market with excess merchandise and had adversely impacted his business. “I am all for helping people,” he wrote, but as a small retailer I have a problem with truckloads of musical instrument [sic] being brought in from somewhere else and given out to people. … If someone wants to donate instruments, how about coming to the small businesses who sell musical instruments and support the musicians in our area and purchasing them there? It is bad enough that small music stores must compete with big box stores and the Internet. A little help here! Please! (Silva 2008) Such a claim plays on the appeal to local sensibility, but elides the national engagement in refitting musicians and music students with the material culture needed to hone their craft. Moreover, it also suggests that the heritage aspect of the effort is secondary to the commercial aspect. Another (anonymous) letter-writer espoused the opposite sentiment: “About 100 years ago, a cornet was put into the hands of a young boy named Louis Armstrong. It took him off the streets and gave him a career. Kids should be encouraged to play real instruments. It takes practice, patience, and builds character. Thanks to everyone who contributes to this good cause!” (504vox 2008). While the structure of this claim is classic, invoking the city’s heritage in order to justify the present initiative, it conversely assumes economic opportunity on the back of that heritage, privileging the latter over the former. The tensions inherent in these arguments reveal the debate around material culture, seeing it on the one hand as an agent of unwelcome market forces, jeopardising local investment and traditions (the “small businesses who sell musical instruments and support the musicians in our area”), and on the other, as necessary in order to preserve a part of the city’s heritage, the very means by which the music-making tradition can continue. This tension is shot through the debates about New Orleans’ culture in all sectors; I return to it at the end of this chapter, looking at the same tensions at capital project-level scales. -135- Figures 4.5, 4.6: The Elysian Trumpet, wrought by Dave Monette. Undated images. -136- One new instrument that has impacted the cultural landscape, however, is the Elysian Trumpet (Figures 4.5, 4.6). Wrought by master craftsman Dave Monette in 2006 and blessed by local religious leaders in a consecration ceremony, this hand-crafted specialty trumpet was made to serve as a material representation and celebration of New Orleans’ culture, and is intended to be played nationally and internationally. Named both for the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology and the Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans, the Trumpet is crowded with symbols of the city: Brushed in a 24-carat gold finish, a turquoise etching of the Mississippi River is saw- pierced into the instrument and flows from the mouthpiece to the end of the horn, meeting up with a red ruby that represents a symbolic convergence of Elysian Fields Avenue, the Louisiana Superdome, and Louis Armstrong Park. … The mouthpiece is built into the horn, and the valve casing is decorated with a fleur-de-lis. Yellow, green and purple diamonds, representing the colors of Mardi Gras, are embedded in the bottom valve caps, and images of lilies are scattered throughout the horn. (Simon 2007) Musician Irvin Mayfield Jr., appointed a ‘Cultural Ambassador for the City of New Orleans and State of Louisiana’, has played this trumpet on numerous public occasions, including before former President George W. Bush at the White House in Washington, DC (Walsh 2008). Mayfield’s father, Irvin Mayfield Sr., had passed away in the storm, consequently for Mayfield Jr. to play a funeral dirge on an instrument created partly to commemorate those lost in the storm in front of the government administration held to be responsible for the disaster imbues the instrument with a critical significance: the Trumpet itself, just as much as the music which is played on it, becomes an instrument simultaneously of mourning, of critique, and of protest. “This trumpet is for my father,” Mayfield Jr. said. “It’s for the victims of the storm. It’s for the people of New Orleans” (quoted in Simon 2007). The Trumpet thus belies its own existence, the dirge that courses through it implicitly repudiating its own necessity, decrying the conditions that led to its conduit’s creation. The rhetoric surrounding the Trumpet has not subscribed to this interpretation, claiming instead that it “serves as a portable monument to the deceased … a reminder of the continued presence of the souls that entered eternal life in the hurricane’s after math … [and] both a unique work of art and a living memorial to all the saints who fell throughout the region.” (Elysian Trumpet 2008) But its appearance at the groundbreaking -137- ceremony for the Hurricane Katrina Memorial in City Park Cemetery on the two-year anniversary of the storm (Figures 4.7, 4.8, detailed in Chapter 6), when Mayfield Jr. played the traditional funeral dirge ‘Just a Closer Walk With Thee’ before city leaders, local and national media, and representatives from religious and activist communities, suggests otherwise. For such a ‘portable monument to the deceased’ brought again to the site of their future gravesite and memorial further saturated the instrument with loss, embeddeding in public consciousness the irony of its creation. The storm is implicitly enshrined in the trumpet, if not explicitly designed— it is as much a part of the immaterial aspect of the instrument as the precious metals that adorn it. -138- Figures 4.7, 4.8: Irvin Mayfield Jr. playing the Elysian Trumpet, 29 August 2007. -139- 4.2.3: Renewing Festivals Irony, satire, and critique in the New Orleans landscape have always been cherished instruments, and nowhere are they more visible than during Carnival, both pre and post-Katrina. Stemming from its Roman Catholic heritage (a legacy of Spanish and French colonial rule), the city’s celebrated Mardi Gras festivities dominate the first two months of each new year. The weeks preceding the Lent liturgical season are characterised by parties and social events held by the various Krewes, formal and informal groups of citizens organised according to numerous different affiliations, such as race, class, family lineage, or aesthetics—McNulty (2008) has detailed the contrast between larger, organised Krewes and the smaller, local Krewes that neighbourhoods, families, restaurant patrons, drinking partners, and other informally attached individuals will arrange. These social events culminate in highly choreographed parades featuring meticulously crafted costumes and floats that wind through the city’s streets in the days leading up to Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, itself. The local expression of this global tradition is extraordinarily complex—socially, historically, politically, racially, and economically—as Abraham, et al (2006) have detailed, and its presence in the post-Katrina context merits deeper consideration. Though Mardi Gras is the most widely known of the city’s festivals, what McNulty has called “the central and defining cultural event of the city” (McNulty 2008: 136), it is joined in the annual musical calendar of New Orleans by a range of others: the Jazz and Heritage Festival (‘Jazzfest’, in April and May), the French Quarter Festival (April), the Essence Musical Festival (July), Satchmo SummerFest (August), and the Voodoo Music Experience (October) have also suffered similar challenges in the rebuilding process after the storm, and have undergone significant transformations in the cultural landscape of the city. I here address the resurgence of Mardi Gras and JazzFest in particular, examining the public discourses and controversy surrounding them and detailing their symbolic significance as markers of not merely economic or demographic but wider cultural recovery. -140- As the floodwaters receded, two main questions about Mardi Gras arose: first, whether it could happen, given the decimated population, resource base, and material culture across the city, and second, whether it should: whether the money, labour, and expertise required to hold a citywide party would be better put to use elsewhere. A vigorous debate over these questions arose in the autumn and winter of 2005, as the city’s population crept back into the city, especially, as Chapman (2006) notes, among the disproportionally high number of African- American diasporees who would have led Krewes such as Zulu, and whose continued absence presaged a severe impediment to the most celebrated traditions such as Mardi Gras Indians masking, marching, and performing (detailed below). But despite the misgivings about the appropriateness of the festival, the consensus among both returnees and diasporees was that Mardi Gras was the sine qua non of New Orleans, that New Orleans was not New Orleans without Mardi Gras, no matter the adverse circumstances—consequently to not carry on with Mardi Gras would be unthinkable. It would be to acknowledge defeat, and signal to those still in diaspora that the city had abandoned its identity after the disaster and was no longer worth returning to. Thus Krewes scrambled to raise money, find members, build floats, and sew costumes, ultimately resulting in a geographically and economically reduced—but no less ribald or bawdy—Mardi Gras. “For one shining day,” noted Gambit Weekly, “the world had to admit that our fair city was indeed back in true form, bloodied but unbowed, stirred and shaken—but all in fun, and definitely not broken” (Gambit Weekly 2006a). Due to the emotional significance of the event, however, the spirit of the celebrations was by turns nostalgic, mournful, reflective, sarcastic, angry, lampooning, and defiant. This defiance took a number of forms, most visibly in the fact that nearly every agency, politician, institution, collective urban experience, and event that the storm had thrown into public consciousness was hauled in for satirisation (Figure 4.9). While satire of this sort is a Carnival mainstay, in this case, it took on a special resonance (Mitchell 2007, McNulty 2006: 145- 6). In fact, in the first Mardi Gras after the storm, to obscure or ignore the storm in a given -141- parade was the exception rather than the rule (a practice that has lessened in subsequent years). The Krewe of Mid-City, for example, caricatured on their float the infamous ‘Katrina Refrigerators’ mentioned in Chapter 2—refrigerators whose contents had rotted due to power loss, and which had to be thrown out wholesale (Figure 4.10)—and the Krewe of Chaos led a procession of twelve floats including depictions of ‘Homeland Insecurity’ and the ‘Corpse of Engineers.’ (Figure 4.11, Jumonville 2006: 17). In that sense, the specific blend of public comment, satire, and improvisation, the appearance of ‘normalcy’ which was so highly coveted after the storm was seen to be preserved, even if it masked a much more serious reality: that many New Orleanians were unable to return to share in the revelry, and that others, who had perished in the storm, never would. To unmask this fact, some Krewes chose to publicly mourn the missing. The Krewe of Muses dedicated the final float in its parade to those lost to the storm, McNulty notes, and symbolized their absence by running the float with no riders. It rattled past the parade goers as a moving tribute, its decks empty, its bead racks bare. The cheers and bright yelling from the sidewalk and neutral ground ceased as it passed. … Ghostly white blossoms and shapes of flowing water decorated its flanks, and at its stern was a banner with script that read: “We celebrate life. We mourn the past. We shall never forget.” The man operating the tractor was bent humbly, like a hearse driver. The bust of a Grecian figure at the prow of the float had a prominent papier-mâché tear beneath her eye. In the wake of this float, some onlookers had real ones filling their own. (McNulty 2008: 146) Figure 4.9: Political cartoon by Jack Ohman satirising federal leaders at Mardi Gras. 2006. -142- Figure 4.10: Mardi Gras float, “Refrigerator Heaven,” Krewe of Mid-City. February 2006. Figure 4.11: Selected designs for Mardi Gras floats, Krewe of Chaos. February 2006. -143- As with the silent second-line discussed in Chapter 1, the power of the ritual is demonstrated only when it is emptied of its content: a silent procession and an empty float communicate become unmistakeable features of the temporal landscape, representing both pre- disaster pasts and uncertain post-disaster futures, an approach similarly on display during the first Jazz Fest after the storm. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, an annual music festival sponsored by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation set over two weekends in April and May, is the second touchstone of the city’s musical calendar, and like Mardi Gras it represents the manifestation of the many forms of the city’s culture in a single context— evidence, Piazza writes, of the ‘cultural synesthesia’ detailed in Chapter 2: Jazz Fest, he writes, is a kind of distillation of the mythology of the city. Jazz Fest constantly underlines the relationship between the music of New Orleans (and Louisiana) and the culture as a whole. The food, the parades, the crafts, are all part of a larger fabric, as they are in the city itself. You won’t find posters advertising individual artists’ appearances at the fairgrounds. Music, the logic seems to run, is bigger than any individual’s music. And, furthermore, culture is bigger than music. Jazz Fest brings this notion into focus, gives it life better than any other event I know of. (Piazza 2005: 59) For the first few months, the future of Jazz Fest too remained in doubt. It was not until early 2006 that Jazz Fest secured sponsorship from Shell Oil Corporation; the sense of contingency surrounding it upon its arrival was transformed into relief (Pareles 2006b). Like Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest proved yet another reason to return to the city—and for diasporees, a motivating date to shoot for—as evidenced by the overwhelming shows of emotion that the musicians and bands elicited. Musicians from across the city and the country, regardless of their connection to New Orleans, rearranged songs, dedicated performances, and rewrote lyrics to custom-tailor their sets to the experience of being ‘back,’ to mourning those who passed away in the storm, to recounting their experiences, to expressing solidarity with the crowd, and to declaring defiance against pessimists and politicians that they saw were indifferent to the plight of New Orleans (Kahn 2006, Gambit Weekly 2006b). As Johnson observed, “…every performer within hailing distance of a microphone encouraged New Orleans’s slow recovery and Jazzfest’s role in the city’s cultural rebirth. ‘It’s good to be back; it’s good to see you people here’ was the riff that -144- marked this first weekend.” (Johnson 2006). This refrain would resonate throughout the rest of the musical calendar of the city in the first year of the rebuilding process, wherein events at French Quarter Fest, Essence, Satchmo Summerfest, and Voodoo (itself in exile in Memphis for its 2006 festival) would be marked by that abiding sense of continual, if slow, recovery; each festival became an opportunity to gauge not just the economic health of the city (through tourism-driven estimates of hotel rooms booked, meals eaten, and tax revenues collected) but its intangible spirit of resilience as well. 4.3: Case Studies: Musical Heritage Under Threat Before concluding this chapter by reconsidering heritage ecology, the following sections of this chapter examine three case studies of different scales which serve as exemplary illustrations for the issues that have arisen in the musical community, and which raise further questions about the rebuilding of New Orleans’ cultural heritage. The first case study, set on a street-level, examines Mardi Gras Indians, groups of African-American performers and musicians who perform several times a year in elaborate hand-sewn suits in honour of their historical links to Native American tribes in the early part of the city’s history. The experiences of Mardi Gras Indians after the storm, as noted earlier in this chapter, have been tinged, as some of the most visible of the city’s tradition-bearers, with a particular moral urgency to their narrative. The second case study, set on a neighbourhood-level, examines the Habitat for Humanity Musician’s Village, a new neighbourhood in the Upper Ninth Ward intended specifically to house musicians displaced by the storm, and which has been the subject of national media attention and benefit efforts as well as local controversy about rights, eligibility, and authenticity. Finally, the third case study, set on a city-level, examines two initiatives intended to professionalise New Orleans’ heritage of jazz music: a plan, now-defunct, to create a National Jazz Park and Museum in the Central Business District. Examining these three different -145- levels of impact, assessment, and recovery enables a more nuanced assessment of the issues that have arisen, a discussion that follows in the conclusion to this chapter. 4.3.1: The Scattered Tribes: Mardi Gras Indians Mardi Gras Indians are one of the most prominent features of the New Orleans cultural landscape, as Regis (1999), Ehrenreich (2004), and J.M. Jackson (2006) have noted. The term is derived from linkages with Native American tribes in the region (and their historical status as similarly marginalised communities), linkages that African-Americans have honoured by creating a singular cultural form found only in New Orleans. They are known today for their colourful suits displaying finely-wrought bead- and featherwork (Figure 4.12, each of which takes many months to complete—Sublette (2006) and Reckdahl (2008) point to the saying that one is not a ‘real Indian’ without callouses on one’s fingers, showing one’s commitment to the needlework), intricate tribe hierarchies, and elaborate street processions which take place three times a year: on Mardi Gras Day, St Joseph’s Day (March 19), and Super Sunday (the Sunday nearest to St Joseph’s Day), with occasional other performances. Membership in an Indian tribe is coveted, being a privilege rather than a right, and carries not just rewards but responsibilities: to carry on traditions handed down from generations, to represent the tribe adequately whether the mask is on or not, and to maintain the strength and the integrity of the tribe—all of which are enormous attractions for younger generations, thereby serving as a means by which social and educational standards are incentivised to be met (Katzman 2006), despite the fact that meetings could historically prove violent if two warring tribes from different neighbourhoods came into contact. Mardi Gras Indians’ complex origins emerging from adverse economic, racial, political conditions, as Michael Smith (1994) has detailed, have in certain respects been revived in the post-Katrina era. In addition to rebuilding their families, livelihoods, and neighbourhoods irrespective of their tribal affiliation, Indians have faced challenges in reconstituting their tribes. As J.M. Jackson has argued, Indians “…are integral to the social fabric of the Lower Nine -146- community. They do not only parade together, they work, play, socialize, and worship together. In addition, they provide vernacular networks that were most helpful as support conduits before and after the hurricanes and the floods.” (J.M. Jackson 2006: 775). These networks were both reason for and aides in their return. Two months after the storm, not only did some tribes declare their intent to return in time for Mardi Gras (prior to the storm, about forty tribes were in existence), but other displaced tribes were banding together even in exile to perform (Backstreet 2008; Eggler 2005). Indeed, after the first Mardi Gras, despite their reduced numbers Indians have since presented at every scheduled major parade since the storm. But in addition to the impacts that Katrina wrought on musicians generally (detailed above in section 4.2), the loss of material culture, infrastructure, and livelihoods affected Indian tribes in a compound manner, given the interrelation between the three aspects of performance noted above—material culture, infrastructure, and social networks. Their collective story can thus be taken as a lens through which the above issues are condensed and refracted. Figure 4.12: Gang Flag Thomas Watson of the Golden Blade tribe, 12 August 2007 -147- Figure 4.13: Interior of Backstreet Cultural Museum, 31 August 2006. Figure 4.14: Interior of House of Dance and Feathers, 7 January 2008. -148- The immediate impact resulted in the loss of extensive, irreplaceable forms of material culture—not just their suits, which typically cost thousands of dollars in time and materials to produce and which are often only worn once before being ‘retired’—but tribe records, memorabilia, accounts, photographs, and recordings as well. Such material serves as a tangible collective memory for the tribe, and can help to settle disputes or trace the evolution of styles, especially when individual, personal memory is rendered inaccessible due to death or dislocation of a senior tribe member (R. Lewis 2008). In this context the diaspora—the impact on livelihoods—comes into sharp focus, given that the expertise and knowledge which senior Indians possessed had become overnight scattered around the country with no path immediately visible towards reuniting its disparate threads. It is one thing to have enough materials or resources to make a Mardi Gras Indian suit; it is another entirely to have the local knowledge of how to make one. The impacts on material culture were severe, but this was undoubtedly the primary loss the Mardi Gras Indians experienced in the aftermath of the storm: their immediate family and social networks, and concomitantly, the opportunity to pass on their traditions to new, younger members who have joined the tribe (or again, to provide an incentive for aspiring tribe members to meet the requirements to join.) Without this kind of continuity, the heritage—which is simultaneously tangible and intangible—would invariably wither. Preservation of Indian traditions has taken place in a variety of ways, from the establishment of two museums, the Backstreet Cultural Museum in Tremé, opened in 1999 and run by Sylvester Francis (Figure 4.13), and the House of Dance and Feathers in the Lower Ninth Ward, a new, sustainably-designed museum built in 2006 by architecture students from the University of Kansas and run by Ronald Lewis, founder of the Big Nine Social Aid and Pleasure Club (Figure 4.14). These two spaces have served as the site not just for the physical housing of suits, photographs, and ephemera as described above (of particular note is a ledger at the Backstreet Cultural Museum containing the record of every jazz funeral held in Tremé for three decades, over 500 entries long (Winkler-Schmit 2008) but for events and ceremonies intended to -149- reaffirm Indian heritage and display its resilience both internally to members of the tribes and externally to the public at large. Ronald Lewis, for instance, reported that he had intended to hold a jazz funeral for Katrina at the House of Dance and Feathers on the three-year anniversary of the storm in 2008, in the vein of those that had been held on other anniversaries, but it was cancelled due to Hurricane Gustav (R. Lewis 2008). Along a similar line of commemorative activities are the Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame ceremonies, honouring both those who have made significant contributions to Indian culture each year at the same time as honouring those who have passed away or who have, in the post-Katrina era, been unable to rejoin the tribe (Figures 4.15, 4.16). That these ceremonies now take place in Congo Square (prior to the storm, they were held at a nearby school (Faclane 2007) illustrates and deepens Indians’ connection to the past, having explicitly chosen to gather, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, at the historic core of the city’s musical heritage. Other initiatives such as oral histories and Indian craft arts training camps have been launched (Breunlin et al 2008, Granger 2008, LEH 2009), reaffirming the deep history of Indian culture, and knitting back together their torn social fabrics. But these are not the only fabrics requiring repair. I have already discussed the impacts on Indians’ material culture, lives and livelihoods, but the impacts on the infrastructure of the Indians’ performance needs are particularly cogent. This infrastructure was both innocuous, being perfectly visible, and ubiquitous, being everywhere in New Orleans: its streets. Here the physical impacts of the storm met the political impacts, in that the physical disruption to the city’s street plan—damaged roads and sidewalks, rampant debris (as noted in Chapter 2), combined hazards of ruptured gas, water, and electrical lines, and loss of power and lighting for months—resulted in an upended, unfamiliar landscape perfectly tailored to prevent the use of the space to which Mardi Gras Indians (and second-liners and jazz funeral processionals more generally) have not just become accustomed, but without which their culture cannot thrive. As Michael White noted in the first year after the storm, -150- Figure 4.15: Program from 10th Annual Mardi Gras Indians Hall of Fame, 10 August 2008. -151- Figure 4.16: Program from 10th Annual Mardi Gras Indians Hall of Fame, 10 August 2008. -152- …many neighborhood streets that once bounced with the ‘second lines’ are now uncharacteristically quiet and still. In the predominantly Black 7th Ward, the lonely tattered remains of a once majestic Mardi Gras Indian suit are seen nailed to the outside of a house: the lifeless carcass of a once vibrant existence, but one implying a defiant vow to return. (White 2006: 91) Threats to the street culture had already been apparent before the storm, however, that both presaged and paved the way for later limitations on the use of the streets. Police crackdowns on Mardi Gras Indians on St Joseph’s Day 2005 (not uncommon, as Sublette (2008) has shown, but this was an unusually violent day) had led to heated exchanges between Indians and city officials; in a now-legendary moment, Big Chief Allison ‘Tootie’ Montana of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe gave testimony to the New Orleans City Council against the violence, declaring, “I want this to stop” immediately before collapsing to the chamber floor and dying of a heart attack (Katzman 2006, Winkler-Schmit 2008). Such an incident reflected a long history of misunderstanding and suspicion between municipal authorities and residents who participated in Indian gatherings and street celebrations more generally, as became apparent again after the storm. In October 2007, a second-line in the Tremé neighbourhood honouring recently (and unexpectedly) deceased tuba player Kerwin James was abruptly and violently shut down by police, and two musicians, drummer Derrick Tabb and trombonist Glen David Andrews (cited above), were arrested. The crackdown drew ire from both the participants and the broader public alike (Blumenfeld 2007), and while then-Councilman James Carter responded by forming a series of dialogues between police officials and local representatives, resentment and accusations that this incident was not just an attack on the culture, but part of a broader, long-term covert effort to clear the neighbourhoods of lower-income residents have persisted. One means by which this effort is seen to be happening is the dramatic escalation in fees for parade permits, or in some cases, introduction of any fees at all—as Blumenfeld (2007) and Reckdahl (2007d) have noted, second- lines are often spontaneous and tend to avoid the formal permit structure. Hence after the storm, with profound increases in the cost of living (Brookings 2009), Indian tribes must therefore find -153- new ways of paying for the legal right to express their traditions, and those which are unable to do so must either perform clandestinely, outside the law, or cease to do so at all. Parade crackdowns have continued, such as in April 2008 and March 2010 (Reckdahl 2008b, Reckdahl 2010). But the heart of the issue in these events, however, for all public performers in New Orleans, is the use of public space. Helen Regis has argued that public space is “…important to a democracy, that we need to be able to gather in public and be together, whether that’s discussing politics or dancing in the streets. And certainly in New Orleans it feels like a fundamental right to those who participate in that tradition.” (Sublette 2006). Even before the storm, but catalysed by the storm, the street has become the staging ground for intense debates surrounding the future of the musical culture in the city—a politicisation reinvested from an earlier period in the city’s history when the street was one of numerous places where African- American slaves were forbidden to gather, except in the wake of a funeral. Elie has argued that the urban form of traditional neighbourhoods is precisely what gave rise to their celebrated musical traditions: “There are no second-lines outside the older sections of the city,” he writes. This is true despite the fact that many musicians have moved to these areas in recent decades. The design of those newer neighborhoods, the distance between houses, the prevalence of automobile traffic, the lack of mixed use planning, all these factors work against formation of parades. (Elie 2008) Consequently the preservation of musical heritage requires the concomitant preservation of urban heritage, an issue discussed in more detail below and in Chapter 5. To look closely at a street in contemporary New Orleans, especially in a historic neighbourhood like Tremé, is to see not a physical accretion of tarmac, concrete, or crepe myrtle poking up through the sidewalk, but instead a range of possibilities: a space for the expression of culture, an opportunity to publicly gather in peace, a conduit for sound and music, an absence waiting to be filled, a space where culture is persecuted and lives have been lost, a path to a cemetery where those lives are celebrated, and a reservoir for memories of parades and parties past. To empty the street is to silence the music; if any heritage is to be preserved, it is found here. -154- 4.3.2: Neighbourhood Development: The Musician’s Village While the rebuilding process may begin on a single street, that street impacts the neighbourhood, and vice versa. As detailed in Chapter 5, metropolitan New Orleans is divided into seventeen different historic districts, each of which was impacted differently during the storm. With respect to the differing transformations neighbourhoods faced, this section examines a neighbourhood-level development that has emerged after the storm as a national relief project for displaced musicians: the Musician’s Village in the Upper Ninth Ward (Figures 4.17, 4.18). Originally conceived by musicians Harry Connick Jr., and Branford Marsalis, the initiative was launched under the local auspices of Habitat for Humanity in December 2005, four months after the storm, in order to build new low-cost, communal housing for musicians who had lost their homes in the storm and who had lived in diaspora or temporary housing ever since. The project was “dedicated to the education and development of the next generation of New Orleans music enthusiasts and the preservation of New Orleans’ unique musical heritage,” (Habitat for Humanity 2006), with the intent not just of recreating a community that was washed away in the storm, but as well of creating a new community out of it. “We need something concrete, like this … village, to really ensure that the history continues to flow from one generation to another,” Connick Jr. told Brian Williams of the NBC news network (Williams 2006). Launched with national-level support, including capital-level grants from donors such as Dave Matthews Band, Shell Oil, and BP, the Village also earned proceeds from two of the post- Katrina compilation relief albums mentioned above, “Hurricane Relief: Come Together Now” and “Our New Orleans: A Benefit for the Gulf Coast.” As of this writing in early 2010, the Musicians’ Village is largely complete. Seventy-two homes over eight acres have been built with a combination of skilled construction labour, volunteer labour (in its early days, as Gross (2006) notes, involving up to hundreds of people per day), and the required ‘sweat equity’ of those homeowners who bought the house; the final building, still under construction as of this writing, is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music (Figure 4.19), an adjoining community center featuring -155- performance and rehearsal space, technical support, and recording space—in short, all the physical infrastructure a musician could require. The neighbourhood is very much alive; noted local musicians such as Bob French, Fredy Omar, Shamarr Allen, and Peter ‘Chuck’ Badie have bought homes and moved into the neighbourhood, whose bright pastel shotgun-inspired houses sit in stark contrast to much of the surroundings. (I detail in Chapter 5 the local architectural style of the shotgun house; for now, it is enough to say it is one of the most traditional and iconic local forms of dwelling in New Orleans, and serves to symbolise the city—hence the choice by the designers of the Village to reproduce a familiar form.) Figure 4.17: Design sketch for Musician’s Village. Undated image. -156- Figure 4.18: Row of newly-constructed shotgun houses, Musician’s Village. Undated image. Figure 4.19: Ellis Marsalis Center for Music. Undated illustration. -157- Despite the intentions of the initiative, in the wake of other recovery efforts these main tensions—the selection process of musicians, the style of the houses, and the wider politics of neighbourhood recovery—have stoked controversy around the Musicians’ Village, however. Yet these issues illuminate the politics of musical recovery in New Orleans. The first issue, the selection process, drew criticism not just for its early perception of favouring jazz musicians only (as opposed to rock, rap, or soul performers) but most prominently for the extensive background employment and credit checks required for applicants, checks which required documentation—income records, proof of identity and home ownership—almost invariably lost in the storm. These obstacles prevented scores of musicians from being approved for a home: as Reckdahl noted, “Spotty income streams and dubious credit histories are almost as much a part of the musician’s life as road tours and unscrupulous club owners, and yet that financial profile is the grounds for rejecting a lot of the applicants seeking to live in the Village” Reckdahl (2007a). Though the local authorities for Habitat for Humanity over time began to loosen their requirements on whether applicants had to provide every piece of information in exactly the format previously stipulated, bending their regulations over what forms of identification could be considered proof of income, for example, two years after the storm the eligibility rate was only 10% of applicants (Cohen 2007), and many of those who did qualify “experienced hostile pressure … in this very politicised music community not to cooperate in what [was] seen as a flawed scheme” (Atkinson 2006). Compounding the argument about skewed selection—“If this housing is supposed to be for jazz musicians, why are most jazz musicians not eligible?” asked Hot 8 Brass Band member Raymond Williams (Reckdahl 2006)—was a criticism about the design of the new houses themselves, which were modelled after traditional New Orleans shotgun-style houses. Sartisky has been the most outspoken critic from this point of view: Located in one of the historically most drear and remote sections of the upper Ninth Ward, largely bereft of any infrastructure or services even in the best of times before the storm, the monotonous row of houses of the Village might architecturally be described -158- as ‘shotguns,’ but in truth they more resemble migrant worker cabins, the inelegant 20th century equivalent of slave-quarters. Unlike traditional New Orleans shotguns, they are thickly proportioned, bereft of the slightest ornamentation or grace, their grim functionality unalleviated by the gesture of flinging over them coats of paint in vivid primary colors. … they have the visual ambience of barracks. (Sartisky 2006) Such critiques do not just obscure the basic need for housing, but moreover reflect a wider assumption, critiqued throughout this dissertation, that authenticity is to be located in discrete, identifiable places which can therefore corrupt it via a malformed expression, or sacrifice it at the altar of a corporate, commodified ideal. In subscribing to a fixed, static vision of what constitutes authenticity, this approach falsely renders the houses in the Village (which display six different façades) as singularly uniform, and mocks them in the same stroke. Moreover, it assumes that authenticity itself cannot evolve. Yet (as I detail in Chapter 5) the shotgun house, architectural emblem of New Orleans, has undergone a continual evolution in style, an evolution to which these houses in the Musician’s Village are no exception. A more nuanced view would suggest that they have taken the evolution of the shotgun house in a new direction, in order to satisfy a pressing need for musical infrastructure as quickly as possible, recognising that the heritage of the city was to be found in the interaction of its elements: in this case, the return of the musicians themselves. While these two issues characterised the early debates surrounding the Village, the final tension has usurped them both in its wider concerns. As the majority of the families have now been selected, and all of the homes have been built, the critical discourse has shifted to the symbolic politics of the neighbourhood, and its attempt, as noted above, to serve as a new catalyst in the preservation and transmission of the musical heritage of New Orleans. Whether this will take place in the way its founders have envisioned is yet to be determined (much will depend on the use of the Ellis Marsalis Center), but in the meantime, Village residents have felt their neighbourhood to have become a tourist attraction, and not necessarily for the best of reasons: it has now become a frequent stop on the post-Katrina ‘disaster tours’ run by local tour bus operators. Discussed further in Chapter 6, the disaster tour is a complex phenomenon, as -159- Lennon and Foley (2000) have argued, with contradictory impulses. It commodifies suffering and loss at the same time as it ostensibly educates the viewer, and in doing so, titillates that viewer at the same time as imparts a provisional, fragmented understanding of the disaster in question. This provisional aspect comes from the insulation of the viewer from the disaster: seen comfortably from behind the tinted windows of the bus, the danger that the disaster might breach that barrier is minimised, if not eliminated. Rather, the distance between viewer and viewed is safely maintained: “Sometimes, [Village resident and Mardi Gras Indian Queen] Cherise Harrison-Nelson has said, it feels odd when passing disaster-tour guides point at residents like her.” (Reckdahl 2008a) Harrison-Nelson’s comment points to a significant issue in understanding the role of the Musician’s Village in post-Katrina New Orleans. The point is not that the Village risks becoming a ghetto of musical culture in New Orleans as Sartisky’s comments suggest, which it does not. Such a claim misidentifies the location of authenticity. Nor does it risk becoming a ‘living museum’ of musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, or even non-musical New Orleanians (for which, interestingly, some housing has been reserved). Such a museum would be one in which the ‘exhibits’ maintain jobs, play gigs, cook dinner, teach students, and perform at the Marsalis Center. Nor does it even risk being consumed by the tourist gaze, which, after Urry (1990), “creates a situation whereby culture and tourism become one, since culture is increasingly commodified as spectacle for consumption by tourists” (Knudsen, Soper, & Metro-Roland 2008: 2). The point is rather that, despite its intentions, the Village has done too much, has exceeded its ambitions in attempting to replace what was already present: the local neighbourhoods in New Orleans which are, as Autin above declared, the ‘incubator’ neighbourhoods. For the Village to supplant these as the source of musical generation in the city is to have misread the historical nature of cultural development in the city, and to have attempted to artificially reproduce the complex social, economic, racial, and urban features (such as the streets in Tremé, discussed above) which have made this organic evolution possible. As Glen David Andrews said, -160- On [the] one hand the city wants to use you to promote it, “Come to New Orleans to hear the great music,” but on the other hand there’s no place for you here. It’s like the Musician’s Village, which I have a real problem with. And not just because they turned me down for a house. They turned down most of the musicians who applied, most of the brass band members. The only people who are qualifying are people with good credit, older people with social security and folks like that. How does that help us, really? How are you supposed to have good credit when you’re wiped out, lost all your possessions and are living in somebody else’s trailer? Even if I had good credit, if I could get a loan from a bank, what do I want to live in the Ninth Ward for, anyway? I grew up in the real Musician’s Village, Tremé. I want to live in the real Musician’s Village. (Swenson 2008) 4.3.3: District-level Development: The Hyatt Jazz District The same tension, of creating a new entity in order to galvanise interest in local heritage, emerged on a grander scale in the plans for the Hyatt Jazz District, an initiative launched by developer Lawrence Geller and Strategic Hotels, a Chicago-based hospitality corporation. Also present, as with the Musician’s Village, was the discursive thread of creating a musical infrastructure which could then therefore be used as an asset in broader economic development, a discourse that came partly out of what was seen as the national emergency regarding the city’s musical heritage and partly out of the Louisiana state Department for Culture, Recreation, and Tourism’s ‘Cultural Economy Initiative’ and ‘World Cultural Economic Forum,’ discussed in Chapter 7. Attempts to develop New Orleans’ musical heritage have been widespread in public discourse for years, but after the storm they found new relevance to public and private interests alike, looking for opportunity amid the rubble. Many attempts began with a comparison, looking unfavourably upon New Orleans’ musical infrastructure in the light of efforts by cities such as Austin, Los Angeles, or Memphis; considering the latter, Fensterstock has argued that “It’s hard not to compare Memphis’ preservation efforts to New Orleans.” Here, Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Studios … is a Laundromat. Jelly Roll Morton’s house has a plaque but not much else. Since Katrina, some stellar organisations have done fabulous work cleaning up the mess and taking care of the musical community that is so essential to New Orleans’ identity and to our tourism draw. But we’re still way behind the solidly branded home of the blues in terms of celebrating (and leveraging) our rich musical heritage. The tours we got from our evacu-hosts came from their being part of a city that celebrates awareness of, and pride in its history—pride that translates into real, brick- and-mortar institutions that in turn generate tourist dollars. (Fensterstock 2008b) -161- Comparisons of just this sort gave rise to Geller’s proposed project. In September 2005, Irvin Mayfield Jr. and Geller met at a fundraiser in Chicago, an encounter that, in the wake of conversations about the future of New Orleans and Mayfield’s inspiration by Chicago’s Millennium Park, led to plans for an integrated jazz district to galvanise downtown development as well as provide a home for Mayfield’s New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (Berry 2007). Over the next six months the plans continued to develop, until in May 2006, when Geller, Mayfield, and municipal officials including then-Mayor Nagin publicly announced the creation of the Hyatt Jazz District, whose combined assets would be valued at $716M. Part of the proposed plans (designed by architect Thom Mayne) involved the relocation of City Hall from its current premises to the Dominion Tower on Poydras Street, which had recently been purchased by Judah Hertz of Hertz Investment Group, as well as demolition of the present City Hall building in order to make way for the new 20-acre suite of linked buildings that included a new City Hall, courthouse, theatre and performance hall, and public park (Figures 4.20, 4.21). “Before Katrina,” said Ray Manning, the local architect on the project, “this project, quite honestly, might have encountered a lot more resistance. We have the opportunity to re-envision ourselves, and to try to create a catalytic project that will help move the city forward. It’s not an entirely altruistic act we’re performing here. It makes good business sense to use our cultural elements as a catalytic event to make New Orleans thrive.” (quoted in Bergeron 2006) -162- Figures 4.20, 4.21: Digital rendering of design for Hyatt National Jazz Center (unrealised). -163- Given the extensive urban restructuring the plans entailed, however, they required Hertz’ involvement, and while Geller and Hertz had apparently shared a prior verbal understanding, by the summer of 2006 it became apparent that Hertz was not going forward under the allegedly previously-agreed terms (Pristin 2006). In September 2006, Hertz publicly disowned his involvement in the project, stating that he had never agreed in writing to sell the property to Geller, and recused his corporation from any potential further negotiations. Despite this setback (and the inevitable furore it caused, given the high level of expectation for the project), instead of abandoning the idea completely, Geller decided to scale down the plans to focus only on a National Jazz Center: a complex featuring a performance hall, museum, and welcome centre for visitors, which Mayne would also design (Figures 4.15, 4.16). By June 2007, however, the one- year anniversary of the public launch, the project was widely seen as stalled, in part because the public-private partnership funding which Geller had expected city and state partners (Nagin and then-Governor Kathleen Blanco) to raise had failed to materialise despite their statements of continued support, further jeopardising the plans for the integrated district (Thomas 2007). Writing publicly shortly after these reports appeared, one of the project partners decried yet again the lack of interest in developing musical tourism in New Orleans, calling the city one of “the most anti-music cities in the world”: Permitting requirements restrict live-music performances. Other rules hamper the expansion of authentic music venues in the French Quarter, leaving visitors to hear music of questionable quality on Bourbon Street. … In the name of modernization, the city has allowed some of the most historically significant jazz bars to be bulldozed, while other historical music artifacts in the city deteriorate. … Instead of a prominent welcome center assisting tourists in finding the wonderful music that supposedly emanates from here, visitors find a city either ashamed of its music heritage or too misguided to recognize its economic value. To capitalize on music will require a complete reformatting of the city’s posture towards music in general and support of the National Jazz Complex specifically. (Goolsby 2007) -164- Figures 4.22, 4.23: Digital rendering of design for National Jazz Center. Morphosis Architects. -165- Claiming, finally, that the project was “alive and well, in spite of the city, the state and our illustrious leaders”, Goolsby’s claim reflected two tenets: insistence on the power of capital alone to catalyse the rebuilding (his projections called for 250,000 musical tourists per year, with a “realistic” expectation of up to one million), and a demand that this project, too, not fail where other capital-level projects in the city had famously done so. His claim was seconded in a glowing review of Mayne’s proposal by national architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, who wrote on the two-year anniversary of the storm that “the scope and creative ambition of these projects [Ouroussoff also reviewed the ‘Reinventing the Crescent’ project, detailed in Chapter 5] suggests how architecture could someday be vital to the city’s physical and social healing. Both seek to transform dead urban areas into lively public forums, employing powerful architectural expressions of a democratic ideal” (Ouroussoff 2007b). But it was not enough: by October of that year, Geller was preparing to sell the Hyatt Regency building, the cornerstone of the design, to a third-party firm (Strategic Hotels 2007). While the precise reasons for the failure of the Hyatt Jazz District in either of its incarnations may never be agreed upon—municipal recovery czar Ed Blakely blamed ‘complex zoning issues’, though Mayfield Jr. blamed lack of leadership, which translated into lack of funding, which was the primary issue (Berry 2007)—the scope of its vision presented its own tensions that may have compounded the economic development issues that were already present post-Katrina. Mayne’s proposal required a programme of public works that would have upended a primary downtown corridor for years, a complexity sure to be challenged by competing interests, especially given the requirements of relocating an entire municipal administration which would simultaneously be governing the storm-ravaged city the project was designed to bolster. But deeper questions quickly arose about the nature of the impact the Hyatt district would have had, questions examining the role it would play in directly supporting local music as opposed to simply mining it for tourist dollars. Part of the critique stems from the selective nature of the historical appropriation: as Atkinson has argued, “in this project, the city and policymakers have -166- named jazz as the New Orleans music worth investment, rejected the idea that jazz had a home in New Orleans before the project, and, for validation, evoked Louis Armstrong’s name, at least a notion of his approval” (Atkinson 2006). Indeed, the contrasts between Geller’s proposed project and the already-extant New Orleans National Jazz Historical Park, managed by the United States National Park Service, would have been matched only by the redundancy of the former. (The latter has since received $12M in public money for refurbishment and expansion, as Williams (2007) notes.) Moreover, public sentiment remained ambivalent, seeing the project as having an economic impact only at the capital level, with the cultural benefits affecting only tourists (Troeh 2006). As has been present throughout the rebuilding process (and detailed again in Chapter 5), the divisions between the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ ownership of culture re- manifested in force, divisions visible from the beginning in the corporate name of the project. If Hyatt were to have ‘owned’ jazz heritage in the city, the question became, then where else could it be made and played? As of this writing in early 2010, the project is not necessarily dead on the table, though it is certainly comatose. Having seemingly backed out of the initiative altogether, Geller has since donated the design of the National Jazz Center complex to the city, itself a multimillion dollar document (Figures 4.22, 4.23). The Hyatt has reopened under different ownership and management, and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra has relocated to the Mahalia Jackson Center, as noted earlier. And the designs that were left behind for the previous district, with their crisp blue skies and ethereal tourists peopling the park, moulder in the city’s collective memory of other possible futures like all unrealised architectural models. The blame will continue to be shared, though if Mayfield Jr.’s efforts pay off, other initiatives will soon replace this one. Mayfield Jr. likens the city’s musical culture to its own natural resource awaiting development and exploitation: “Oil is to Saudi Arabia what jazz is to New Orleans. It’s authentic. It’s sold all over the country. It started here. It lives here. Americans look for authentic experiences. No business is going to thrive if the city doesn’t get behind a definition of itself.” (Berry 2007) -167- Bereson and Hackler (2006) have argued that such metaphorical language sets dangerous precedents, couching the debate over the future of musical recovery in the terms they may not be able to sustain (discussed further in Chapter 7). But while Mayfield is sometimes seen as uneasily straddling the worlds of commerce and culture, few dispute his intentions for a smaller, revamped National Jazz Center to serve as a social and cultural catalyst for the city (Swenson 2009). Moreover, his initiatives promoting the public education and appreciation of music in New Orleans set the stage for generations of music lovers, makers, and critics to come, in an era when the simultaneous fragility and resilience of musical culture is at the fore of its public image. These issues conclude this chapter. Figure 4.24: Bruce Davenport Jr. with his mural of marching bands, 22 August 2008. -168- 4.4: Ecologies of Music All these interactions, spurred on by the consequences of a physical ecological event, form a cultural ecological event in their own right as they witness the intermingling of disparate musical styles and practices. Equally significant is the way in which this transformation has invoked a third domain even as it has rejected the lines on which such classifications are made. As noted above, much of the public and private sentiment expressed in music post-Katrina has protested the contingency of the disaster, and the ability of those responsible to prevent it. Such sentiment, reinvesting the political nature of the disaster into the work, reflects a further constructivist interactant at play. To interpret cultural work in simultaneously political and environmental terms is to rinse this new heritage clean of categorising frameworks. In so doing, these artists craft a revised vision of the nature of musical culture, sublimating its aesthetic and commercial roles to promote a reimagined consciousness of settlement in the landscape, and the responsibilities that such settlement entails. This reinvestment sourced both in its physical origins and its subject matter, has been issued on numerous scales, notably before the third anniversary of the storm, when a delegation of Louisiana musicians (brass bands, jazz instrumentalists, soul singers, and Mardi Gras Indians) performed at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Playing in Denver, Colorado, before a nationally televised audience, they reminded the country not just of the ongoing rebuilding process in the Gulf South, but of the responsibilities that the rest of the country had towards its coastal resources. Tab Benoit, founder of the Voice of the Wetlands Allstars music coalition which has campaigned since Katrina for coastal restoration and conservation, protested the lack of mitigation thus far: “If I want to take people camping where I camped as a kid, I have to take a houseboat. … It’s open water.” (Spera 2008). Separating the musical from the political project thus constitutes an unconscionable fission, given that the forms of loss that would result would reject categorisation: political failure to conserve the wetlands would result in the loss of the style of music he and other musicians (such as Amanda Shaw, a fiddler and coalition member) have played for generations. -169- These past generations serve as a natural backdrop for the question of future generations. For as long as the physical landscape remains at risk, then those forms of dwelling and livelihood—in this case, teaching and learning a musical craft, and joining a tradition—are equally at risk. Yet that landscape is precisely what has given rise to these unique forms of culture, as an examination of local architecture reveals (detailed in Chapter 5). Biological theorists have described this relationship as that between ontogeny, the development of an individual organism, to phylogeny, the evolutionary history of a species (Gould 1977, Oyama 2000)—a useful metaphor for thinking about forms of heritage ecology as well. To interrupt this process of generational recapitulation—whether deliberately (in the case of coastal wetlands, assessing the likelihood of mandatory relocation from low-lying or eroding settlements) or inadvertently (due to a disaster which causes the sudden and involuntary abandonment of those settlements)—is to jeopardise the ability of prior generations to pass on their heritage to future generations even as it is to create the conditions by which novel forms of culture can arise. Though the terminology is rarely invoked in this context, such encounters operate under the same mechanism as creolisation discussed in the last chapter. Whether the fruits of creolisation in this context are worth the trauma, loss, and grievance the displacement entails, however, is not in question. Ultimately, as Michael White has observed, risk continues to cast a shadow even when the sun is shining: “…the prognosis is not good,” he remarked, “…when you consider coastal erosion, global warming, and the fact that the levee system is shot. I hear people say, ‘It’s over, move on.’ We’d love to forget it, but it’s ongoing. We’re in limbo.” (Gundersen 2006) As these considerations make clear, the music of New Orleans harbours a range of attributes: organic, responsive, resilient, and community-driven, but also risk-prone, place- specific, and hard-won. Its life in the city is played out through the tangibility of material culture and instrumentation; the intangibility of craft, expertise, and enthusiasm among each generation; the ephemerality of live performances which then give rise to a durable musical literacy and consciousness; the spatiality of where music is made, played, and shared; and the power-driven -170- hierarchy of how it is recorded, distributed, and preserved for posterity either by the darkness of ink or by the light of a laser. In this respect, the ‘heritage assemblage’ of the musical culture of New Orleans (after Breglia 2006) dwells in a variety of different relationships between people, material culture, practice, and social space. But crucially, its life is located neither in the instruments nor the venues, but in the people themselves: “Ironically,” as Campanella has argued, …the recovery of New Orleans as a real and robust city and not a theme-park version of its former self rests heavily on the shoulders of those most burdened by the catastrophe. Tourists and conventioneers may bring needed dollars, but it is the residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, New Orleans East, and other stricken neighborhoods who constitute the lifeblood of the Big Easy, carrying in their traditions, cuisine, musical heritage, mannerisms and habits of speech what made New Orleans unique. (T.J. Campanella 2006: 144) Looking to the future, the impacts that White fear will surely come to harbour should efforts at mitigation of natural hazards, conservation of the Louisiana coastline, and a properly reinforced levee defence system not succeed (as I argue in the Afterword). But within those levee walls, the future of music continues to depend more than anything else upon education. The future of New Orleans’ music is found in its schools, in the spaces where future generations are not just trained but instilled with the desire to train—whether at private academies such as the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, or at public high schools like McDonough 35 (Pareles 2007). Such realisation was the spirit behind the creation of Bruce Davenport, Jr.’s hand-painted mural depicting hundreds of local marching bands that regularly played before the storm, which has been described as an attempt to “symbolically resurrect the bands on paper.” (Figure 4.24, MacCash 2008b: 13) John Swenson, writing shortly after Katrina, recalled when the sounds of such bands practicing were a regular feature of the local soundscape: …on my walk home each day I enjoyed watching a high school marching band practice after school. Week by week they honed their sound until they started mini-parade practices on the side streets off Esplanade Avenue. It was inspiring to watch these teenagers parade under the majestic live oaks, slowly working their sound into powerful march cadences. All in service of one lofty goal at Mardi Gras. But some of those kids will continue to play music and this was their training ground. Those schools are closed now and those marching rhythms—the best of them—are silenced. How strange our truncated six-day Mardi Gras will be without those magnificent marching bands of the New Orleans public school system. (Offbeat 2005: 19) -171- There is hope: the instruments delivered by the Tipitina’s Foundation have primarily been distributed to local schools, and the relocation of the Thelonious Monk Institute for Jazz from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Loyola University of New Orleans, can only bode well. Should efforts such as these be sustained, then Campanella’s fears of the theme-park version of New Orleans will be less likely to come true. After all, it already has one: the derelict JazzLand theme park fifteen miles outside the city, flooded and shuttered after the storm, which had out- Disneyed Disney by crystallising and condensing the city’s culture into rides like the Muskrat Scrambler and the Zydeco Scream. (“Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably,” Ignatius J. Reilly famously claimed, “Outside of the city limits, the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.” (Toole 2000: 11)) Efforts at musical education will serve as the primary flood defence against the loss of cultural heritage in this sector, even when the next storm rises in the Atlantic—in this sense, the future of music in the city is not music as entertainment, or music as economic development, but music as a living art form deeply aware of its history and its own contingency. For ironically, as Raeburn has revealed, an earlier disaster was partly responsible for the creation of jazz in the city. An unnamed category-4 storm in 1915 that made landfall in Grand Isle, just west of the city, drove numerous musicians from the surrounding communities into New Orleans, resulting in a mélange of musical styles seeking refuge in the urban setting, perceived to be safer than the countryside. “Within a few years,” Raeburn showed, the refugees joined with some local musicians to form the Sam Morgan Jazz Band, a fusion of rural and urban sensibilities that was unique among New Orleans bands of the period, as amply demonstrated by its recordings for Columbia Records in 1927. The band was, in essence, created by the forced migration caused by the hurricane of 1915. In the history of Louisiana music, such occurrences are not uncommon. (Raeburn 2007: 818) If a natural disaster partly created New Orleans’ music once, then another natural disaster has partly re-created it into a newly politicised art form, in which its contingency is today expressed in a new diversity of forms and opportunities. Such is the perspective afforded by heritage ecology: observing the snake eating its own tail, the hurricane swallowing its own eye. -172- Chapter 5: Katrina and the Built Environment Living near the Gulf, you think about storms and how to live with them... The houses have a lot of character. They remind me of the people. I paint the houses because I’m really painting the people. —Terrance Osborne (2008) Prologue: The Latex House In the summer of 2007, Takashi Horisaki, a sculptor originally from Japan, arrived in the Lower Ninth Ward with the aim of rebuilding a house. Not a house for himself, nor a house for somebody else as the majority of volunteers set out to do (as at the Musician’s Village). Rather, he set out to rebuild a house in which two residents used to live—a shotgun house on Caffin Avenue that was slated for imminent demolition—and to rebuild a version of it outside of New Orleans. Armed with the permission of Roosevelt and Billie Johnson, the former owners, financial support from an art foundation, volunteer support from a local construction contractor, and logistical support from the Army Corps of Engineers (which at one point forestalled a municipal demolition order so that Horisaki could finish his work), over a period of three months Horisaki coated the entire structure in layers of liquid latex and cheesecloth. As the latex dried, it moulded to the frame of the house, and creating an imprint of the exterior of the house which Horisaki then cut away in strips, packaged for transport, and reassembled inside-out at the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City (Figures 5.1, 5.2). Intended as a reminder to the rest of the country about the ongoing struggle of recovery in New Orleans, the sculpture of the empty house, entitled ‘Social Dress – New Orleans,’ harboured even the most minute details of the effects of the storm: “When peeled off,” Reckdahl noted, the result is as solid as a rubber welcome mat. But it looks like wood; the latex imprint reflects wood grain, the white paint trimmed with green. Every single nail hole, even small pieces of ivy that sprouted up between pieces of siding can be seen. From one window pane, about 7 feet up, the latex layers pulled up a papery skeleton of an inch- long fish, left there when the house was submerged by water after Hurricane Katrina. (Reckdahl 2007c) -173- Figure 5.1: ‘Social Dress – New Orleans’ under construction, July 2007. Figure 5.2: ‘Social Dress – New Orleans’, latex sculpture by Takashi Horisaki, 2007. -174- The house on Caffin Avenue was demolished on 12 July 2007, the last day of Horisaki’s work at the site, but its replica remained standing until late October of that year. The piece responded to numerous issues present in the rebuilding, serving both as a metonymic representation of displaced families from the storm (what is a house without people to live in it?) but also, as with the material culture detailed in Chapters 3 and 4, an opportunity for the material traces of the storm itself to travel outside of New Orleans. This forced extension of the storm into a nonlocal context heightened the political dimension both of the artwork and of the recovery process, as the empty house brought with it physical remnants of the biological and chemical agents of the hurricane (forensic data examined in a museum context in Chapter 6) at the same time as bringing the absent presences of the Johnsons. That Horisaki had also recreated portions of the interior of the house further amplified this dimension: walking through the reconstructed emptiness, viewers were invited not just to imagine but to see the devastation wrought upon a family, the latex walls having brought that devastation home. The house is simultaneously one of the most notorious symbols and one of the most salient catalysts for recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. The house represents destruction, abandonment, loss, and death (seen in the security X, detailed in Chapter 2, representing the transformation of houses into cemeteries), but also hope, optimism, determination, and resilience: as Wilford has argued, in the narrative of the individual recovery process, the rebuilt house represents the telic end of a spectrum that runs from “shelter – housing – house – home” (Wilford 2008: 657). As the centre of family and community, and the primary site of the passing on of traditions to future generations, the house is a form and dimension of heritage that knows neither boundaries nor categories. As McNulty (2008) has written, describing the renovation of his house prior to Katrina, I felt like I was earning my place in its history through my work to restore its health and well-being. I felt that, down the line, after I had moved somewhere else and even after I was dead, other people would be living there within the same walls. It was a part of my own story, and I was a part of its story too, and to me this gave it something like a soul. I had fought with this house and cursed it on hot days when I was covered and sweat and -175- dirt and bleeding here and there where it had bitten me with nails and splinters, and I had rejoiced within it and because of it when my work came to fruition and when I could have people visit under its roof. I respected it and cared for it. I made sacrifices for it and was happy having it in my life. It was a relationship. (McNulty 2008: 31) The house is also the most immediate example of built cultural heritage in New Orleans, a city that enjoys scores of different and unique architectural styles in the diverse neighbourhoods that have evolved in the city’s 300-year history. Consequently for a disaster on the scale of Katrina to impact the city’s architectural heritage constituted a national tragedy, imperilling a unique architectural resource both in the immediate aftermath and (as is often the case) in the rebuilding process that has followed. As Viejo-Rose (2009) has argued, it is not only in the disaster itself that the real damage is done, but in the ‘reconstruction’ period afterwards. The threats to the historic environment in the first four years of the recovery process have been numerous and constant—as tangible as wrecking balls and as intangible as liquid capital, as nearby as New Orleans City Hall and as distant as the Atlantic and Pacific coasts—and have put endangered one of the most celebrated aspects of New Orleans’ culture at large. Those threats, and the responses to them, are the subject of this chapter. As I argued in Chapter 2, the phrase ‘historic environment’ can be interpreted in several ways: it can be read as foregrounding a natural environment which has its own unique history of patterns, resources, interactions, and impacts on its human—its cultural—environment, even as the two mutually construct one another. In this sense, the historic environment refers to the natural environment which is reflective of, and generative of, history and heritage. While this wordplay usefully foregrounds the ecological and political issues regarding the built environment, for ease of reference throughout this chapter I refer to the ‘historic environment’ in its more customary sense: the built environment of significant historic and modern structures, physical infrastructure, and urban design. This chapter examines the impact of Hurricane Katrina on that built environment, assessing the damage across the city and detailing the challenges that the rebuilding process has faced, challenges which as of this writing are in many respects still -176- ongoing—many neighbourhoods are still suffering from depopulation compared to pre-Katrina levels, and numerous structures remain blighted. Following from the survey of the damage and an assessment of the ‘blank slate’ discourse, this chapter explores the way that the damage to the historic environment both threatened and reinvigorated (as with culinary and musical heritage) a public sense of urban identity, and occasioned public and private developments that have had considerable impact on the future urban footprint of New Orleans. Examining case studies of destruction and rebuilding on the individual, neighbourhood, and citywide scales reveals that contested issues such as transformed land use, gentrification, and insider/outsider ownership have characterised the rebuilding process from its first days, and four years later show little sign of abating. Yet paradoxes persist, both in terms of the city’s complicated relationship to decay (detailed in Chapter 2), and in debates about who holds the right to intervene in the city’s visual landscape. Considering these issues sets the stage for a discussion of architectural futures, and the resurgent influence of environmental thought and practice on the urban fabric of the city: in these dimensions, heritage ecology becomes both a physical practice, designing more environmentally sustainable structures, and a metaphorical agent acting upon the city’s history and historiography, adding the contemporary ‘green’ dimension as a further evolution in vernacular architectural style. 5.1: New Orleans Architecture Past and Present With twenty districts listed on the National Register of Historic Places prior to the storm, New Orleans has enjoyed a reputation as one of the most visually distinctive cities in the United States, a reputation earned by the centuries of immigration and exchange of ideas governing architectural craft and design. Notwithstanding its heritage as a European and American settlement, influences from Latin America, West Africa, and the Caribbean—including Haiti, as DeBerry (2010) noted after its devastating earthquake in January 2010—have all contributed to its mélange of styles. Its relation to the physical landscape, moreover, as Colten (2004), Kelman -177- (2003), and Kingsley (2007) have argued, has contributed to the development of local design features. These design features are frequently subtle in execution, but intuitive in their adaptive strategy to adverse environmental factors that further separated the city from its neighbours elsewhere in the state and the region: features such as raised foundations to mitigate against potential flood impacts, the prevalence of locally-sourced river cypress wood resistant to moisture absorption, or the ubiquitous combination of prominent windows and heightened ceilings to promote heat dissipation. Even within New Orleans, however, each neighbourhood enjoys its own distinctive sense of style and structure, with examples of classic instances of local buildings including shotgun houses, Creole cottages, and double gallery homes (Figures 5.2, 5.3, 5.4). “Containing over 30,000 structures and covering more than half the core of New Orleans,” the Preservation Resource Center, the city’s primary historic preservation advocacy organisation, has claimed, the city’s 20 historic neighbourhoods are an irreplaceable national treasure. Architecturally they display an enormous variety of styles and forms – from simple Creole cottages and shotgun houses to Greek Revival and Italianate galleried mansions with ornate cast iron and wooden trim. Culturally, the city’s 19th and early 20th century neighborhoods are the heart and soul of the city. (PRCNO 2006: 18) The full extent of the storm’s impact on these neighbourhoods may never be fully charted— Richard Moe, NTHP director, has suggested the number of historic structures in the city is closer to 37,000 (Lubell 2005), all of which suffered at least minor damage from the atmospheric conditions of the storm. It is important to recall, however, as detailed in Chapter 2, that disaster is no stranger to New Orleans. Many of its neighbourhoods have faced crises prior to the storm, crises that in the public debates surrounding post-Katrina development have become touchstones for mistakes of the past and warnings of adverse or unintended consequences to come. One focal point is the controversy surrounding the development of the elevated I-10 expressway, built in the late 1960’s and which today runs directly through the heart of the city. Its construction, chosen by city officials over an original proposal to steer the motorway directly through the Vieux Carré, uprooted a central social and economic corridor in the Tremé -178- neighbourhood, the historic Claiborne Avenue. Termed by Baumbach and Borah (1981) as “The Second Battle of New Orleans,” the public controversy and subsequent scattering of one of New Orleans’ most culturally vibrant streets has reemerged since Katrina as a tragic lesson in the dangers of overzealous development, unarbitrated political interference, and, as detailed in Chapter 4, the fragile and central role that streets play in sustaining the city’s heritage (Elie 2008). Figures 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 (L-R): Vernacular architecture in New Orleans: shotgun houses, Creole cottages, and double gallery homes. -179- As noted throughout this dissertation, in the months immediately after the storm the primary characteristic of the impact on the built environment was uncertainty: since even the municipal levee system was still under repair, many homeowners hesitated to invest time and resources to rebuild their homes regardless of their historic value. In this interim period, the demolition and sale of homes and land became widespread (Brookings Institution 2006), as did the practice of ‘land-banking,’ wherein business interests outside New Orleans (in cities as far removed as Boston and Las Vegas) purchased vacant properties with no intent to rebuild what was there beforehand until the market had stabilised and a profit would be guaranteed, paradoxically leading to short-term stagnation in the rebuilding process and precluding the recovery of that market (Informant B 2008). From the perspective of the street, these practices—demolition, sale, and land-banking—led to what was known as the ‘jack o’ lantern’ effect in neighbourhoods across the city, the slow and torturous rebuilding of a city block one house at a time, wherein a single rebuilt, lit dwelling would be surrounded on all sides by derelict and demolished properties creating “the gap-toothed look of neighborhoods reviving unevenly” (Horne 2006: 318). (Properties were looted in the meantime both for salable materials such as copper, and historic architectural features, as Thevenot (2006) and Bonnette (2005-2006) note.) This effect was conditioned partly by the complex overlapping relationship between geography and class: as Figure 2.1 indicated, neighbourhoods like the Vieux Carré, Uptown, the Lower and Upper Garden Districts, and the Marigny/Bywater which were already situated on high ground (formed by the natural deposition of silt from the annual flooding of the Mississippi River) were spared the bulk of the destruction, unlike neighbourhoods such as Central City, Lakeview, Gentilly, and the Ninth and Seventh Wards in which the ‘jack o’ lantern effect’ was most widespread. As noted in Chapter 4, this contrast partly represents the tensions between the tourist destination neighbourhoods which suffered comparatively little damage, and the ‘back of town’ neighbourhoods where the labour force supporting that tourism tended to live which -180- became ghost towns almost overnight. Moreover, such an atmosphere far transcended, as noted in Chapter 2, the mutually nurturing relationship between New Orleans and decay; in this context, since the decay had been forcibly visited upon the city, it had been thoroughly stripped of any romantic or nostalgic value that it might otherwise harbour in a secluded courtyard garden in the Vieux Carré. Rather, the scarred and empty houses the floodwaters left behind became the norm rather than the ideal, reminding resident and tourist alike that had the levees held, such destruction would not have occurred. Amid those dark initial months, homeowners were forced to wait to gut and rebuild their homes—waiting to receive promised federal and state assistance from FEMA and from the Louisiana Road Home programme, respectively—further contributing to the apprehension that many neighbourhoods would not return, or would only do so in versions vastly different, potentially even unrecognisable, from those that had thrived prior to the storm. The most visible of these fears has revolved around the prospect of gentrification (a term used in conjunction in this dissertation with Disneyfication, detailed throughout)—a prospect that emerged demographically in the first year after the storm, with Frey and Singer finding that the immediate post-Katrina population was “more white, less poor, and more transitory than the pre-hurricane population” (Frey and Singer 2006: 8). Gentrification has taken physical form in sites across the city, from new mixed-use residential and commercial developments in the Bywater to the demolition and redevelopment of lower-income public housing projects. I address these specific cases shortly, but for now it is crucial to recognise that the spectre of a gentrified New Orleans after Katrina has been present throughout its rebuilding process: writing even before the floodwaters had receded, Allen noted that “The biggest questions surround the Ninth Ward, a large section of middle-class housing, much of which was totally flooded. There’s already talk of razing the neighborhood and rebuilding. Gentrification looms over the horizon. Except for a few holdouts, the people who lived there are all gone now…” (Allen 2005). Abetting such fears were early claims by then-Mayor Nagin that the much-reviled River Gardens -181- district—a faux-historicist neighbourhood in the Lower Garden District that had replaced a previous public housing project (St. Thomas), featuring replicas of traditional architectural styles such as camelbacks and bungalows, and incorporating mass-produced rather than traditional materials—would serve as a model for rebuilding historic neighbourhoods. Though these specific plans ultimately proved rhetorical, other critics, reading such visions (driven philosophically by the New Urbanist movement in architecture and planning) as thinly-veiled opportunities for gentrification to take root, observed that the process typically serves the interest less of local citizens than property developers and estate agents, who benefit from high profit margins on design and construction even as the communities their visions are intended to serve are unable to buy into the artificially inflated property market (MacCash 2005, Ouroussoff 2005). The conditions had already been ripe for this specific kind of gentrification pre-Katrina; globalization, Horne argues, the easy flow of capital around the world—had made New Orleans both a bargain and, for holding out against the cultural homogenization that was globalization’s dark side, also a place with special appeal to the very people who were benefiting so handsomely from these same engines of global commerce. (Horne 2006: 203) Post-Katrina, however, the consequences of these conditions could not have been more severe: families who were already socially and economically vulnerable prior to the storm would be displaced from their homes not just by environmental forces but by economic forces equally outside their control, leading to the further dissolution of community ties and cross-cultural connections that were the foundation of New Orleans’ culture. Gentrification therefore meant the loss of the house and the neighbourhood just as much as the sense of place, of identity, and of meaning: the loss of a tangible and intangible cultural heritage centuries in the making, with none other than Mickey Mouse taking its place. -182- 5.2: Blank Slates: Demolition versus Reconstruction Klein has suggested that the metaphor of the ‘blank slate’ for urban redevelopment post- disaster is favoured by neoliberal, capitalist political and economic regimes, in that it allows a complete remodelling of the physical, economic, and social landscape in ways that most conform to their interests (Klein 2007). In New Orleans, this discourse of the ‘blank slate’ arose after the storm as a means of critiquing top-down engineered recovery plans; citizen-led plans such as the Unified New Orleans Plan (briefly detailed in Chapter 7) portrayed themselves rather as being bottom-up, grassroots, and dialectically opposed to corporate interests originating outside the city. That such a metaphor could even take root to begin with in New Orleans is worthy of note; as one of the United States’ oldest cities, with an urban and environmental footprint that (as I have argued in Chapter 2) reflects the continuous, ingrained, and stubborn settlement in a risk- prone landscape, New Orleans would initially seem like the least likely city in America to entertain a comprehensive redevelopment after a disaster (in comparison, for instance, to the town of Greensburg, Kansas, which was completely redesigned after a tornado obliterated it in 2007 (Schneider 2009)). Despite the urban problems that had long predated Katrina (BGR 2008), the depth of the historic environment in New Orleans in both space and time—its presence visible on every street, and an age measured not in decades but in centuries—would imbue it with a resilience that could not necessarily be calculated in resistance to wind shear, or absorption rates of water in wood. Yet “because New Orleans’ architecture lives in families and communities just as much as they in it” (English 2008), and the instinct to preserve that mutual aspect of dwelling was catalysed by the disaster, advocates quickly rallied to save the city’s remaining historic homes and structures from the wrecking ball. Two main threads emerged. Not only did the Preservation Resource Center instigate multiple initiatives of homeowner education and consultation, architectural element reclamation, and anti-demolition workshops—arguing that in the majority of cases, demolition was in fact costlier than rehabilitation of a damaged historic structure— but soon after the storm local -183- activists organised to investigate, and challenge, the demolition orders issued by the municipal government. These orders, issued under the guise of constituting ‘imminent health threats’ to the community, were seen as expressing wanton disregard for the city’s architectural heritage and housing stock. The Nagin administration had passed a law in March 2007 which labelled hundreds of properties across the city and authorised FEMA to demolish them in the interest of public safety. As Krupa and Elie noted, The health-threat ordinance aims to deal swiftly with the worst-ravaged properties by sidestepping a multitiered appeals process required by a separate city law, called the Good Neighbor Program, that gives owners 120 days to clean, gut, and board up blighted properties, or at least prove they’re working toward that goal. The health-threat ordinance, by contrast, allows the city to demolish or gut a property within 30 business days of providing notice, then place a lien on the tract for the cost of the work. (Krupa and Elie 2007) Criticism of the law focused on its seemingly arbitrary nature, an inadequate notification process that resulted in homeowners uninformed of their property’s demolition, an invisible or nonexistent appeals process, and its unexplained penchant for designating structures on the list which were otherwise reparable. By the second anniversary of the storm, of the 1630 structures under the ‘imminent health threat’ designation, argued preservationists Karen Gadbois and Laureen Lentz of the Squandered Heritage project, “one-third are wrong, a third need re- evaluation and a third need to go” (MacCash 2007). But the controversy over the law escalated when it became apparent that the administration’s efforts (part of a larger suite of administrative tools, such as a razing review panel (Gallas & Brown 2007, Krupa 2008), which it has not been possible to fully analyse) had potentially bypassed building inspection protocols prior to proposed demolitions. Gadbois, for instance, exposed a plan by private developers to demolish largely undamaged properties in the Carrollton neighbourhood in close proximity to one another in order to build a Walgreens’ pharmacy in their place, the developers falsely claiming that the individual property owners had sold their property—and hoping for imminent demolition to take place to speed construction (Fontana 2008, Winkler-Schmit 2009a). Such revelations confirmed the abovementioned fears that across the city, land and properties were being eyed by -184- private interests outside New Orleans whose development plans would disrupt a tightly woven urban fabric, a sense of neighbourhood identity and its corresponding sense of distinctiveness, and the deep, generational ties that families and communities would have to their houses, streets, and neighbourhoods. 5.3: What Is New Orleans? Individual Case Studies In the above scenario—the city’s decision to demolish damaged homes—the disruptions were distributed across New Orleans, most prevalently in those neighbourhoods that had suffered the worst impacts from the storm. But some individual structures, simultaneously interlinked with a neighbourhood identity and a broader urban (New Orleanian) identity, became flashpoints for debates about the future of the city’s heritage, revealing and igniting tensions about representation and ownership. While arguably every historic structure that was lost in the storm could be interpreted under this framework, such as the many non-listed structures like the restaurants, bars, and performance spaces considered in the preceding chapters (and as Breunlin 2008 has articulated), this next section addresses three structures in particular as contrasting case studies, from a variety of scales. It examines a church that was controversially demolished, a housing development still under construction, and a widespread neighbourhood repopulation effort in order to reveal and account for that complex transformation. 5.3.1: St. Francis of Cabrini Church It is a truism that defining the historic is as contentious as defining the modern. Though it is impossible to say, had the designers of the former St Francis Cabrini Catholic Church on Paris Boulevard in Gentilly known of the debate their design choices would entail forty years later, they might well have chosen to emphasise one aspect of historicity or modernity over the other. As it stands, however, the church no longer stands at all, in part because of irresolvable debates over these issues. Having steeped in eight feet of floodwater after the storm, the church -185- was damaged almost beyond repair (Figures 5.6, 5.7). Yet as an significant entry in the local architectural ledger—designed in the early 1960’s, it was not just a rare example of Modernist architecture in New Orleans but one of the first local churches to incorporate the theological guidelines of the Second Vatican Council into its interior design—preservationists objected when, in the autumn of 2006, the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association put forth a plan to demolish the church to make way for a rebuilt and expanded Holy Cross School, itself a historic institution, founded in the mid-nineteenth century. For many in this community, such a plan was seen as vital to the rebuilding of the neighbourhood at large, as otherwise the School Board would have found a different site or neighbourhood to which to relocate, and the erstwhile site in Gentilly would have been left blighted while the church remained closed and residents struggled to rebuild their own homes. As then-City Council member Cynthia Hedge-Morrell put it at one of the public discussions, “There are so many people whose lives are being put on hold over this.” (Finch 2006) The debate soon settled into two positions: the first was held by those who doubted the church’s status as a historic structure (being younger than 50 years old, the cutoff point by federal historic preservation law) but more immediately saw it as obstructing and potentially jeopardising a broader recovery process (the question being, at its core, just whom the church was being preserved for—a neighbourhood of empty houses?). As Patty Gay, the director of the Preservation Resource Center, said: “It might be significant in other ways [than historicity] … What is being proposed in its place is a major factor – a quality school in a neighborhood that wants the school in their neighborhood.” (Schleifstein 2006). The opposing view was held by individuals who saw the church not just as a unique and irreplaceable feature in the New Orleans architectural landscape, and potentially falling into the same fate as the much- mourned Rivergate building on Canal Street demolished in 1995 (also Modern, and like the Cabrini Church, also designed by the local firm of Curtis and Davis). They argued that the church, once restored and reopened, would spur neighbourhood recovery just as much as the school would (DeBerry 2006, Hobbs 2007b). -186- Figure 5.6: Exterior view of St. Francis of Cabrini Church. Undated photograph. Figure 5.7: Altar of St Francis of Cabrini Church. Undated photograph. -187- The controversy was amplified by the unexpected, and late, decision in November 2006 of the Historic District Landmarks Commission to appeal to FEMA for a historic review process (Section 106 review), even after demolition orders had been issued (New Orleans Times-Picayune 2006h). Though FEMA ultimately declared the church a historic structure, negotiations with the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association and other public authorities in March 2007 resulted in a plan to dismantle the church and to provide space for the School to move into the site in time for the following school year (thereby providing a motivation for displaced residents to speed their own rebuilding efforts). In accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act which mandated the mitigation of changes to historic properties wherever possible, the demolition orders were ameliorated partly by the decision to preserve the significant features of the church rather than destroy them along with the structure: FEMA would “ensure that all research materials related to Cabrini Church, including architectural renderings, plans and drawings; copies of reports; recordings and transcripts of oral interviews; and photographs, are donated for archival storage to a library, archive, museum, or historical society that agrees to take responsibility for their long term preservation, security, and accessibility” (Hobbs 2007b: 30). Though the building had even been proposed for adaptive re-use as a potential museum or memorial for Katrina victims (Finch 2006, Verderber 2009) which could be integrated into the school plan, the demolition order held: its features were removed, and in June 2007, the bulldozers rolled in. 5.3.2: ICInola At the same time, a few miles south on Elysian Fields Avenue from the Cabrini church, a similar controversy was brewing over a structure that, rather than facing imminent destruction, was facing imminent construction. Billed as a new mixed-use housing and commercial development in the historic Bywater neighbourhood—a traditionally lower-income neighbourhood east of the Vieux Carré between the Faubourg Marigny and the Lower Ninth -188- Ward, where, as R. Campanella (2006) notes, many of the early immigrants to New Orleans settled—the ICInola project proposed redeveloping four city blocks into a unified, sustainably- designed complex featuring loft residences (105 in total), shops and other small businesses, and a supermarket (responding in part to the concerns about post-Katrina food access detailed in Chapter 3) (Figure 5.8, 5.9, 5.10). Yet its designers, developers Shea Embry and Cam Mangham, faced immediate resistance from Bywater residents furious about the potential impacts on the neighbourhood: impacts such as dramatically increased property values, disruption of the traditional architectural character, the introduction of moneyed outsiders into a neighbourhood with which they had no connection, and especially, the forced relocation of residents who owned historic homes in the path of the development to elsewhere in the neighbourhood, with no stated mechanism for doing so (Krieger 2007: 6). As with the Cabrini church, the debate swiftly polarised: Eggler noted that “To opponents, it’s an unsightly, out-of-scale behemoth that would wreak havoc on Bywater’s traffic, parking and drainage and threaten the neighborhood’s somewhat raffish, unconventional character. To supporters, it’s an environmentally sensitive, neighborhood-friendly engine for economic development that could be the catalyst for a dying district’s rebirth.” (Eggler 2007a) But of these myriad concerns, the question of what constituted traditional, or acceptable, New Orleans architecture rose to the fore. Not only did Embry and Mangham hire firms local to New Orleans to execute the designs (Eskew, Dumez, Ripple; and Wayne Troyer Architects), but they insisted in their advertisements and printed ephemera that at no point were the proposed structures seeking to ‘replicate’ historic New Orleans architecture. On the contrary, they argued that “Designing for conformity does not respect historic architecture, and indeed decreases the social and architectural value of structures that are actually historic, as opposed to just appearing to be so.” (ICInola 2007) At the same time, however, the designs for the residential complexes exceeded the height of the majority of the housing stock in the neighbourhood (primarily single and double shotguns), drawing fire from residents and preservationists alike, and the early lack of -189- iconic local design features such as stoops, galleries, balconies and shutters suggested that there was little New Orleanian about the project despite designation of French, German, Italian and Spanish names for the buildings. (Hobbs 2007a; Caribbean, West African, or Native American names did not appear in the design.) While revised designs presented at charrettes in the spring of 2007 did allay some residents’ fears, a committed core of opponents severed itself from the Bywater Neighborhood Association to form the Bywater Civic Association, a rival community organisation that took defeating the ICInola project as its chief aim (Figure 5.11). Ultimately, however, citing the long-term economic impact on the neighbourhood, the City Planning Commission voted in May 2007 to approve the project—which, while construction has begun on the first phase, has since been delayed in part due to the national recession still extant as of this writing in early 2010 (Moran and Reckdahl 2008). The first two building complexes, the ‘Kuhler Haus’ (formerly the historic Frey warehouse, dating to 1865) and the ‘Maison du Soleil’, are under construction, whereas the second phase of the ‘Casa Verde’ and ‘Casa del Viento’ buildings await groundbreaking—and for how long, it remains to be seen. -190- Figure 5.8, 5.9: Undated design rendering of ICInola development, Wayne Troyer Architects. -191- Figure 5.10: Map of site plan and building layout, ICInola, July 2007. Figure 5.11: ‘Icky-nola’ campaign poster, Bywater neighbourhood, 9 July 2007. -192- Linking these two sites is a reassessment of what ‘makes’ New Orleans architecture unique, and what qualifies for inclusion on a list which is, by all discursive accounts, as inclusive as a pot of gumbo. In commenting on the Cabrini church, DeBerry argued that “Granted, it’s somewhat distinctive. But no one from here or abroad could stand before the church and declare that its architecture defines New Orleans. If anything, the church sticks out.” (DeBerry 2006) That such a claim could not be extended to the Superdome—a structure that, like the Cabrini Church and the Rivergate, was designed by the firm of Curtis and Davis, and that shares similar features yet is widely regarded as one of the most iconic buildings in the city—reveals an idiosyncratic particularism (at least for this writer) about what constitutes inclusion onto a list of ‘appropriate’ local forms of architecture. That the bulk of the city’s historic environment is housing stock originally built in the 1800s and early 1900s is without question—but is not under critique. Rather, this assessment reveals a prejudice towards certain architectural styles and against others on the basis that they do or do not constitute ‘New Orleans.’ Granted, such a tension must always be in play, as taste evolves over time. But as local architect Allen Eskew has noted (not sharing the opinion that the church should have been destroyed), “…we have this horrible, horrible disease in this city, that if it’s not antebellum, then it has no value” (MacCash 2007). Consequently if the Cabrini church was demolished, it was done so partly because it was not authentically ‘New Orleans’ enough to be preserved—despite the location of authenticity, as I argue in Chapter 7, being found in dialectical relations rather than in materiality alone. And if the ICInola project was demonised, then it was not just for its alleged infidelity in architectural terms alone, but because it would have displaced the authentic New Orleans: the residents of the Bywater, and the neighbourhood feel which gives it its character (the subsequent economic arguments about increased rent, cost of living, and property taxes notwithstanding—entry-level costs for a loft in the ICInola development began around $300,000). -193- As van der Hoorn has argued in examining the afterlife of the Berlin Wall, culturally significant structures can continue to exist despite their material disassembly. “[They] can continue to live in fragmented form and act as an intermediary onto which people can project their memories, frustrations or experiences with regard to the object which used to occupy an important place.” (van der Hoorn 2003: 189-90). Indeed, the presences of these structures still, in their own respective ways, haunt their neighbourhoods. Donze, citing the Cabrini church among other lost features of the cultural landscape of the city, notes that “While the sight of empty buildings and vacant lots may pale in comparison to the visions of death and destruction that still haunt so many lives, each little faded memory can take its own special toll.” (Donze 2007). Moreover, the tensions present throughout reveal that even single structures have, as intermediaries, this capacity to ignite, or reignite, debate over what constitutes the historic environment, to the point that the culture of New Orleans itself becomes a voice in that debate, perhaps the loudest voice of all—despite the fact that its interpreters may not agree on what the city is saying. 5.3.3: The Make It Right Project East of the Bywater and the ICInola project, and across the Industrial Canal in the Lower Ninth Ward, another vision for a transformed, revitalised neighbourhood was taking shape. In early 2008, commuters driving along Claiborne Avenue across to the Lower Ninth Ward began to see an unusual sight: hundreds of enormous pink cubes and triangles strewn across the ravaged city blocks, some lying by themselves and others placed in odd juxtapositions to one another, still more forming the stylised semblances of houses, with square fronts and triangular pitched roofs, as in a child’s drawing (Figures 5.12, 5.13) When viewed at night, when they were lit from within, it appeared as though an entire fleet of ghostly, ethereal homes had suddenly repopulated the ruined neighbourhood. Which was precisely the point: in late 2006, the actor Brad Pitt had announced the work of the Make It Right Foundation, a nonprofit institution -194- dedicated to rebuilding homes for homeowners in the Lower Ninth Ward who had lost everything during the storm. The Pink Project, as it was called, which remained in place for approximately one month, was only the first signifier of this work: simultaneously a publicity stunt and an argument, a protest against what had been allowed to happen, and a form of visual promise-making to those individuals with whom it was in contract. “Right now there are scattered blocks, like they were scattered like fate’s hand, symbolic of the aftermath of the storm,” Pitt said. “But we will be flipping the homes, essentially righting the wrong.” (quoted in Krupa 2007) -195- Figures 5.12, 5.13: The Make It Right Foundation Pink Project, December-January 2008. -196- Figures 5.14, 5.15, 5.16: Design renderings for rebuilt homes in the Lower Ninth Ward. -197- Unlike the ICInola project, the vision put forth by the Make It Right Foundation received widespread approbation, for two reasons: first, because of its focus on homeowner restitution and social justice rather than profit-making, and second, because of the scale of its ambition—restoring an entire neighbourhood, rather than just one building or suite of buildings. That the Lower Ninth Ward had been a cultural epicentre in New Orleans (as I argue in Chapter 6) only contributed to the welcome reception that the Foundation received. A central dimension of the new houses’ construction—each of which was estimated to cost about $150,000, financed partly by the Foundation and partly by other public and private donors—was the emphasis on sustainable and renewable materials and design elements (Figures 5.14, 5.15, 5.16). Each of the 150 homes (despite their being designed by different local, national, and international architectural firms) was designed to reduce energy consumption, invoke passive features such as natural lighting and ventilation, and respect the morphology of the landscape by building with the floodplain (on elevated foundations) rather than against it. The designs thus acknowledged the risk of another flood event, but had already adapted to it: the proposal by Thom Mayne (who designed the National Jazz Center in Chapter 4), for instance, called for the house to be built on a floating foundation tethered to two piers. “It’s a boat,” he said (quoted in Pogrebin 2007). Though not all designs received equal praise, the debate about what constituted traditional New Orleans architecture was not inflamed in the way that it was with the ICInola project. Architects had been instructed by the Foundation to author their designs with a respect for the local culture in mind, citing requests by the residents who would be returning to the neighbourhood, but the material aspect of the homes was understood instead in the service of a larger purpose. The architects—and Pitt—were widely seen to be rebuilding a way of life which spoke louder than any individual cornice, shingle, or (in this case) solar panel—hence the praise recognised the attempts to restore an intangible culture that was in dialogue with the materiality of the home. The Foundation had illustrated, in other words, the perpetual and ongoing adaptability of New Orleans architecture—allowing, rather than forcing, its evolution into a new -198- ecological paradigm, a process of recapitulation examined in more detail at the end of this chapter—in a way that the ICInola project had not been able to do in a similarly historic and traditional neighbourhood. Whereas ICInola had assumed that style could be imposed independently of local heritage, the Make It Right Foundation had assumed from the start that style was achieved in concert with a heritage that could not be found in a pattern book or design encyclopaedia. In early 2010, thirteen of the one hundred and fifty homes had been completed. 5.4: Public Heritage The above case studies, in their various scales (from individual structure, to city block, to entire neighbourhood), illustrate two mutual impacts: that of the built environment on the city’s intangible heritage, and those of the city’s intangible heritage on the rebuilding of its built environment in turn. In this regard, scalar analysis can show linkages between seemingly unrelated impacts on the heritage ecosystem, as well as set a context for future forms of analysis. The final three studies considered in the context of the built environment are taken at the highest scale here useful: the size of the city itself. These three case studies, all of whom impact New Orleans at distributed yet linked points across the city, approach the built environment from both tangible and intangible perspectives: the first case examines the physical structure of a celebrated, iconic hospital as a site for the safeguarding of the city’s culture. This hospital, whose fate is still uncertain as of this writing in early 2010, is a landmark in New Orleans for its generations of medical care for the city. The second case examines the demolition and redevelopment, begun in 2007 and still underway, of the city’s five largest public housing projects, long seen (like Charity Hospital) as an incubator for the city’s cultural traditions, and now seen as unnecessary victims of an overzealous urban renewal plan whose consequences revitalise the prospect of gentrification. Finally, the third case considers the ‘Reinventing the Crescent’ plans, a proposed suite of seventeen different interventions into the city’s engagement with its natural environment, specifically, the Mississippi River. These plans, proposed by -199- developer Sean Cummings, have proposed to ‘reactivate’ streets, wharves, docks, and other points of access within New Orleans in order to ‘reawaken’ its relationship with its most important historical, geographic, and ecological feature, deliberately courting the ‘re’ discourse detailed in Chapter 2. In so doing these plans reinvoke the notion that the natural environment is itself a form of heritage—a notion examined at the conclusion of this chapter. 5.4.1: Charity Hospital The Make It Right Foundation’s work, described above, was accelerated partly by the fact that it was sourced from private donations, and so did not face the same legal and bureaucratic procedures as rebuilding projects operating through strictly public sources of funding. Back across the city, these hurdles have to date prevented one of the city’s landmark historic buildings, the Charity Hospital complex on Tulane Avenue in the Central Business District (Figures 5.17, 5.18), from refurbishment and repair since it was flooded. The debate surrounding Charity Hospital has focalised much of the rebuilding process since the storm, and the centrality of its role cannot be overstated. A masterpiece of Art Deco style architecture built in the 1930s by Governor Huey P. Long (who had previously built the Louisiana state Capitol building in the same style but who was assassinated before the hospital was completed), ‘Big Charity’ (as it is known locally) has long been an urban anchor in New Orleans. It served numerous overlapping roles: as the primary point of care for residents unable to afford private medical treatment, a learning and teaching resource for medical personnel in the region, and a catalyst for public and private development in the Tulane/Gravier neighbourhood (Morris 2008). Its closure after Katrina has proved a major impediment to the restoration of full public services in the city, as well as a further disincentive for lower-income families whose health care may not be covered by private insurers to return to the city. Charity has thus been positioned at the centre of overlapping debates about architectural preservation, neighbourhood development, medical infrastructure, and citywide and regional revitalisation. -200- Figure 5.17: Charity Hospital prior to Katrina. Undated postcard image. Figure 5.18: Charity Hospital shuttered after Hurricane Katrina. Undated photograph. -201- The debate originally centred on the aims and practicalities of conservation: as part of the public health system in Louisiana, could a structure of approximately one million square feet be repaired, refurbished, and reopened in a way that would be cost-effective to taxpayers? Irrespective of its architectural or heritage value, municipal and state governments were confronted with the question of whether it was feasible to restore Charity as a working medical facility—or whether the remaining hospitals and clinics spread throughout the city, such as Tulane Hospital, Touro Infirmary Hospital, and Ochsner Baptist Medical Center, would be able to fill the need that Charity left behind. Amid these logistical concerns, preservationist groups such as the Preservation Resource Center, the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation opposed any proposal to demolish the building and redevelop the site, should studies suggest refurbishment would not ultimately be cost-effective— as a premier example of Art Deco style in New Orleans, they argued Charity should not be allowed to suffer the same post-Katrina fate as other historic landmarks, including the Cabrini Church. Charity was portrayed as symbolic of New Orleans as any other local landmark, if not more so because of the crucial role it played in providing a safety net for lower-income communities—from which, as I have detailed in Chapters 2 and 4, many of the cultural tradition- bearers in the city have come. A loss of the Charity system would therefore spell a further threat to the rebuilding process of living culture in the city, and as a result imperil wider recovery efforts—if musicians, for example, could or would not return to New Orleans because public services remained in disrepair, then how could the city advertise the rebirth of its culture as an incentive for returnees and new residents alike? In this context, Charity set the stage for a wider debate about the reciprocal impacts of restoring one historic structure, a structure whose importance in the cultural landscape could not be overemphasised. In this sense, an ecological metaphor is useful: the Charity Hospital system can be taken as what Weidensaul calls an “apex predator”, not in its strictly carnivorous sense but as an organism in an ecosystem which exerts pressures and checks over other organisms, -202- around which biotic activity is subsequently organised, and whose removal, crucially, impacts the whole of the ecosystem. “There is an almost palpable completeness to the few remaining wild places that still have their apex predators,” he argues, “a sense of presence that I’ve never felt when the capstone animals are missing. … When wild country loses its pinnacle predator, that loss leaves a hole, and it’s one we notice, if only subconsciously” (Weidensaul 2002: 42). This prospective impact became increasingly forceful once competing visions for the Charity Hospital structure, and the wider site, began to emerge. The Louisiana State University medical system, which had since 1997 managed the Charity system, announced that it was considering a proposal not just to demolish Charity to avoid the cost of refurbishing it, but to build a new medical complex in conjunction with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs in the neighbourhood immediately north of the old Charity site, in lower Mid-City. Such a plan, estimated at $1.2B, would entail a public buyout of private property, the demolition and/or relocation of hundreds of historic homes, and the redistribution of residents into new neighbourhoods as yet unspecified—all in order to create a linked hospital, research and teaching facility, and biosciences industrial corridor (Figure 5.19). Moreover, it would have ironically entailed demolishing that part of upper Canal Street that historically comprised the now-lost neighbourhood of Storyville, where Louis Armstrong first learned his craft (Leathem 2008). These plans were met with immediate and widespread protest, both from the local Mid-City Neighbourhood Association and from stakeholders across New Orleans—protest that in the summer of 2008 was amplified by two events. -203- Figure 5.19: Tulane/Gravier proposed medical complex map. -204- Figures 5.20, 5.21: Digital renderings of refurbished Charity Hospital, RMJM Hillier Architects. -205- First was the listing of Charity in May 2008 as one of the United States’ “11 Most Endangered Historic Places” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which cited both the building and the surrounding neighbourhood as integral aspects of the city’s culture, and emphasised their heightened vulnerability in the post-Katrina economic and political landscape. The clearance of 67 acres and the demolition of 165 historic buildings in Mid-City would adversely impact the recovery, they argued, given that “The buildings targeted for demolition include a restored landmark school and thriving small businesses. … In addition, the plans abandon Charity Hospital, leaving it to an uncertain fate and pulling major economic drivers out of the still-struggling Central Business District” (National Trust for Historic Preservation 2008). This listing had no legal binding, however, prompting LSU official Fred Cerise to reply that “I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect patients to be relegated to an old and outdated facility that didn’t serve the needs of the public before Katrina” (quoted in Reckdahl 2008c). This tension between visions of an extant facility in need of repairs and a facility that existed only on paper was quickly overshadowed, however, by the release of a report by an independent architectural consulting firm (commissioned by the Foundation for Historical Louisiana) that had concluded, after extensive site surveys, structural and materials testing, that it would be both cheaper and faster to refurbish the extant Charity complex than it would to demolish it and build a new one elsewhere, even nearby (Figures 5.20, 5.21). The report concluded that a full refurbishment and modernisation would cost $484M over three years, whereas demolition and reconstruction would cost $620M over five years (RMJM Hillier 2008: 39-41). While these findings galvanised the preservation community, they too were legally inconsequential, exhibiting little impact on either the decision-making process of the LSU board or the political ability of the municipal and state governments to secure the necessary funding for any project, regardless of which one will ultimately be chosen. In summer 2009 Charity was considered as a prospective site for a relocated City Hall (Mowbray 2009), but with the state-level decision in November 2009 to commission yet another feasibility study for the two sites (Moller -206- 2009), its future remains unclear. What is clear, however, is the ongoing central role it continues to play in New Orleans’ cultural landscape, a role that was on display during the fourth anniversary of the storm. On August 31, 2009, a second-line of over 1000 protesters led by the ReBirth Brass Band and the Hot 8 Brass Band (sponsored by multiple nonprofit organisations, including SaveCharityHospital.com, the Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force, and the Committee to Reopen Charity Hospital) gathered on Tulane Avenue and marched around the footprint of the proposed site. Many of them bore articles of clothing and signs that read “I’m a Charity Baby.” And many of those, as David Grunfield’s photograph from the New Orleans Times- Picayune shows (Figure 5.22), were carrying musical instruments. Figure 5.22: Photograph of second-line in support of Charity hospital refurbishment, 31 August 2009. -207- 5.4.2: Public Housing, Public Culture In one sense, the seeds for what happened to public housing in New Orleans after 2005 had been sown in the previous decade, when the suite of buildings at the Desire public housing project in the Ninth Ward were demolished. Desire, a development built in the late 1940’s under the United States Housing Program (precursor to the modern-day Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD) for low-income residents, had long been seen in New Orleans as a spatially isolated, racially segregated neighbourhood where poverty, crime and violence were rampant and inextricable (GNOCDC 2006). When in 1995 HUD authorised redevelopment under the federal Hope VI protocol for creating mixed-use communities, the response by the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO, previously the local administrator for HUD but which HUD had reclaimed in 2002 over mismanagement issues), was initially to attempt to repair and refurbish the units. Ultimately, however, HUD moved to raze the entire Desire site, leaving two buildings for historic preservation, and redevelop it entirely (GNOCDC 2006). This process was underway when Katrina struck, flooding the site and devastating the attempted efforts at redevelopment, and setting the tone for HUD’s response to the impacts on the major public housing projects in the city. These dwellings, representing 5100 units of housing, are collectively known as the “Big Four”: (1) CJ Peete (also known as Magnolia) in Central City, (2) BW Cooper (or Calliope) in Central City, (3) St Bernard in Mid-City, and (4) Lafitte in the Seventh Ward, on the opposite side of Armstrong Park from the Vieux Carré. (Not all the public housing in New Orleans suffered damage: the St Thomas/River Gardens Project in the Lower Garden District and the Iberville Projects north of the Vieux Carré were only minimally affected and remain inhabited, as of this writing in early 2010.) The argument frequently heard after the storm that “Katrina was an equal-opportunity” disaster, affecting all strata of race and class equally, is sorely challenged by an examination of its impact on these public housing projects. These neighbourhoods were not only deserted overnight, but given their administration by a public government which was itself scattered, their -208- future seemed especially uncertain: in September 2005 the artist Dawn DeDeaux noted at the Lafitte projects that “Only a month ago, this was home to more than 2,000 people. Not a sound. Evidence of the sudden cessation of life can be seen through the scores of open windows. It brought to mind Kurdish towns after the gas, or Hiroshima following the blast.” (DeDeaux 2005). As the projects remained empty, with their residents dispersed across the country, it quickly became rumoured, then publicly apparent in June 2006, that HUD and HANO were considering the same response to the Big Four as they had to Desire years earlier: demolition and redevelopment under HOPE VI. This response was considered even despite two mitigating factors: first, the eligibility of some of the projects (such as Lafitte) for Section 106 review and potential subsequent historic preservation, and second, and even more salient, the lack of serious structural flaws to the buildings themselves that would have necessitated demolition. Contrary to claims issued by HUD, advocates and preservationists declared the buildings structurally sound after Katrina, having originally been built by trained craftsmen from local communities. Despite some wind and water damage, they argued, it would cost less time and money to refurbish and repair the units than it would be to demolish and rebuild them—just as with Charity Hospital (Sasser 2006, Ouroussoff 2007a). In a revised urban landscape desperately in need of housing for displaced residents, to destroy serviceable housing stock without simultaneously replacing it was seen not only to violate the rights of the previous tenants (including those who still held the lease on their unit, and those who had not been able to return to their damaged homes to retrieve personal belongings) but would, on a wider level, offset the city’s recovery process by additional months, if not years. Against the weight of the HOPE VI vision, however, the public protests and sit-ins (which took place periodically in 2006 and 2007) proved unsuccessful. In December 2007, amid emotionally charged protests both inside and outside the City Hall chambers (Gill 2007), the City Council voted unanimously to authorise the demolition of the Big Four, 4500 total units, in favour of redeveloping them (Warner & Filosa 2007). -209- Figure 5.23: Demolition of CJ Peete public housing complex. Photograph by Karen Gadbois. -210- Lafitte was later granted a temporary reprieve, but the impacts of the demolition of the others on the cultural fabric of New Orleans have lingered on. To understand these impacts, it is important to understand the history of these neighbourhoods. Part of the protest stemmed from the recognition that, despite their severe social ills, public housing projects in New Orleans had long been incubators for the city’s creative energy, where internationally prominent musicians, artists, and performers had been born and raised and trained, and where new art forms themselves—such as bounce, a uniquely New Orleans style of hip-hop, itself creolised with other musical styles—had developed as well. The loss of the neighbourhoods was not just seen as an impact on the racial makeup of the city (residents of these neighbourhoods were predominantly lower-income and African-American) made without consultation, but was then translated to the loss of the intangible culture of the city (just as residents feared would happen to Charity Hospital, as Baum (2007) noted). Nor was the replacement offered by HANO any palliative: the vision of mixed-use development, founded on New Urbanist ideals of imposed density, locality, social interaction, and accessibility, was criticised for artificially reproducing the architectural layout that had arisen in New Orleans without any assistance from planners—an artificiality Stevens et al (2010) show exacerbate extant latent hazards. Examining New Fischer, a HUD development across the river in Algiers, the critic Nicolai Ouroussoff savaged their vision: Conceived as an internalized world, with the majority of its narrow streets dead-ending into nowhere, the development is virtually cut off from the lifeblood of the surrounding city—the shops, streets, parks and freeways that weave the city into an urban whole. And its uniform rows of houses represent a vision of conformity that has little to do with urban life. Instead, it replaces one vision of social isolation with another. In its broadest sense, that approach is part of the continued assault against cities as places of contact and friction, where life is embraced in its full range. By smoothing over differences, it seeks to make the city safe for returning suburbanites and tourists. (Ouroussoff 2006) The romanticism that some residents and advocates felt towards public housing in New Orleans (despite its ills) was therefore less rooted in nostalgia for a bygone past than joined to a collective anger about what would come to fill that hole—or write on that blank slate. By replacing traditional housing with imitations thereof, the only culture of New Orleans that HUD and -211- HANO were understood to be rebuilding was the culture of tourism—and hot on its heels, that of gentrification. A pale white ghost that, even as the housing blocks were coming down on land, was rising over the Mississippi River. 5.4.3: Reinventing the Riverfront As Oliver-Smith (1986) has noted, any natural disaster prompts a widespread reassessment of the specific landscape feature or set of features, or practice of use, that gives rise to it—whether after a volcano, an earthquake, or a mountain landslide, communities that recover from disaster reevaluate their relationship with their environment as part of the adaptation process to that revised environment. In New Orleans, the primary element subject to that reappraisal has been water: since Katrina the surrounding environment—the Mississippi River, the lakes surrounding the city (Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne), the coastal wetlands, and the Gulf of Mexico itself—has been re-examined with a view towards strengthening civil defence infrastructure as well as decision-making about the extent of future urban layouts. The Mississippi River in particular, for which the ‘Crescent City’ takes its name, has been the site of special consideration and debate, becoming—or rather re-becoming, after Kelman (2003)— simultaneously a continuous physical site used for recreational, commercial, and aesthetic purposes, and a distributed symbolic site sharing multiple meanings for multiple stakeholders across lines of race, class, occupation, and intended use. It has also become a site for development: a site of potential capital, an economic resource to be exploited, as plans unveiled by the New Orleans Building Corporation (NOBC) in late 2006 began to reveal. -212- Figure 5.24: NOBC schema, ‘Reinventing the Crescent,’ 15 April 2007. Figure 5.25: Photograph of maquette of ‘Reinventing the Crescent’, 28 July 2007. -213- Figure 5.26: Digital rendering of design for conversion of Bywater Point, Hargreaves Architects. Figure 5.27: Photograph of original design specification for Bywater Point, 28 July 2007. -214- Shortly after the one-year anniversary of the storm, the NOBC, headed by developer Sean Cummings, announced a competition open to teams of national and international architectural firms to submit proposals for projects entertaining new visions for the Mississippi River. Called ‘Reinventing the Crescent,’ the competition was intended, as Cummings frequently put it at planning charrettes held across the city in subsequent months, to ‘invite New Orleans and New Orleanians to reinvent their relationship to the river’, which was, in those same settings, cited as the city’s most valuable heritage resource. In its original incarnation (Figures 5.24, 5.25), the framework envisioned as many as seventeen potential interlinked ‘interventions’ along the Mississippi River from Jackson Avenue uptown in the Garden District to Caffin Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward (the street of Horisaki’s latex house), interventions whose unifying themes would be to achieve five goals: to celebrate ‘places of distinct character and civic energy at the river’s edge,’ to ‘break down barriers and gain access to the river’s edge,’ to ensure ‘continuous access along a great public open space network,’ to promote ‘building and sustaining great places to live near the water’s edge’ (unsurprising given Cummings’ other career as a hotelier), and finally to create ‘new icons and social landmarks at the water’s edge’ (New Orleans Building Corporation 2007). The design plans of five different teams of architects were shortlisted, and the winning team of five local, national, and internationally-represented architects for the first phase of the project was announced in May 2008. The concept, generally welcomed within the larger narrative of ongoing rebuilding efforts (Eggler 2006), quickly ran aground of two complications. The first was local public reaction at the planning charrettes, which—while warm to less intrusive interventions, such as expanding public access in Woldenberg Park in the Vieux Carré, or at the Moonwalk near Jackson Square— for the more ambitious designs was mixed at best and openly hostile at worst. The conversion of Bywater Point (Figures 5.26, 5.27) was one of the most hotly contested: the original design proposed the refurbishment of the block, the expansion of the streets, the construction of new hotels and a luxury high-rise condominium, and the development of a secondary cruise ship -215- terminal downriver from the primary terminal near the Convention Center in the Central Business District—all interventions that would spoil the traditional character of the neighbourhood (the same criticisms made against the ICInola project earlier that month, as I detailed earlier in this chapter). As the report of one charrette in the Bywater noted, omitting the obscenities that frequently graced public discussion of the ‘Point Park’, The question/answer session was lively. Many questions involved the traffic congestion that would be created by Reinventing the Crescent developments coupled with cruise ship activity. There were no real answers. … In general, the public seemed pleased at the idea of being able to access the river, but extremely concerned about problems of traffic, density, and the ‘touristification’ of the neighborhood. (Jones 2007: 4) Responding to subsequent community feedback, this particular intervention was ultimately scaled down, but it has remained exemplary of the facility with which corporate interests were able to inflame a community that felt it already had a relationship with the Mississippi River that was in no need of revision or reinvention. As one Bywater resident complained, “We’ve got people from all over the world deciding what should happen to the New Orleans riverfront” (Eggler 2007b, MacCash 2007). Behind these protests, however, was the recognition of a heritage of control of the riverfront not by insiders or by outsiders per se, but rather by a class of elites: as Kelman has argued, the river has long been a site of economic development as much as symbolic or aesthetic appreciation: “New Orleanians have used history, scrubbed of its unseemly elements, as an anchor store in a preservation mall. In this way the waterfront again has become what the city’s commercial elites have always wanted: a landscape of power, order, and discipline, a tableau of progress.” (Kelman 2003: 216.) This description of a ‘tableau of progress’ mirrors the language being used for the contemporary vision of the Reinventing the Crescent programme. Not all of the interventions (like the development of Bywater Point) have survived their encounters with the public, either intact or even in partial form. Nor have they survived the second complication mentioned above, financing the project, an effort that has required a wide variety of local, state, federal, and private sources, and which since has met resistance from other stakeholders such as the Port of New -216- Orleans (Eggler 2008a). But the vision nevertheless still draws on a specific, selective vision of the heritage of New Orleans in order to advance its agenda. “While cherishing its past and remaining protective of its heritage,” they argue, New Orleans can only prosper by embracing a future with the same passion it has always brought to innovations in music, literature, cuisine, the arts and maritime industry. As New Orleans rebuilds its neighborhoods, the opportunity to add to the variety of environments, institutions, and dwelling places that will characterize the next New Orleans lie primarily near the river’s edge. (New Orleans Building Corporation 2008: 7) The river thus returns as and becomes anew the staging ground for the definition of what that future heritage will be, even as its role in shaping the city’s culture is only selectively acknowledged (Colten 2004). Which, if any, of the remaining interventions will be executed in years to come (and in what form) still remains to be seen—the estimated completion date of the proposals is tied to the 300-year anniversary of the founding of the city, upcoming in 2018. But in reshaping the environment specifically for economic development (an estimated impact of $1.6B in spending, $526M in earnings, approximately 24,000 new jobs, and $34.8M in state tax revenues (New Orleans Building Corporation 2008: 62), it remains furthermore unclear how this vision for reinvention will respect local architectural character, urban density and form, and use of public space, much less mitigate against the gentrification and ‘touristification’ that local residents have come to expect as a byproduct of this vision. For the same concerns about the demolition of public housing, noted above, have arisen in this context as well: if individuals and communities are priced out of the market by rising real estate costs due to artificially inflated property values (the metaphorical wrecking ball swung by the developer rather than the demolisher), the impact on the city’s culture—not so much the river as the people who live in, with, and in respect to it—will be far greater than any dollar sign could measure. -217- Figures 5.28, 5.29: Exhibition map of DesCours architectural installations, 2007 & 2009. -218- 5.5: Crowding the Blank Slate While these interventions in the post-Katrina landscape have led to large-scale alterations in the built environment (and will continue to do so in the years to come, especially if the Reinventing the Crescent plans materialise), at the same time as they were being planned and executed, smaller, more localised interventions into the historic environment were taking place across the city. These interventions, miniscule in scale but equally distributed throughout the city, have filled it in their own way with reflective commentary and critique of the rebuilding process, and have added a visible layer of local ownership to the rebuilding of the built environment. Before concluding this chapter with a reinvestigation of the work of heritage ecology, it is crucial to examine how even an intervention as small as a hand-made poster or a graffiti tag can ignite as large a public furore as a wrecking ball or a construction crane. This section briefly examines three interventions in particular: the DesCours project, the NoLA Rising project founded by artist Michael Glassman, and the public confrontation between the British artist Banksy and the anti-graffiti crusader Fred Radtke, also known as ‘the Grey Ghost.’ Originally the inspiration of Melissa Urcan, the local director of the American Institute of Architects, the DesCours project was unveiled for eight days in December 2007. Displaying the interventions of twenty-three architects and designers over seventeen locations in the Vieux Carré, the Central Business District, and the Faubourg Marigny/St. Roch neighbourhoods, the project sought to provide alternative ways of filling the blank, derelict, and ‘hidden’ spaces of the city’s architectural fabric (Figures 5.27, 5.28). Featuring installations such as free photobooths, explorations of renewable energy, and new artistic representations (such as the artist David Sullivan’s digital representation of the mould growing on the interior of flooded houses), the aim was twofold: first, to reimagine New Orleans as a locus for design innovation, and second, to highlight the linkages between the forms of heritage of the city, pairing New Orleans’ musicians with visiting designers and architects to create installations crossing artistic lines (further -219- extending the discourse of cultural synaesthesia detailed in Chapter 2). The project was repeated the following two years, its architects claiming that these efforts present an opportunity for viewing contemporary design within a historic setting by way of juxtaposition, thereby exposing the elegance achieved in the careful articulation of contrasting old and new. On a local scale, DesCours highlights the culturally rich fabric of New Orleans as a great backdrop for forward-thinking structural innovations that nod towards the future of architectural possibilities. (DesCours 2009) The effect of the contrast in these installations is apparent, yet few of the projects or interventions authored by the DesCours project, despite its ambitions, have taken root in the public imagination or discourse in the way that the Pink Project of the Make It Right Foundation has. Though this limited impact is due partly to its more transitory nature by comparison (occurring once per year for just over a week), the organised impulse towards conversion and revelation has filled the empty and blighted spaces of the city with low-impact visions of a prospective future—linking present architectural heritage with their future evolution. This impulse was echoed by the work of Michael Dingler, whose ‘NoLA Rising’ project has sought to provide even smaller-scale interventions into the urban landscape of New Orleans, via placing hand-designed posters, prints, and drawings bearing colourful, optimistic messages about the future of the city onto nearly any surface that would receive them: wooden fences, streetlights, public noticeboards, and the exterior walls of buildings (Figure 5.30). Unlike the corporate organisation of the DesCours project, however, the NoLA Rising project was engineered first by Dingler, and later, as it grew, by local residents who had formed an anonymous collective of designers, printers and distributors whose aim was to disseminate this form of public art as widely as possible, creating a new visual language to be found across the city. This language featured the fleur-de-lis on the majority of its designs; as I argued in Chapter 2, to reassert civic pride in a localised, informal manner would have been impossible without recruiting the dominant symbol of the city. Dingler acknowledged that the work of NoLA Rising had grown larger than his own direct control, claiming that the army of volunteers had self- organised beyond his capacity to manage them and even beyond the city limits of New Orleans -220- itself, garnering national and international sympathy (Rose 2007c). The NoLA Rising ensemble has argued that custodianship of the built environment—and correspondingly, of the psychological well-being of the citizens who inhabit it—is first and foremost under the control of those citizens, and that it is in their power to make amendments to a landscape known both pre- and post-Katrina for its blight (BGR 2008, Russell 2008). Hence the handmade street signs (some, but not all, executed by NoLA Rising), that began to repopulate neighbourhoods such as Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward after the storm, to replace those which the municipal government had until then been unable to repair (Figure 5.31). Serving to orient returnees and visitors alike to those neighbourhoods (including disaster tourists, who would have been visiting those areas with no previous knowledge of the street plan), they also made a widespread public statement about the ability of residents to repopulate the urban landscape with a human presence, even if, in the case of the most depopulated neighbourhoods, it was not yet repopulated with humans themselves. -221- Figure 5.30: Photograph of NoLA rising. Undated photograph by Matthew Hinton. Figure 5.31: Handmade NoLA Rising street signs in the Lower Ninth Ward, 22 December 2007. -222- But these efforts drew controversy, as vigilante reconstruction efforts within the built environment were not limited to beautification. In the summer of 2008, a local activist began to escalate his ongoing efforts to rid the city of graffiti, an escalation that came to prominent public view in late August and early September, during the third anniversary of the storm. For years both pre- and post-Katrina Fred Radtke, otherwise known as ‘the Gray Ghost,’ had assembled volunteers (like NoLA Rising) to undertake ‘Operation Clean Sweep’, a city-wide scrubbing of graffiti in a signature shade of grey paint (Pic & Fox 2007). His efforts have drawn ire from local residents for making the built environment less attractive than it had been with the graffiti, as well as for situating himself in the ironic position that his tactics “[made] him a de facto graffiti artist himself, albeit with one with no color or design sense” (Bookhardt 2008: 34). Neither this public sentiment nor the questionable legality of his actions, however, curbed his productivity, which was—until the arrival of a newcomer to the graffiti scene—largely directed at individual tags and signatures rather than urban art. Shortly before the third anniversary of Katrina, the city realised it had been visited without warning by the internationally-recognised street artist Banksy, whose designs of social and political critique had earned praise and revilement in equal measure in cities across the globe. His interventions in New Orleans, however, found on shopfronts, derelict buildings, and even the levee walls themselves—Banksy had noted on his website that the levee was “the best painting surface in the state of Louisiana” (Banksy 2008)—specifically targeted the lack of recovery by featuring stencilled images of brass band members wearing gas masks, a girl holding an umbrella under which rain pours down, and, famously, members of the National Guard looting a television from an abandoned store (Figures 5.32, 5.33). -223- Figures 5.32, 5.33: Street art by Banksy, New Orleans. August 2008. -224- Figures 5.34, 5.35: Street art by Banksy, New Orleans. August 2008. Figure 5.36: Banksy installation repainted over, Lower Ninth Ward, 11 September 2008. -225- Moreover, some of them targeted the Gray Ghost: two images in particular featured an individual painting grey paint over other figures, one a white stick figure and the other colourful sunflowers (Figures 5.34, 5.35). They did not just comprise a personal attack against Radtke, an attack that Dingler and the NoLA Rising collective publicly cheered (Dingler 2008). These stencils furthermore reignited the public debate about graffiti, and many of them, once their locations became known, were either stolen or themselves painted over (Figure 5.36)—some by Radtke, others by the owners of the buildings. (Burcher (2008) features a photograph of an individual he claims is Radtke painting over the Banksy image of the brass band members, but this claim is unsubstantiated.) Finally, even after they began to disappear, they continued to spark dialogue about the state of the recovery (Gill 2008), a reinvigoration of public discourse that led Doug MacCash, the art critic for the Times-Picayune, to publicly ask Radtke to lay down his paintbrush: “I suggest that Mr. Radtke let these particular pieces of graffiti survive,” he pleaded. Yes, they’re illegal. Yes, they will eventually be painted over when the walls where they’re found are repainted. In the meantime, allow these lovely little passages of surrealism to survive. In exchange, the local taggers and street art wannabes should keep the caps on their spray cans. Until—like Banksy—they’ve dreamt up something that is a contribution to the cityscape, instead of a visual contamination. (MacCash 2008c) His request fell on deaf eyes. As of this writing in early 2010, only a few images remain, and those are now covered in plexiglass—ostensibly to protect them from harm, but in effect, fossilising them in place. 5.6: Ecologies of Architecture Though these developments represent only selected examples in light of the overall impact of the storm on the built cultural heritage of the city, these transformations in the historic environment raise numerous questions about the discourse of the ‘blank slate’—embracing it, adapting it, rejecting it, even mocking it. It is clear, moreover, that they simultaneously force a reassessment of what constitutes the cultural heritage of the city and reveal the polarisations in that debate. In this context, what constitutes the cultural heritage is the built historic -226- environment—but as the above case studies have also shown, the issues run much deeper than the material nature of the changes. Certain themes arise which together point to a widespread reevaluation of the city’s built heritage, as would be expected, following the insights of Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (1999), when a society is reconfigured by disaster. First are the layers of association attached to the built environment, the social and emotional connections that individuals, families, communities, and the city as a whole maintained to the historic architecture of the city. This connection behaved in certain respects like a personal relationship; correspondingly, when the impact of the storm became apparent, the psychosocial reaction to the loss of the city’s architecture was to mourn it as though it had perished, a process Marris (1986) notes is to be expected. But the corollary impulse, as I have detailed throughout this chapter, was to attempt to preserve as much as possible in the aftermath, immediately mobilising the personal, economic, and legal instruments available to do so. Within weeks of the storm the Louisiana state Division of Historic Preservation had moved to expand the number of neighbourhoods eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places in order to guarantee the Section 106 review process (such as was undertaken for the Cabrini Church) for those districts and to speed the disbursement of state and federal recovery funding (Fricker 2005-2006: 11). Moreover, the swift listing in 2006 of all the historic neighbourhoods in New Orleans—in contrast to the single site of Charity Hospital in 2008—on the National Register of Historic Places’ list of “11 Most Endangered Historic Places” foregrounded the national level of crisis taking place in the city. Yet despite these efforts, many cherished structures were still lost, leading to similar efforts of material and psychological reclamation as were detailed in Chapters 3 and 4 (e.g. attempts to restore lost recipes and replace lost instruments). In this context, materiality played a key role: shortly after the storm, the Preservation Resource Center instigated ‘Operation Comeback,’ a recycling programme for elements of historic architecture such as cornices and gables—an architectural organ donor programme (Lentz 2006, Calmes 2009). -227- Second, though these emotional connections run deep both in the lives and the afterlives of historic buildings, mourning was by no means the only response that residents (and non- resident advocates) displayed in the aftermath of the storm. As discussed in the previous two chapters, the rebuilding process has witnessed the revitalisation of local craftsmanship after the storm, as residents sought to rebuild their homes using traditional materials and methods. The call for local woodworkers, painters, plasterers, and designers to work upon the historic architecture of New Orleans has been a signature feature in the post-Katrina landscape, and exhibits a longstanding form of tangible and intangible heritage that would not likely be found on local or national registers. Such a form of craft is not in tension either with the built environment or with legal forms of arbitration of it, but rather dwells in symbiotic, epiphytical relationship with them, and is an acknowledged form of heritage larger than any individual homeowner or craftsman. In the context of the visual dimensions of the landscape, Walker has noted that what is most important to preserve are the talents and the abilities of individual craftsmen, who frequently work without recognition (and in some cases, anonymously, as his examination of Lester Carey’s work on advertising design shows) to maintain the appearance of signs, buildings, murals, and other graphic elements that together render the distinctiveness that New Orleans enjoys. (Walker 2009) Third, for every small-scale intervention by a plasterer, graffiti artist, or aesthetic mercenary, larger-scale interventions will also respond to, and attempt to prompt in their own right, reassessments of what constitutes the city’s cultural heritage—reassessments that in some cases, such as in the work of the Make It Right Foundation, find concordance with a disparate public, and in others, such as the demolition of public housing or the closure of the Charity Hospital complex, prompt a more ambivalent response. As I detail in Chapter 7, each new map, charrette and neighbourhood plan drafted by every architect and designer is—not despite but because of its built-in obsolescence—in its own right an opportunity to reimagine and recalibrate the culture of New Orleans, and is, indeed, a direct attempt to reshape it according to a given -228- agenda. Most of these plans, including the largest of all—the Unified New Orleans Plan, drafted in consultation with stakeholders from all levels and sectors of New Orleans society and still, as of this writing in early 2010, awaiting ratification by the New Orleans City Council—have not seen the light of day, but this does not mean that they have not had an impact on the city’s culture. They serve as catalysts around which stakeholders, visions, and interests flow, acting simultaneously as resources and as drivers for cooperation and conflict, and as opportunities to articulate and safeguard those visions of the city’s culture that are poised to undergo a transformation. They are, in other words, artefacts from another world, a world that was never made, has not yet been made, and could still be made. Fourth, the debates over those other worlds have tended to revolve around questions of ownership, entitlement, authority, and moral and legal representation. The visions of New Orleans’ future on display over the past four years have almost without exception highlighted New Orleans’ past as its essential ingredient and its driving aesthetic and economic force and used it to advance their agendas (those visions which are not just infeasible but farcical, such as proposals to convert New Orleans to an American Venice, are exempt from this analysis). Yet these visions have implicitly maintained a selective image of New Orleans’ history (as the case of Charity shows above—revisioning one of the most historic and iconic spaces in the city in favour of economic development), rendering its heritage a terrain on which subsequent clashes are played out. In this context, the city’s heritage becomes a process, rather than a stable entity, in which the fears of gentrification (many of which are warranted, as the examples of ICInola, the demolition of public housing, and certain plans within the Reinventing the Crescent scheme demonstrate) are able to find voice, trading on an undesirable future in order to maintain a past to which it is impossible to return—as the dichotomy of the pre- and post-Katrina discourse, described in Chapter 2, enables. Gentrification will take root in New Orleans over time, but in the initial post-Katrina landscape it has served primarily as an idea around and against which disparate stakeholders have rallied as much as a new (or even refurbished) apartment block or -229- urban park. The primary concern is of escalation: that developments like ICInola will lead to dangerous precedents of large-scale capital interests remaking the city in their own image, despite the fact that no agreed-upon image of the city’s past exists. But fifth, and finally, the most compelling reassessment of the architectural fabric of New Orleans is located in its most signature feature: its landscape. A propos of demarcating, preserving, reviving or forgetting New Orleans’ built cultural landscape (efforts and tensions seen in all the above case studies), the physical landscape has played a singular role in reshaping the debate about the future of the city’s historic environment. In this sense, its heritage ecology has been uniquely influenced by disaster, becoming a form of disaster ecology: an ecology of disaster that simultaneously exhibits and tests the resilience of the extant system at the same time as it introduces new elements into that system. In this context, those new elements are architectural innovations that specifically recapitulate environmental considerations and frameworks into their design, a narrative of widespread resurgent interest in sustainability that is poised to shape the future of the urban landscape more than any other element. The houses in the Make It Right project have already been discussed as incorporating principles of sustainable design, one of their chief selling points when they were unveiled to the public (granted, one of the base principles for the ICInola project as well, as Reid (2008) has noted). But these examples are only the tip of the sandbar: proposals for low-cost, energy-efficient modular housing (occasionally called ‘Katrina Cottages’) have sprung up across the Gulf Coast (Jarvie 2007, Hyman 2008); the Global Green Initiative based in the Holy Cross neighbourhood launched a design competition for environmentally-conscious homes that drew 3000 entries internationally (Curry 2008); and entire neighbourhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward are now reconsidering how to rebuild in a more sensitive, environmentally low-impact manner (Wiltse 2007). Even the proposal for the floating shotgun house (a variant of which Thom Mayne had proposed for the Make It Right Foundation) has resurfaced; architect Elizabeth English reported that public interest in her designs has far surpassed any level she had seen prior to the storm, even though -230- designs such as hers had been long known from similar adaptations to floodplains in other countries such as the Netherlands (English 2008). But if it is necessary to foreground the newfound interest in design innovation, it is even more important to acknowledge that these innovations are frequently not innovations at all, are instead repackaging of previously extant designs in new ways—as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, local architectural styles in New Orleans have for generations evolved and adapted to the particularities of their physical landscapes, both on an individual level (in the single house) and the neighbourhood level (in urban density and layout). “New Orleans can offer plenty of lessons in green living,” Curtis has argued, and it could have before the storm, had anyone asked. How to build small and beautiful houses on narrow lots. How to built compact, walkable neighborhoods. How to adapt buildings to the environment, with deep porches and high ceilings and small, leafy yards. These are the things that people loved about New Orleans—and they’re the things that architects interested in sustainable design most want to build right now. The past here has much to inform the future, not just for New Orleans, but for an entire country that needs to rethink the way it designs cities and homes. (Curtis 2009) If this resurgent interest in environmental adaptation is less an innovation than a return to form, then it is partly because of the renewed national interest in adaptation to environmental change (a renewal sparked by considerations of global climate change, as noted in Chapter 1). Given the particular kind of impacts that Hurricane Katrina occasioned, however—a hurricane followed by a catastrophic flood—it is important to note that not all of these designs for environmentally- conscious houses adequately respond to the level of risk posed by the physical landscape, despite their efforts to mitigate that risk. A house situated on a floodplain will still be damaged if its elevation does not surpass the flood table, regardless of its energy efficiency. The heightened awareness of this risk (and the corresponding limitations of architectural innovation to mitigate against it) led to public outrage when, a year after the storm, revised federal flood elevation codes only increased the minimum requirement for insurable elevation by a slim margin, a margin not only unrelated to variances in local topography but far below the recommended levels advocated by expert institutions (Gordon 2006, Peck 2008, UNO-CHART 2008). -231- This perceived failure of leadership on the national level has been attributed to numerous sources, most commonly the close relationship that insurance corporations have maintained to politicians and political action groups, but regardless of their origin they pose serious questions for the future of the historic environment in New Orleans. If residents rebuild (or even build anew) to the minimum guidelines, both they and the historic homes in which they live will remain in danger, and will, as a result, remain potential subject material for sculptors such as Takashi Horisaki if the conditions for another disaster are met. In this sense, the “historic environment” is more accurately an environment whose history is never fully written, whose inscription upon the landscape and upon the communities who dwell in that landscape is a process that continues to evolve (for better or worse, for more or less impact) just as much as the individual designs which seek to respond to the dynamics of that landscape. One of the most difficult questions to arise after the floodwaters had receded, but before the majority of the population had returned, was what the exact impact on the physical footprint of New Orleans would be—whether the storm would rewrite the city again as environmental phenomena had written and rewritten it from its beginning. The answer to this question lay not in words or figures but rather in the unmistakeable rapport of nails striking wood, an answer singularly unconcerned with its question. -232- Chapter 6: Remembering Katrina And I just had to get that out of this old trumpet, because it’s been in there for three years, I’ve been wanting to play for these people. —Minyard 2008 Prologue: Disneyfication One of the means by which the force of Disneyfication advances is by the gradual erasure of the elements of the original object, ritual, or process that presaged it. Over time, the simulacrum comes to replace the source artefact or text, leaving no trace of its former existence, not simply obstructing but occluding the recovery of that text. The end result of this process is, as Baudrillard has described it, less a deliberate destruction of the original than a methodical project by which it is rendered irrelevant. Disneyland itself, he argues, …is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but are of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. (Baudrillard 1988: 172) That the imaginary is “neither true nor false” is crucial, for when it has finished, this act of systematic replacement self-legitimises the regime (economic, political, or ideological) which has undertaken it. As writers such as Orwell (1949) and Kundera (1981) have noted, when this form of erasure and substitution acts upon historical memory, it does so by the careful manipulation of public and private memory. When it succeeds, the process does so because it is finished more swiftly than the affected can become aware of it. “The first step in liquidating a people,” Kundera writes, “is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” (Kundera 1981: 159) As I have described throughout this dissertation, this fear has been prevalent in New Orleans throughout its rebuilding process: that in time, the impacts of the storm, while -233- catastrophic and generational, would be deliberately erased or absented from the landscape in order to cultivate an idea of the city that would be able to entice individuals, corporations, and developments from outside the city to invest in it for purposes of tourism, economic development, and ostensible ‘urban regeneration.’ In other words, the areas of the city where investment would be most viable—the upscale, iconic neighbourhoods on the high ground such as the Vieux Carré and Uptown—would become the public face of post-Katrina New Orleans, a form of institutionalised displacement of the fact that the rest of the city was still flood-ravaged and depopulated. The result would be an erasure by implication, or in other words, a crafted forgetting. As the artist Herbie Kearney put it shortly after the storm, “New Orleans is rotting and tragically fresh. … We have to come back and make art. If you don’t have culture, the city will become Disneyland for condo people” (quoted in Longman 2005). As noted in Chapter 5, the onset of Disneyfication is of legitimate and grave concern: with the increase in cost of living, the continued diaspora of former residents, and the increasing reliance on a tourism-based economy, the ingredients for the recipe are all in place. But as Percy (2001a) and Souther (2007) have argued (discussed in Chapter 3), despite its post-Katrina ubiquity, this discourse has in fact predated the storm by decades, and had long been anticipated. Nor has the rebuilding process to date presented so linear a dynamic as these processes would seem to engender, with the inauthentic replacing the authentic, the simulacrum replacing the real. Rather, the first four years of the recovery have instead presented a more intricate set of tensions between absence and presence, remembering and forgetting—partly due to the improvisational spirit of response to the disaster, but partly because the totality of the disaster has presented unique opportunities for residents to lay claim to participation in the whole of the rebuilding process in a single expression or gesture (as each of the three previous chapters have shown in different ways). In order to illuminate those tensions more fully, this chapter takes two approaches: first, it documents the forms of remembrance that have arisen since the storm—local, municipal, and national—and in so doing examines the issues inherent in memorialising a disaster. Having -234- charted the efforts of individuals and institutions to remember the storm—or, in some cases, to forget it—it then addresses three case studies of memorial sites in greater depth, the unidentified and unclaimed bodies memorial in Charity Hospital Cemetery on Canal Street in Mid-City (referred to for ease of reference as the Hurricane Katrina Memorial), the wider collective site of the Lower Ninth Ward, and a site outside the city, the Hurricane Katrina collection at the National Museum of American History (part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC). Having examined those sites in detail, the chapter then concludes by an analysis linking these sites together. These considerations invite an analysis of the idea of proleptic or future heritage, of the ways in which—conditioned by present initiatives and memorial sites—the storm will be remembered in years to come. Despite the threats that Disneyfication poses, it is, and will remain, impossible to truly rid the landscape of the storm. For to cleanse a landscape of an absence is a task far more difficult than replacing it with a presence; as Lowenthal has argued: Therein lies the art of forgetting—art as opposed to ailment, choice rather than compulsion or obligation. The art is a high and delicate enterprise, demanding astute judgment about what to keep and what to let go, to salvage or to shred or shelve, to memorialize or to anathematize. (Lowenthal 1999: xi) 6.1: Memorialising the Storm Given the diversity and depth of impacts across the city and the region, the forms and places of remembrance of the storm will naturally vary in concordance with those impacts. Individuals, families, and communities each harbour their own means of marking the storm, creating an idiosyncratic, continually evolving cultural landscape of memory. (I have already mentioned in Chapter 2 the response of Biloxi, Mississippi, to memorialise the storm surge by marking its height on municipal lightpoles; their memorial complex, which it has not been possible to fully analyse, includes a monument with a stylised ocean wave and preserved storm debris constructed by the ABC television network (Figures 6.1, 6.2). Consequently to tease out the salient features in that landscape is a delicate act and prone to claims of relying upon subjective accounts, claims which are important to acknowledge. For accounts of what -235- transpired during the present disaster have been conditioned by prior acts of collective remembrance, as Miles and Austin (2007) have argued in examining the belief that portions of the municipal levees were deliberately dynamited to divert the flood pattern from the wealthier neighbourhoods upriver to lower-income, more vulnerable ones such as the Lower Ninth Ward downriver. The belief, articulated in Lee (2006), is not without grounds: as Barry (1998) has shown, that this sabotage did happen—not necessarily during Hurricane Katrina, but in the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927, from whose events Randy Newman’s now-iconic song cited in Chapter 4 (“Louisiana 1927”) was inspired. Whether it did or did not happen during Katrina, however, is less relevant to the present study than the way that the memory of a past traumatic event serves to condition the response to a present disaster: as Miles and Austin claim, the force of deeply engrained beliefs such as these within a community transcend the normal structure of collective memory and verge on myth. Once such myths become enshrined, moreover, they serve as the condition for the contestation of remembrance—and subsequently the contestation of moral authority, the right to declaim what happened—that comes to characterise public discourse after a disaster. -236- Figures 6.1, 6.2: Hurricane Katrina Memorial, Biloxi, Mississippi. 7 September 2007. -237- Before examining this contestation further, however, it is important to chart the physical spaces of remembrance that have been established following the storm. Even this gesture is not without controversy, given the widespread extent of the disaster: as I argued in Chapter 2, arguably, every structure, every street, and every space in New Orleans has been transformed by the storm, and thus deserves consideration as a prospective site of memory. For any form of material culture directly or indirectly impacted by the storm has implicitly undergone a transformation to become a record of its impact, and harbours interpretable data and associations. Indeed, in the first year of the rebuilding process, this widespread process of citywide memorialisation nearly transpired. In preparation for the first anniversary of the storm on August 29, 2006, the need to revitalise the city’s self-image, to call attention to the cultural heritage still at risk (in all its forms, as detailed in previous chapters), and to protest the slow pace of recovery in full glare of national and international media, was apparent in the art exhibitions, media programmes, commissions, public discussions and conferences, religious observances, and formal commemorative services taking place over that period of time. Crystal (2009) has recently argued that anniversaries catalyse flows of emotion surrounding a given observance, providing an opportunity for them to diffuse outward into the public sphere. During this first anniversary the entire city (both returnees and diasporees, as Lundgren’s Katrina Dinner detailed in Chapter 3 shows) prepared to remember and reflect upon Katrina’s impacts, performing this memory for a global audience. As Maklansky (2006b) reported, however, in the years following the initial surfeit of events addressing the storm and the rebuilding process, this outpouring of private and public attention to the storm led paradoxically (and inevitably) to ‘Katrina fatigue,’ an oversaturation of the cultural landscape with the storm, and ultimately a psychosocial exhaustion with the topic. To point this phenomenon out is in no way to discount the daily struggles that individuals, families and communities faced in rebuilding their lives and livelihoods; in one sense, as argued above, it would be impossible to forget the storm, given that its impacts were -238- everywhere visible, salient, and recurrent. But in another sense, after the first anniversary—after the storm had made metaphorical landfall and departed once again—the widespread desire to ‘just get on with it’ began to take hold. As the rebuilding process has progressed, the decreasing numbers of organised events and services at each new anniversary of the storm—in comparison to the first year, when the list of anniversary events covered a full broadsheet page of the newspaper—suggests a partial remission of the storm from public observance (New Orleans Times-Picayune 2006, Appendix B). Yet paradoxically, the sites for public remembrance of the storm have continued to grow, with the mayor’s office and the City Council sponsoring a range of formal observances at selected sites around the city. Specifically highlighting the political nature of the disaster—the failure of the municipal levees and the flood, rather than the hurricane itself—at each of the four anniversaries prior to this writing (and likely again at the upcoming fifth anniversary in August 2010), city leaders have ceremonially marked the sites of the main levee breaches: the 17th Street Canal in Lakeview, the London Avenue Canal in Gentilly, and the Industrial Canal at Jourdan Avenue and North Galvez Street in the Lower Ninth Ward. These sites have become, over the four years, a network of linked memorial sites at which public officials (regardless of whether they had held their office during the storm) hold commemorative services, such as ringing bells, leading prayers, and throwing wreaths of flowers into the canals at the precise moment the levees had breached (Figure 6.3). These services, which have drawn returned residents, displaced homeowners, public officials, members of the news media, and other stakeholders together in their observance have largely been transitory (lasting no more than an hour), but in their spatially distributed practice, each site comes to stand metonymically for each of the other sites. To participate in a commemoration service at one levee breach is, in a sense, to participate in all of them, given the nature of the disaster—acknowledging that the floodwaters respected no bounds, and that identity both as a New Orleanian and as a Katrina survivor can be affirmed at any one of these sites regardless of whether it is in one’s own neighbourhood. -239- Figure 6.3: Memorial service (obscured), Industrial Canal, Lower Ninth Ward, 29 August 2008. Photograph by Charlotte Bearn. -240- Figure 6.4: Granite marker at the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center. 7 September 2007. Figure 6.5: Memorial complex, Claiborne Avenue, Lower Ninth Ward. 31 August 2006. -241- Figure 6.6: ibid., steel poles marking the height of the floodwaters in the Lower Ninth Ward. Figure 6.7: ibid., granite marker and flag poles (with structure from Pink Project visible). -242- Elsewhere I have examined in detail the physical monuments that have arisen in the city since the storm (Morris 2009). These can be divided into several categories: the first main kind are the formal monuments erected by public subscription or government authority (whether in part or in full): a granite marker at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in the Central Business District (where thousands of residents sought shelter and awaited evacuation immediately after the storm, as Horne (2006) details), a sculpture of a half-built house on Claiborne Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward (whose construction Bearn 2009 has examined), and the Hurricane Katrina Memorial in the Charity Hospital cemetery on Canal Street. The first two sites (Figures 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7) were unveiled and dedicated on the first anniversary of the storm; the Hurricane Katrina Memorial took three years to construct and is considered more fully in the next section. The second main kind are the more informal monuments, which I have termed ‘minuments’—small, humble artworks and sculptures placed at sites of local remembrance where a family member passed away, where a house had stood, or where another event of unspecified or ambiguous origin is marked. In the context of the post-Katrina visual landscape detailed in Chapter 5, these minuments—ubiquitous immediately after the storm, but seen less frequently as the recovery process took shape—presaged the later reclamation of street signs and posters undertaken by initiatives such as NoLA Rising, with their small-scale interventions into the ruined landscape. It is arguable furthermore that the messages of hope and optimism promoted by NoLA Rising displaced both physically and psychologically the messages of mourning or grief these artworks seemed to signify. But as I have argued throughout this dissertation, neither physical spaces nor material culture can be considered independently of their performance, interpretation, and use, nor (in this context) their relationship to other memorial practices in the city, nor their specific local cultural context—the Elysian Trumpet detailed in Chapter 4 serving as an illustration of this point. Because the element of performance is intrinsic to the culture of New Orleans, the interpretation of these sites and artefacts remains incomplete without it, as evidenced by a third -243- category of remembrance undertaken during the anniversaries. Each anniversary has featured musical appreciations—not just concerts and marches, but full jazz funerals for Hurricane Katrina (in some cases, multiple, concurrent jazz funerals across the city) in which the storm is symbolically laid to rest (Morris 2009; Figure 6.8; Appendix B). To date, the structure of the ritual has frequently mirrored that as it would for a recently deceased person, from the initial procession and dirge to the arrival and cutting loose of the ‘body’ and the transformation of the dirge into an uptempo celebration. (Some of the celebrations during the third anniversary of the storm, including a jazz funeral and second-line in the Lower Ninth Ward, were curtailed and/or cancelled by the imminent arrival of Hurricane Gustav, as R. Lewis (2008) reported; this impact is detailed in the Afterword.) Figure 6.8: Drummer ‘Uncle’ Lionel Ferbos, Treme Brass Band, preparing for jazz funeral and second-line for Hurricane Katrina on the first anniversary of the storm. 29 August 2006. -244- Interestingly, however, in order to ‘bury the storm,’ as these funerals set out to do (Kraemer 2006), the celebratory aspect of the march must diverge—for the purpose of the uptempo transformation is to celebrate the person’s life, their release from this world, and their entry into the next (as Minyard 2009 describes below). The same structure of celebration for a natural disaster would be incongruous; on such a ground, the celebratory aspect of the transformation would be reflected back upon the ‘mourners,’ who are, in this context, both mourners (for those friends and family members who were lost in the storm—a corresponding subject of the funeral) and survivors (of the storm, the evacuation, and the return). In this sense, the uptempo major shift in a traditional processional hymn such as ‘Just a Closer Walk With Thee’ would mark a break with two aspects of former lives: the break between life pre- and post- Katrina (as described in Chapter 2), but correspondingly, the transformation from life in which existence (personal and collective) is taken for granted into life in which resilience and survival become paradigmatic. In this sense, the performative element of the jazz funeral impacts upon the awareness of mortality of the self, as it always has, but to impact in this way in a post-disaster context in which the contingency of life is brought to the fore adds a dimension of urgency to the narratives being represented. And that these narratives are frequently nonverbal in both conceptualisation and practice—that they are played out in phrases of notes rather than words— is irrelevant. 6.2: The Hurricane Katrina Memorial It was a sweltering windless morning on August 29, 2008, when Dr Frank Minyard, the Coroner of Orleans Parish, took the stage at the recently-completed Hurricane Katrina Memorial in the Charity Hospital Cemetery at the north end of Canal Street (Figure 6.9). Surrounded by municipal, state, and national leaders, all of whom were fanning themselves with the ‘One New Orleans’ fans provided by the Mayor’s office, Minyard stood at the podium with his trumpet and offered a few words of explanation about the history and purpose of jazz funerals (Appendix C). -245- (This ceremony took place after a jazz funeral had processed up Canal Street to the cemetery bearing the final body for interment; the others had already been interred by the day of the anniversary; Figures 6.10, 6.11, 6.12) Minyard then proceeded to play the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” for the assembled crowd of residents, mourners, religious leaders, military personnel, and media. Yet his performance was not for them, strictly speaking: he played this hymn, rather, for the 126 unclaimed and unidentified bodies that the Memorial had interred in its dual role as a cemetery (the coroner’s office had originally received 225 cadavers, as Minyard noted, but forensic identifications and relatives claiming remains had lowered the number over time). The Memorial, designed by the Coroner’s office and underwritten by a combination of public, private, and corporate funding sources, had been under construction since the first anniversary, when then-mayor Nagin announced the plans for its design; its groundbreaking took place on the second anniversary of the storm in 2007, and its formal dedication on the third anniversary, the morning that Minyard played. This performance echoed the previous year’s groundbreaking ceremony, when Irvin Mayfield Jr. had played “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” on the Elysian Trumpet (as noted in Chapter 4)—playing not just for those who would come to rest at that particular site, but a dirge for all of those lost in the storm, including his own father.) Minyard’s performance lasted no more than four minutes, but prior to resuming his seat—and the subsequent unveiling of the memorial plaque, and the conclusion of the ceremony (Figures 6.13, 6.14) he thanked the sponsors of the site, including Mayor Nagin for facilitating its construction. Minyard concluded his remarks by saying: We’ve had a tremendous experience finding out about how to do a place like this, and how to keep it up, how to have the perpetual care account, which I never knew even existed. So we got all of that, and here we are today, and I am just so proud. And I just had to get that out of this old trumpet, because it’s been in there for three years, I’ve been wanting to play for these people. So—we finally got it done. Thank you very much, and God bless you, and God bless this wonderful city of ours. (Minyard 2008) -246- Figure 6.9: Frank Minyard playing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’ 29 August 2008. Figure 6.10: Procession for the final unclaimed body for the Memorial, 29 August 2008. -247- Figure 6.11: Carriage bearing the final unclaimed body for the Memorial. 29 August 2008. Figure 6.12: Interment of the final unclaimed body for the Memorial. 29 August 2008. -248- Figure 6.13: Ceremonial bell-ringing and conclusion of anniversary service. 29 August 2008. Figure 6.14: Mayor C. Ray Nagin unveiling memorial plaque. 29 August 2008. -249- Elsewhere I have detailed the early phases of the construction of the Memorial while it was underway, including early criticisms over whether it was even appropriate (Morris 2009); since its completion, it has become clear that over the three years that Minyard’s hymn had been waiting in his trumpet, the Memorial had faced a number of challenges. First was the scale of the endeavour; while a set number of coffins had been delivered to the coroner’s office in April 2006, eight months after the storm, it was unclear how many of those coffins would remain eligible for interment in the cemetery, or whether in the course of its construction rescue teams would continue to discover more bodies. Caution was therefore required lest the tallying of the deceased become inaccurate, as was proved by the case of a memorial monument in nearby St. Bernard Parish bearing numerous errors—about which Warren notes that “Some of the storm’s victims weren’t included. Other names were misspelled. In a few cases, the monument listed the names of people who are still very much alive” (Warren 2008). Second, as noted above, was the funding; securing the roughly $1.5M that was required for its design, construction and maintenance was a challenge that led to the creation of a nonprofit body, the Hurricane Katrina Memorial Corporation, tasked with securing the support (Eggler 2007c). Third was the physical site; as Minyard noted in his remarks, prior to choosing Charity Hospital Cemetery (Figures 6.15, 6.16) the location originally considered for the Memorial, at the Potter’s Field cemetery on the old Gentilly highway, suffered from adverse environmental factors: the propensity to flood and the subsequent loss of remains. “It would be very, very difficult,” Minyard said. “Once you put a coffin in the ground out there … it sinks, it’s gone, you can never retrieve it” (Minyard 2008). The risks of burial in New Orleans have been long acknowledged, and long celebrated; the city’s famed aboveground cemeteries were constructed in response to the local ecological factors of residing below sea level and suffering from high groundwater, and have given rise to traditions such as the annual maintenance of family tombs on All Saints Day (1 November), and tours of mortuary architecture for residents and visitors alike, traditions that as Dawdy (2006) notes in her post-disaster salvage work on these sites were severely disrupted by the impact of the flood. -250- Three specific elements of the design of the Memorial deserve mention (I am here excluding the design of the tombs themselves). First, the most striking aspect of the site’s design is undoubtedly its physical layout, resembling in abstract form the multiple-spiral shape of a hurricane (Figures 6.17, 6.18). I have already argued that such a design reinscribes the disaster back into the landscape of the city, a gesture that has drawn both criticism and praise since its construction (Morris 2009); in this context this element presents an unresolved question about the nature of memory, addressed in more detail in Chapter 7, in its implicit claim that the city is to be permanently reminded of the shape of its disaster by the inclusion of its representative symbol. The second design element, also symbolic, is the arboreal landscape inside it (Figures 6.19, 6.20). Planted by Monique Piliè of the nonprofit environmental advocacy organisation Hike for KaTREEna, forty-five Louisiana bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) line the site on raised mounds, surrounding and echoing the central arms of the site; that this species is not only native to Louisiana but instrumental in stabilising coastal wetland ecology as well as mitigating against flood and storm surge impacts (Faulkner, et al 2007) is both an ironic comment on the degradation that the wetlands have suffered and a form of protest against further degradation— raising the spectre of future memorials for future storms. The third design element is the central plaque detailing the purpose of and donors to the Memorial, otherwise unremarkable except for the fact that it was never meant to exist: the original design for the site included a sculpture of an angel by the artist Kim Griffin (Figure 6.21). Featuring prominent symbols of the city (including a fleur-de-lis), the sculpture was subsequently reneged upon by city authorities when they were unable to secure the full funding for it, leaving it, like the unrealised architectural visions detailed in Chapter 5, an expression in design only (Minyard 2009). The plaque with its memorial dedication was later erected in its place (Figures 6.22, 6.23). -251- Figure 6.15: Undeveloped site for the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. 22 December 2007. Figure 6.16: Hurricane Katrina Memorial tombs under construction. 13 August 2008. -252- Figures 6.17, 6.18: Early design renderings for Hurricane Katrina Memorial, sponsored by New Orleans Katrina Memorial Corporation. Design by Mathews International Corporation. Undated images. -253- Figure 6.19: Louisiana cypress bordering the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. 23 August 2008. Figure 6.20: Nearly-finished Hurricane Katrina Memorial prior to dedication. 23 August 2008. -254- Figure 6.21: Undated image of ‘Angel of New Orleans’ sculpture by Kim Griffin. (unrealised). Figures 6.22, 6.23: Monument erected at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial. 29 August 2009. -255- At present, the Memorial plays an ambivalent role in the heritage landscape of New Orleans. With the exception of the yearly anniversary services, which are covered in-depth by local and national news media; it lies locked and dormant, scarcely a presence or destination in the public arena in the way that other memorial sites, such as Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC has become, or like the future September 11 memorial at Ground Zero in New York is slated to become, as Edkins (2003) has argued. (That the yearly commemoration of 9/11 falls two weeks after 8/29, drawing journalistic resources and attention swiftly away from narratives of New Orleans to narratives of New York, raises intriguing questions about the displacement of national attention regarding tragedy, and the mechanisms by which it is created and sustained). The site has faded into the backdrop of municipal life, contrary to the original expectations of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission which had originally conceived of this kind of large-scale memorial complex as a major tourist destination across the Gulf South region and indeed the nation (Morris 2009). This is partly due to the nature of the site: as a cemetery for the unclaimed and unidentified victims of the storm, rather than the named victims whose family members would still pay their respects, it does not draw an audience that would come outside of the formal observances. This is also partly due to the adverse economic situation that New Orleans has faced; with the dawn of the global economic recession in 2008 as a result of the banking crisis, the administrative and legislative priorities of New Orleans were unable to accommodate additional development in this sector, focusing instead on essential city services. Hence the development of the Memorial site was curtailed by external factors, and might have undergone addition or expansion had not these pressures come to bear. But the most important factor playing into its widespread invisibility is undoubtedly memorial fatigue: the sense, referred to above, that the ‘official’ occasions and forms of remembrance of the storm have by now served their purpose; in other words, that it is no longer necessary to publicly memorialise the storm. Monique Piliè, the environmental activist contracted with planting the cypress trees around the Memorial, reported that she had no intention of -256- returning to the site, that it did not satisfy her needs of private remembrance which were found elsewhere—among her family, her neighbourhood, and her religious community (Piliè 2008). Her feelings reflect the sentiments of many New Orleanians, but paradoxically the anger at the lack of national remembrance and attention outside of anniversaries (transforming ‘the city that care forgot’ into ‘the city that the country forgot’) coexists with little contradiction against the local desire to be done with the storm, to move on from it on a personal and family level. Even Minyard himself voiced this desire. When asked at the observance ceremony on the fourth anniversary of the storm (at which he had given his time on stage largely to Dr Jeffrey Rouse, and which performance featured vocalist Cory Richardson rather than Minyard or Mayfield, Jr.), whether he had considered playing another piece, Minyard reported: “They asked me, but I said no thanks. I played a year ago, I said my piece, and I left the music here. You can’t keep coming back to the cemetery. I’m 80 years old. I don’t want to keep coming back” (Minyard 2009). Prior to examining the next case study, it is crucial to acknowledge in any discussion of the remembrance of Hurricane Katrina that because the damage was so widespread, it would prove challenging, if not impossible, to focalise all points and needs for remembrance into one site. Rather, as the case study of the Lower Ninth Ward shows, the city and its neighbourhoods serve as the memorial, so to channel all material and immaterial flows through one memorial conduit would prove intractable. An inbuilt tension within the Memorial remains, however, between the ordered material arrangement of the site (its precise landscaping, its finely-edged granite craftsmanship, its hand-painted wrought iron fence) and its unkempt immaterial nature: a site dedicated to housing the unclaimed and unidentified victims of the storm, the lost and forgotten and abandoned of the storm. In such a context, any attempt to neatly contain all narratives, even narratives of marginalisation and exclusion, would prove difficult. Granted, the site does not aim to undertake this task. It serves as a cemetery first and a memorial second, whose precise material order (what Minyard referred to as ‘perpetual care’) is intended as a form of respect for those individuals, and honours their lives. Nor does the site exclude other forms of -257- remembrance; there are no provisions delimiting any forms of activity on its grounds. But it has positioned itself over the first four years of the recovery as the prime locus for the civic performance of memory, and should city leaders of any administration—not just the Nagin administration, whose tenure was indelibly marked by the storm and the rebuilding process, and which is materially responsible for the foundation of the site, but the newly-elected Landrieu administration as well—continue to stage the public remembrance of the storm on these grounds, over time it will take on this role. Whether this will inscribe a form of local ambivalence to the site—the beginning of a collective forgetting—is a question that remains to be seen. 6.3: The Lower Ninth Ward While the Hurricane Katrina Memorial has served to focus the remembrance of the storm around a single site, and has served as a stage on which diverse forms of memorial practice have been played out, these forms only begin to encompass the many diverse forms of memorialisation present in the city, and do not fully represent the range of responses that memorial practice in New Orleans harbours. Chief among these, as has been clear in the events and developments in the Lower Ninth Ward over the past four years, is anger: an outcry against the overwhelming destruction and loss experienced by the residents of this neighbourhood, and its identification as the site of the most extensive flood damage in the city. Such a position affords the neighbourhood with both moral urgency and authority: urgency and authority articulated on a local level as the most devastated neighbourhood, and on a national level within the wider context of the discourse of the uniqueness of New Orleans (detailed in Chapter 2). While the Lower Ninth Ward has been the location of a range of demonstrations, interventions, and observances—some of which, such as the Pink Project of the Make It Right Foundation, have already been examined—I here draw out two interventions that both illustrate the diversity of memorial practice and show how aesthetic practice in particular critiques those forms. -258- Figures 6.24, 6.25: Stills from ‘New Orleans for Sale’. 2-Cent Productions. July 2007. -259- 6.3.1: New Orleans For Sale The video opens onto a close-up shot of a camera being held out of a car window, with the person holding it obscured by the shadows inside the car. The window, on the passenger-side door, is mostly—but not entirely—lowered, as though whatever is being photographed outside the car could still, without prior notice, attempt to enter. The video lingers on this image for a few moments before cutting to a second shot of another car idling on a street corner, then cuts increasingly to new automobiles, then men and women holding cameras, walking around the ruined landscape, gazing emptily into their viewfinders. Shortly after this image has been established, an unidentified woman leans out of a van window and asks a question to unseen performers, pointing at them while her companion in another seat takes a photograph,: “Now, why are you guys doing this?” What she is referring to immediately becomes clear: the video cuts to a group of young men and women standing in silence on the driveways and rooftops of ruined houses, wearing rain ponchos (in dry weather) and bearing signs with such messages as: AMERICA DID THIS; WE’RE STILL HERE; THE WATERS ARE RISING; LOOTER; and YOU ARE ALSO BEING FILMED (Figures 6.24, 6.25). Their silence is broken by Nik Richard, a poet and member of 2-Cent, who breaks into an impassioned monologue: Hurricane Katrina was the biggest natural disaster to hit American soil. And nearly two years later, this area [the Lower Ninth Ward] is still devastated. But you know what? We made sure we preserved this strictly for your tourism. For about seventy-five dollars, you can take one of these many tour buses that’s travelling around this city. It looks like there’s more money to be paid in devastation than regeneration. If y’all keep paying your money to see it, should we rebuild it? (2-cent 2007) Throughout his monologue the video shows a montage of tourist buses from corporate agencies such as Celebration Tours and Gray Line prowling the streets of the neighbourhood, mirrored by shots of destroyed houses prominently featuring the spray-painted security X on their doors and windows, and a poster bearing a stylised flood waterline—two of the icons of the storm detailed in Chapter 2. Finally, after the monologue is over, the video adopts the position of a tourist inside a car, driving slowly along a ruined street passing each of the silent protestors. As it -260- fades out to black, the lens focuses on one sign: THIS IS WHAT YOU PAID TO SEE RIGHT. In total, the video, entitled ‘New Orleans For Sale,’ lasts eighty-six seconds. Urry has characterised the gaze of the tourist as operating on multiple concurrent levels. In having paid for a guided experience of a given landscape, the tourist seeks in part to consume that landscape both as place and as spectacle, with limited, mediated engagement with locals and always with recourse to the safety of their known infrastructure (Urry 2002). As I argued in Chapter 4 in examining the Musician’s Village in the Upper Ninth Ward, the tourist gaze in this context functions by maintaining a precise balance of distance from the objects and individuals viewed: a balance leveraged on the one hand by immersion in the landscape, but on the other by the separation involved in insulated vehicles and continuous passage (rather than long-term stays) through the landscape. And it is precisely this balance that 2-cent upends in their production: not only do they reverse the gaze of the tourist by filming tourists in return, challenging the notion of a passive spectacle awaiting consumption, but by responding to those tourists both in written and spoken language, they enter the space of the vehicle in an aggressive, unsettling invasion. As Kevin Griffin, one of the members of 2-Cent, explained, The ‘New Orleans For Sale’ piece came from one of B.Mike’s [Brandan Odums, founder of 2-Cent] friends working at a hotel in Downtown New Orleans. The hotel was advertising ‘Devastation Tours’ and we thought it was crazy and we had to do something about it and let people know what was going on, so we turned the cameras on the tourists. (quoted in Nation of Islam New Orleans 2008) The tourists are all middle-aged and white, in contrast to the young and African-American activists, further subverting a historically dominant racial power dynamic in the American South. This subversion is signalled as well by the sign marked LOOTER, a label to which African- Americans in New Orleans were disproportionately subject in the media portrayal of the flooding (Dyson 2005: 164-165). This injunction, however, to confront the violence of their own practice is arguably the last thing that disaster-seeking tourists would expect in a ruined and ostensibly empty landscape, and which a disaster-tour company would seek to promote as part of the tour. Proof of this fact is found in the reaction of the first woman to the sight of the activists: -261- in speaking to them, she betrays no hostility or counter-aggression—marking comprehension of the dynamic at play—but rather, confusion: “Now, why are you guys doing this?” Flaherty has noted that part of 2-Cent’s motivation in producing this video was to reverse the tide of attention drawn to the city in the wake of sensationalised media coverage: the group, he argues, “…made New Orleans For Sale to convey the frustration felt by many New Orleanians as the city has become a national spectacle and a backdrop for countless national politicians—while the aid the city needs to rebuild still hasn’t arrived.” (Flaherty 2009) While this phenomenon of political spectacle has been much critiqued—most famously, comparing then- President George W. Bush’s 2005 “We Will Rebuild” speech in Jackson Square to his “Mission Accomplished” address on the USS Lincoln in 2003 after the fall of Baghdad—scoring political points is not the only motivation present in the work of the ensemble. One of the implications of 2-cent’s work is that the Lower Ninth Ward, despite its near-total depopulation, is by no means empty—rather, it is inhabited both by the presences of those who continue to speak for it, and by the absences of those who have departed from it (whether through geographical displacement or through loss of life). Further evidence of this assertion can be seen, as Bearn (2009) has noted, in the particular expression of shadow-sculptures found throughout the Lower Ninth Ward, stylised silhouettes representing the missing individuals and families who had once lived there (Figures 6.26, 6.27), making their absences visible and tangible. “It is clear that they are shadows of former residents,” Bearn argues, “but are they symbols of hope for the future of the neighbourhood, recalling a shared past, or an attempt to make clear the slow progress of reconstruction? Their ambiguity is their strength because viewers can attach their own meanings to these simple but ubiquitous minuments” (Bearn 2009: 23). -262- Figures 6.26, 6.27: Silhouettes of former residents, Lower Ninth Ward, August 2008. -263- 6.3.2: Waiting for Godot This sentiment—that despite natural, political, and economic forces at work seeking to keep the slate blank, the landscape of the Lower Ninth Ward could not be fully emptied—was underscored by an intervention that took place in November 2007, shortly after the second anniversary of the storm (Figure 6.28). For two nights, at the empty intersection of North Prieur and Reynes Streets three blocks from where the levee had breached, hundreds of residents and visitors alike gathered to watch a production of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, sponsored by the New York-based arts organisation Creative Time Productions (which had previously authored a temporary memorial light installation at Ground Zero in New York). Produced by the Classical Theater of Harlem and featuring actors both from New Orleans and beyond, the play sought to call attention—as had 2-Cent months earlier—to the slow pace of the recovery both in this neighbourhood and in the city at large (performances were also staged in a half-ruined house in Gentilly; Figure 6.29). After the storm, to stage any dramatic work within the Lower Ninth Ward would have, and would still, as of this writing, imbue its production with considerable political force—but the choice of this particular play, an internationally-renowned work in which afflicted characters wait interminably for a mythical presence that never arrives— found immediate resonance in a city still crying out for relief, simultaneously recalling the fraught days immediately after the storm and the months afterward when national public attention had waned. As the producer, Paul Chan, noted, “The sense of waiting for something was palpable after the storm. And the history of this play is of doing it in unorthodox places, which not only illuminates the play, it illuminates the places. New Orleans is a stage, literally. Our stage is in the street, the backdrop is already there for us” (quoted in Cuthbert 2007). Chan’s words complement the examination in Chapter 4 of the street as a central site of the expression of cultural heritage in New Orleans, whether musical, artistic, or dramatic—no accident given the play’s famously minimal stage directions: “A Country Road. A Tree. Evening.” (Beckett 1954: 1). They furthermore echo a previously celebrated production of the -264- play, when Susan Sontag staged it in war-torn Sarajevo at the height of the Serbian siege (Burns 1993); whereas Sontag’s production suggested that the characters were metaphorically awaiting the arrival of the international community, Chan’s production suggested they await a federal response. Indeed, the overlapping of these directions and the physical site chosen in the Lower Ninth Ward was echoed by the overlapping of the dialogue in the play (first performed in 1953) with relevance to post-Katrina New Orleans: dialogue which was resonant despite being accidental, as observers noted, and dialogue which had been deliberately altered to reflect the specifically New Orleans, and specifically post-Katrina, context (Cotter 2007, Cuthbert 2007). In that sense the production improvised upon the play, as a musician or chef would improvise upon a particular song or recipe in the act of performing it—in this instance fulfilling the local moral imperative to miscegenate, as Cannon (2008) argued, detailed in Chapter 2. (It is worth noting that prior to each performance, brass bands performed and gumbo was served.) But this was, in one sense, predetermined, for to have performed the play exactly as written without intervention into the text would have been to betray the context of production. To intervene in the text, to allow the ruined landscape of the Lower Ninth Ward entry into the play itself at the same time as the text is set in that ruined landscape, was to recognise the ecological relationship by which both the surrounding environment and the organisms which constitute it (in this case, not just actors and audiences, but the playtext itself—continually evolving in every act of production) are mutually co-produced. The environment, as Oyama has argued, “is not just a place or supplier of materials; it is an integral part of a constructive system.” (Oyama 2006: 55) And that this ecological relationship enabled both the environment and the work itself to flourish can be seen in the overwhelming success of the production: after the scheduled four nights of the run, demand for its return was so high that the directors and actors staged a fifth (Cotter 2007). -265- Figures 6.28, 6.29: Stills from Waiting for Godot, Creative Time Productions. November 2007. -266- Boyles has suggested that just as much as Waiting for Godot achieved its aim of drawing national attention back to New Orleans (if briefly), it also drew local attention back into itself, resulting in an internal reckoning of the city’s recovery—a reckoning not drawn in terms of demographic, economic, or political indicators, but in more intangible measures of perception and self-awareness. “As an audience,” he argued, we must be humble enough to recognize the myopia of our outlook, the way the storm and the aftermath shape our critical faculties and judgments. Yet, we must ask how much of that myopia we want to discard, especially in the face of a play thrown into the context of our disaster. We are too far along in this thing to pretend a removal, but one of the joys of the play was its alien quality, the fact we couldn’t compare it to ‘pre-Katrina.’ At the same time, we received this play because and through the lens of Katrina, and we should understand the scratches and clear spots of that lens if we are to trust our vision in the continuing fog. (Boyles 2008) Boyles asks, in other words, how long New Orleans will view itself as a post-Katrina city, a question considered more fully in Chapter 7, but which this production continues, long after its five nights fell silent, to pose. In one sense, the question is moot: New Orleans will always, logically, remain a post-storm urban environment, just as Charleston is a post-Hugo city, and San Francisco, Kobe, and most recently, Port-au-Prince, are post-earthquake cities (with varying degrees of freshness and tragedy). Such is the nature of disaster, in the imprints it leaves on its landscapes—by physically changing those landscapes, disasters inscribe a multidimensional relationship of remembrance between the physical terrain itself and those communities that inhabit it. Yet this relationship deserves further nuance: the Lower Ninth Ward is not just a stage set, as Chan (ironically) observes. It is a neighbourhood where residents of New Orleans live, it is a cemetery where they died, it is a point of hope of return for those who have been displaced, and the tension between these extremes has rendered it over the initial years of the rebuilding process after the storm a barometer for the process at large. Over time, the Lower Ninth Ward will likely cease to serve as a stage set, even for welcomed, inspired directors such as Chan. But it is not possible furthermore to estimate when the greater rebuilding process will end by examining just one neighbourhood in the city—the diversity within and across the seventeen -267- distinct neighbourhoods of New Orleans ensures that much, as it would in any complex urban environment after a disaster. It is possible, however, to measure the very tools of measurement by this form of examination: to witness how interventions into complex, contested landscapes in a neighbourhood such as the Lower Ninth Ward force those stark reassessments. That in this instance a fictional work of art revealed (as Boyles suggested above) uncomfortable truths of ambivalence about the willingness to shed the mantle of the storm bears no judgment upon the dimension of the work as fiction. As 2-Cent might have phrased it, this is what they paid to see. But what theatregoers also paid to see was, in the end, their reflection in a mirror. As Folse noted, There is something essential in [Waiting for Godot] to the current experience of so many in New Orleans, the discovery that we are not suffering from post traumatic stress disorder because we are not past the thing but instead in the very midst of it, in a landscape and a plot as bleak and confusing as Beckett’s, on a road of dubious prospects in a landscape swept clear of familiar geography and of hope, no prospect that over a hill or beyond a wood there is something different, something better. (Folse 2007) 6.4: A Storm in a Glass Case: The Museology of Katrina If the performance of Waiting for Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward served as a symbolic mirror before the collective faces of residents of New Orleans, then the museum exhibitions regarding the storm have provided physical mirrors serving the same purpose, allowing visitors to see themselves in the polished glass cases. In order to detail the classification and codification of memory after the storm, this section examines two museological attempts to represent the storm to public audiences: the upcoming ‘Katrina!’ exhibition at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans, a large-scale exhibition comprising an entire floor of the Cabildo facility in Jackson Square, and the extant Katrina collections at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The chapter then examines the issues emerging from consideration of all the above case studies. It is not possible to fully analyse the ‘Katrina!’ exhibition at the Louisiana State Museum because as of this writing in early 2010, it has not yet opened. Based on preliminary designs provided by museum staff, however, it is possible to examine several of the key elements that -268- have remained consistent throughout its development. (I am indebted to Steven Maklansky and Karen Leathem, both of the Louisiana State Museum, for the following synopsis; the exhibition may have changed since the time of this writing.) The first element is the narrative approach: on entry to the exhibition, visitors experience representations of New Orleans prior to the storm, then subsequently journey (both physically, on foot, and intellectually, through displays and media content) through the history of the hurricane’s development and path. The visitor therefore progresses both temporally and spatially, exposed to displays with information about local ecological conditions, civil infrastructure and flood protection, and historical hazards and risks (such as previous hurricanes, storm surges, soil subsidence, and coastal erosion). On arrival in the central chamber of the exhibition, visitors experience a recreation of the direct impact of the hurricane (not the flood) on New Orleans through a variety of media displays, combining text, photography, audio, and video images directly sourced from the days beginning 29 August 2005—the effect, as Maklansky (2006b) reported, is to simulate the sense of dislocation and disorientation, both in the context of individual experience and in the city at large, where as Horne (2006) notes it was not immediately known that the levees had failed and the city was flooding. As this fact becomes apparent, personal testimonies of survivors begin to feature prominently: stories of individuals escaping to rooftops, or evacuees seeking high ground and shelter (such as at the Convention Center and the Superdome). Accompanying these testimonies are objects sourced from those efforts, such as a small privately-owned boat, or an axe used to break through an attic roof. As the relief operations and the evacuation take shape, the exhibition displays the immediate engineering response: illustrations of how the levee breaches were repaired and the floodwaters drained, and how assessment of the full impact of the storm was undertaken. These displays segue into an overview of the first year of rebuilding (including documentation from FEMA and from the Road Home programme), before concluding with information regarding long-term scenarios of the city, environmental impact assessments and projections, and further education on historical, ecological, and disaster-recovery related issues. -269- The Louisiana State Museum’s exhibition is intended to be both transitory, suitable for travelling to other museums (Leathem 2008), and comprehensive, encompassing as much of the storm as can fit into the physical space while at the same time situating the storm as one moment—if catastrophic—within an extended heritage of local engagement with the environment. By contrast, the exhibition at the National Museum of American History is intended to be permanent, residing only in the Smithsonian’s collection, and representative, a small display case of fifty-eight objects collected on two separate excursions into New Orleans by museum curators in September 2005 and December 2005 (Figure 6.30). Part of its more limited focus stems from the fact that Katrina is but one event in wider American history, for which the Smithsonian Institution is responsible in its entirety, but also because of (and which has partly conditioned in turn) the selection policy with which the curators were armed during their visits to the city. These artefacts, Shayt has noted, were collected from a variety of sources: given from private donors, received from public agencies, sought in contractual agreements, or found as debris (Shayt 2006). But because the Smithsonian was only able to take a limited number of objects into its care, the curators on-site were encouraged to find what museum administration in Washington had deemed most appropriate: what objects would encapsulate and symbolise the storm. In some cases, however, this meant pre-selecting the objects; based on early broadcasts from news media curators were aware prior to their arrival in the city that certain objects would represent the storm better than others to future generations, and would therefore enjoy higher priority in the efforts to collect them (Shayt 2008). The correspondence regarding their acquisitions policy prior to, and during, their visit reflects this awareness: in one email from a curator in Washington to contacts in the city, one curator wrote: I have been asked to seek and find some very specific objects from Hurricane Katrina that reflect the trauma and survival of her victims. … One specific area: the musical instruments of New Orleans. A muddy clarinet, a smashed trumpet, a moldy banjo, something of that scale to capture the two worlds of musical tradition and hurricainal devastation, still dirty. Need not come from a name musician, just someone we can meet and interview, and photograph. … The object with the story. The real story. (Informant C 2005) -270- Figures 6.30: Design sketch for Hurricane Katrina collections, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. 11 February 2008. -271- It is clear even from this limited correspondence that the Smithsonian’s aim to represent Katrina is inextricably bound up in its aim to represent New Orleans. But nevertheless it raises questions not just about what should (and will) be remembered, but how this remembering is choreographed prior to the performance. For if museum staff preselect a stereotype of the city to fulfil for a museum of national history, then in doing so they undermine the curatorial argument that the display case, no matter the number or nature of the objects inside it, is truly representative. Rather, having decided in advance what material culture is to be collected leads to a form of inverse elision by synecdoche, a form of proleptic forgetting: by filling the case with the shadows of objects before they have even journeyed to the site, they are narrowing the range of other possible narratives that the case could harbour. Moreover, this form of curatorial practice risks implicitly arguing that the storm has, indeed, stopped: that the limits of the glass case are coterminous with the limits of the event. While museum collections must be constrained both in number and space—it is redundant to argue that no collection is infinite, or ever complete—the implications of this delimitation for an event with ragged temporal boundaries imbue the post-Katrina museological experience (arguably, any post-disaster experience, in which such synecdochic acts are bound to self-compromise) with a necessary ambiguity. And this ambiguity, abraded against the fixity of the collections—Shayt (2008) has suggested that the NMAH does not anticipate either exchanging new objects for their Katrina collection, much less acquiring new ones—remains curatorially unconsidered. In other words, if the exhibition in New Orleans risks remembering too much, the one in Washington risks remembering too little. 6.5: Emergent Issues in Post-Katrina Mnemonics Examining the range of memorial sites, events, and encounters detailed above shows that the means by which residents have represented the diversity of experiences and interpretations of the storm have been accompanied by a host of complex attendant issues: how to select appropriate objects and materials, how to cultivate a space for reflection, how to stage a -272- performance, how to resist a colonising and ordering impulse, and how to arrange and design a plurality of voices within just such an encounter, to name but a few. Such considerations are implicit in the construction of any memorial site; but examining these together raises a suite of common issues. To conclude this chapter, and lay the groundwork for the next and final chapter (which addresses future memory and future research) two specific issues, inclusion and authenticity, are considered together. The first is inclusion: taken together, these sites provoke a reconsideration of for whom public remembrance of the storm is intended, simultaneously extending and complicating the tensions between insiders and outsiders. That, for instance, the Hurricane Katrina Memorial near City Park is used primarily for yearly public observances of memory—embraced neither as a regular, quotidian feature of the mnemonic landscape (for insiders) nor as a destination for visitors or tourists (outsiders)—suggests its primary role remains as a final resting ground for the anonymous dead, rather than as a memorial site per se. As Piliè expressed, neither she nor members of her community have any personal need to visit the site; she would, instead, sooner attend a religious service on the anniversary. Similarly, Leathem (2008) noted that she does not expect many residents of New Orleans to attend the Katrina exhibition at the Louisiana State Museum upon its opening, suggesting that most individuals who experienced the storm have no desire to do so again, especially not in a mediated environment such as the museum context offers. Rather, prior to its anticipated growth into a travelling exhibition (in which instance the opportunities for remembrance would reach communities with less firsthand knowledge of the storm, as at the Smithsonian), the Museum expects the exhibition to draw primarily tourists who are interested in the history of New Orleans and children from local schools (Leathem 2008). The second issue present throughout these sites, and an issue which (as I have argued throughout this dissertation) has coloured most of the public discourse regarding the rebuilding process as a whole, is authenticity. For these memorial sites, authenticity is typically located in materiality: at the Hurricane Katrina Memorial, for instance, the authenticity of the human -273- remains is indisputable, and provides both the legal and the moral warrant for the use of the site (regardless of the nature of those remains as uncategorisable by conventional mortuary standards). The same principle can be found in the museological responses to the storm, wherein the provenance of a given material object specifically as a post-Katrina object (and not an identical item that did not experience the storm) is what legitimises its entry into the space of the museum. A case in point was the salvage by the Louisiana State Museum of a wall of a residential apartment from the BW Cooper public housing project (detailed in chapter 5) prior to its demolition: Elton Mabry, a resident of New Orleans and the tenant of the apartment both before and during the storm, had written a daily diary of his experience in permanent marker directly onto the wall, which, when discovered by museum curators, was painstakingly removed and salvaged for the Museum’s collection—the curators insisting that no reprint or photograph would suffice as a replacement (Figure 6.31; Mullener 2008). It was not sufficient to reclaim Mabry’s intangible narrative alone from the wrecking ball: the physical ground for its expression had to be reclaimed as well, and the scrawled-upon wall now resides within the Museum’s collection, transformed into simultaneously tangible and intangible heritage. For the National Museum of American History, the authenticity of material culture was further described (as mentioned in Chapter 2) in terms of hazards: selected objects obtained by the visiting curators, such as a pair of boots, a cast-iron ornament, and a pair of valences (Gregory 2006), were upon their arrival back in Washington tested by the Office of Safety, Health, and Environmental Management for a suite of potential toxins, chemicals, and microbes from the floodwaters which would be harmful upon handling. While all the artefacts obtained by the NMAH curators were authentic in their post-disaster respect (“the public trusts us not to collect inauthentic objects,” Shayt noted), the presence of hazardous chemicals and the associated risks attached to their conservation and display imbued them with additional authenticity—and therefore reverence— both for museum staff and for visitors alike. Part of this reverence, Shayt observed, was reserved for objects that bore “the smell of death.” (Shayt 2008). -274- Figure 6.31: Diary wall created by Elton Mabry, BW Cooper housing complex. Photograph by Jennifer Zdon, 24 August 2008. -275- But as I have argued, if the material culture of the storm present in museum collections is considered authentic, the conception of authenticity must therefore extend to all impacted surfaces, spaces and materials throughout the city: whatever the storm touches becomes a post- disaster object or site, and therefore implicitly harbours a material remembrance of that impact. Hence to portray or enshrine any one object or site as ‘especially’ authentic is to engage in an act of mnemonic omission of the others, from which follows the critique 2-Cent levels at individuals and corporations that seek to exploit the experience of the storm, setting spaces of the city apart for a form of tourist-driven remembrance. I further examine this broken nature of the conception of authenticity in the next (and final) chapter, but it is important to note here that the argument of 2-Cent’s work is that the city itself—its presences, its absences, and its transformations—is the first form of authentic remembrance of the storm, and that (as with Waiting for Godot) any car window through which a visitor might peer should better be understood as a mirror through which they should reckon with the implications of their actions. The structure of this critique is that 2-Cent have, through a dramatic (and dramatised) application of irony, restaged the Lower Ninth Ward as the theme park that has pervaded the discourse of the rebuilding process. By foregrounding the underlying economic dimension in their critique—the title New Orleans For Sale impugns not just disaster tour operators but the elite class of land speculators and developers who will shape, in part, the new New Orleans—they call attention to this process. But they have not restaged it as the theme park feared by locals (what Kearney earlier described as ‘Disneyland for condo people’) but rather as the theme park most feared by those very ‘condo people’ themselves—a theme park in what they have paid to see is, in fact, devastation which is authentic, widespread, and unending. In other words, what they have ‘paid to see’ is not a simulacrum, after Baudrillard, after all, but the truth. -276- Chapter 7: Summary and Conclusion Jeanette: What are you doing to rebuild the city? Hendrick: I live here. Isn’t that enough? —Reisman 2009 Prologue: Sister Storms? According to the Times-Picayune, the cleanup from Hurricane Betsy—another category 3 storm, which struck New Orleans on September 9, 1965, and resulted in extensive damage and flooding across the city—was, given what had been feared would happen, comparatively light: “While most damage was almost universal,” they noted two days after the storm, it was in most cases superficial. So far as the city is concerned, there seems to be the kind of harm that can be overcome rather rapidly. Removing the debris will be a monumental job but with the mass of tree limbs out of the way, the windows and roofs repaired, one will see little evidence that Betsy was here. (New Orleans Times-Picayune 1965a) The editors of the newspaper retracted this claim three days later, acknowledging that the extent of the damage was far greater than they had originally estimated, particularly in Gentilly and the Lower Ninth Ward (New Orleans Times-Picayune 1965b). This revised assessment was accompanied by reports of damage to specific cultural institutions, such as the destruction of the historic St Peter Catholic Church at Reserve, which had celebrated its centenary just the year before in 1964 (Lucia 1965), damage to the Municipal Auditorium (New Orleans Times-Picayune 1965c), and paradoxically, the damage that a celebrated local art collection managed to avoid (Collier 1965)— a cursory glance compared to the amount of attention paid to culture that would follow in the wake of a storm exactly forty years later. Indeed, municipal leaders were quick to stress, less than a week after Betsy made landfall, that as far as tourism was concerned, visitors to the city had nothing to worry about. Glen Douthet, then-executive director of the Greater New Orleans Tourist and Convention Commission (precursor to the modern-day CVB), said at the time that all major facilities and services for traveling groups and individuals, including hotel and motel accommodations, restaurant service, entertainment and transportation, have now resumed very close to 100 percent normal operation. … We repeat that visitors to New Orleans, whether they have been planning to arrive either individually or as part of a group, will find a traditional hospitable New Orleans welcome. (New Orleans Times- Picayune 1965d) -277- The supposition that those visitors found “little evidence that Betsy was here” is dubious, and furthermore occludes the impact of the storm on the residents of New Orleans (Landphair 2007). But the editors’ claim, even then, raises important questions about the end of a disaster: not merely how long it takes to remove the physical evidence of its presence, but the time and effort involved in assessing and repairing the damage to social, cultural, economic, and political structures as well. As I argued in Chapter 2, the greater New Orleans area (notwithstanding the entire Gulf South) has endured a long history of disaster in which Betsy is but one entry, buffeted by other events in the past century such as the Mississippi River flood in 1927 and Hurricane Camille in 1969 (Barry 1997, Hearn 2004; M. Johnson 2006; Figure 7.1). Yet as I have also argued, the impacts of the present disaster, Hurricane Katrina, are exceptional both in breadth and depth, impacts acknowledged locally and nationally in a way that stands in stark contrast to the optimism (if later scaled down) following Betsy. Within the region, the storm will be the defining event of the beginning of the 21st century, and barring another major disaster, will serve as its touchstone for generations to come. But it is equally true that if contemporary life in New Orleans is now divided into pre- and post-Katrina, it must also, with the progression of time and the rebuilding process, become further divided into post-Katrina and ‘post-post- Katrina’—what is frequently referred to as ‘the new normal’ (McNulty 2008, Carr 2009). From a research perspective, the question of when the post- aspect of post-conflict and post-crisis scenarios begins remains under debate, yet the storm must at some point end—in local, regional, and national consciousness—even if its impacts continue to linger, both in memory and in practice. As Rose noted shortly before the fourth anniversary of the storm, It wasn’t until I had returned home [from a family vacation] and reflected on the trip that I realized I had, probably for the first time since the storm, been spared the often grueling, always heart-rending chore of trying to explain all the Whats and Whys of living here. And it is no small relief to realize I can move through places wearing the colors of a proud New Orleans identity without having to justify, clarify, explain, or—worse— beg for something. It’s almost like being from anywhere else. Almost. (Rose 2009a) -278- Taking this progression as its departure point—acknowledging that for every individual and community in the city that dividing line will, and must, necessarily diverge—this chapter concludes the dissertation by reasserting its contribution to heritage studies (and its related fields, such as disaster studies, urban geography, and cultural history), focusing on three main forms of contribution. The first is the visualisation of the intersection of these fields, considering in particular how certain themes in heritage studies are both nuanced and extended by their encounter with other disciplines. The second is a discussion of three themes in heritage research that this study has directly impacted: the themes of materiality and immateriality, authenticity, and infrastructure. The third and final contribution is the reassessment and development of the lens of heritage ecology, laying out the advantages of its approach and suggesting further routes for its deployment. After examining these contributions, the chapter considers pathways for future work both on Hurricane Katrina and on the intersection of cultural heritage and environmental studies in general, and having done so, it examines, to conclude the entire dissertation, Hurricane Gustav: the storm that, in 2008, nearly became the new Katrina. Figure 7.1: User-generated map of all hurricane-strength storms (Saffir-Simpson Categories 1-5) to strike New Orleans, 1908-2008. Lighter lines reflect weaker storms; darker lines, stronger ones. -279- 7.1 Future Work: Introduction Despite the fact that the storm has, in some sense, ended, the transformations which it has wrought will continue to impact on the lives of residents of New Orleans and the region. For future researchers seeking to investigate these impacts further, the present study has revealed three primary areas wherein further work is required, broadly divided into urban approaches, cultural approaches, and policy approaches. Before restating the contribution of this dissertation to heritage studies, this section puts forth prospective ways forward with specific respect to New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, then closes with an injunction for more research into the wider connections between cultural heritage research and post-crisis and post-disaster studies. Before undertaking this survey, however, it is important to restate the magnitude of the disaster. As noted throughout this dissertation, the impacts of Hurricane Katrina upon the Gulf South region have not just interrupted but have fundamentally reordered human society in ways that researchers will be seeking to understand for generations. Of these impacts, however, the most pressing is undoubtedly the creation of the Katrina diaspora: the displacement and resettlement, as of the fourth anniversary of the storm, of approximately 10.4% of the pre- Katrina population (Brookings Institution 2009: 9) (Figures 7.2, 7.3, 7.4). While population figures in real terms are difficult to calculate—the 2010 United States Census, underway as of this writing, will generate critical data in this regard, as Campanella (2009) suggests—by this stage in the rebuilding process, the reasons for remaining in diaspora (such as the relocation of family and community members, ongoing economic hardship leading to the inability to return, or conversely, increased economic opportunity in other areas) have increasingly been cemented by the formation of new relationships and the breakdown of old ones. The longer an individual or family remains in diaspora, the more likely they are to do so, as relationships become rerouted: the line between an individual still in diaspora and an individual who has decided to relocate is often a blurred line indeed. Hence the need from a variety of research perspectives—sociological, anthropological, psychological, and economic—to understand that decision-making process and -280- to find strategies of mitigating against it for those individuals and communities for whom diaspora is a continued hardship. Granted, data such as this, transcending boundaries between qualitative and the quantitative, may not initially present itself as data—but only a sustained, interdisciplinary research programme attentive to the multiplicity of these factors over the long- term will result in conclusions relevant to this case study and to others (especially, as argued below, as the intensity and frequency of cases of environmental migration rises due to the effects of global climate change). In this context, the oft-cited figure estimating ten years for the recovery process after a disaster is, like all numbers, best understood as a framework—a way of thinking about recovery rather than a fact susceptible to analysis. But in sum, none of the prospective work detailed here will be meaningful if it does not impinge upon, and seek to ameliorate, the underlying inequalities present in New Orleans—racial, economic, educational, and environmental inequalities that were known before the storm but which the storm exposed to the nation and to the world, and which could not be scrubbed away as easily as a waterline (Figure 7.5). As Horne (2006) notes, “Black New Orleanians were acutely sensitive to the way history and racism had conspired to place them in the city’s most vulnerable landscapes—the last to be settled, and the first to be flooded” (Horne 2006: 324). This vulnerability has continued in the post-Katrina rebuilding process; as of this writing, in early 2010, the Lower Ninth Ward still suffers from a slower pace of rebuilding than other neighbourhoods in New Orleans, as Wilson (2010) notes. While these inequalities are interlinked, economic inequality in particular will keep disadvantaged individuals and communities at levels of increased risk of future disasters if it is not remedied. Campanella’s early appraisal of the post- Katrina urban landscape still rings true: “Many of the hardest-hit communities in New Orleans,” he writes, were also among the poorest, and subject to social problems including a broken public school system, drugs, and gang violence. Those already struggling to survive will find it difficult to bounce back from such a devastating blow. The resiliency of many such New Orleanians was already critically low. (T.J. Campanella 2006: 144) -281- Figure 7.2: Katrina diaspora mapped by FEMA assistance applications, 23 September 2005. Figure 7.3: Katrina diaspora mapped by US Postal Service change of address forms, 1 July 2006. -282- Figure 7.4: Political cartoon by Dwayne Powell depicting the Katrina diaspora. 2005. Figure 7.5: Political cartoon by Stuart Carlson with waterline representing underlying problems in New Orleans. 2005. -283- 7.1.1: Future Urban Work Within the city of New Orleans in particular, the present study revealed sources of data which it was not possible to fully analyse, three of which I address here. The first, which came in the form of regular communiqués announcing meetings of the City Planning Commission, was the regular public hearing of requests for rezoning private and commercial properties. A sample request from the City Planning Commission Meeting of 10 July 2007 reads: ZONING DOCKET 61/07 — Request by JEFFERY CHAMBLISS for a Zoning Change from an RD-3 Two Family Residential District to an RM-1 Multiple Family Residential District to permit three units in an existing structure, on Square 197, Lot B-1, in the Third Municipal District, bounded by Dauphine, Andry, Royal and Flood Streets. The municipal address is 5416-18 DAUPHINE STREET. (ZBM E-14) (New Orleans City Planning Commission 2007) While not all requests for rezoning are granted, for those that are (such as the request to rezone part of the Bywater for the ICInola project, detailed in Chapter 5), a study which collects and synthesises (potentially via the use of GIS modelling) the diverse forms of data present in this announcement—geographic, demographic, economic, and architectural data—would reveal much about the changing urban landscape of New Orleans as it changed. Such insights would contribute enormously to the efforts of advocates for public accountability in governance, and would serve as a form of protection for those individuals and communities who are less able to resist the encroachment of outside interests (such as the Squandered Heritage organisation was able to demonstrate, detailed in Chapter 5). And looking to the future, undoubtedly other municipalities with a similar civic infrastructure would have similar forms of data, that could be used to further mitigate against loss after a prospective disaster. The second form of urban data which was not able to fully figure into this study was the multiplicity of planning documents designed and issued by local civic advocacy groups after the storm. These plans, which were eventually synthesised into the Unifed New Orleans Plan, and subsequently the New Orleans Master Plan, all articulated and espoused specific visions for the role of culture in the rebuilding city, and as such serve as records of public visions for that role at -284- a moment in the city’s history when its heritage was at its greatest risk (UNOP 2007, Cityworks 2010). Consequently historians examining the rebuilding process in years to come will find considerable opportunities to trace, through these documents, visions of the city that were never realised (not unlike the Theory of Ruin Value developed by Albert Speer (Holtorf 2004)) at the same time as specific instances of organisations whose contribution to the rebuilding came in the marshalling and deployment of the citizenry. In other words, these plans, while they may not have been realised, have still contributed to the rebuilding process by the very act of their drafting, consultation, refinement, and publication—a point proven by the endorsement of the UNOP by the mayor’s office and City Council, and its submission to the Louisiana Recovery Authority in early 2010 (New Orleans City Council 2010). To trace the impact of this adoption (or, its potential revision or even abandonment—as of this writing, in early 2010, with a new mayoral administration under Mitch Landrieu, it is unclear what will happen to the plan) specifically on the culture sector would reveal much about the mutual impacts of policy on cultural heritage traditions and of disaster on cultural policies, fields of understanding which, as I detail below, are still poorly understood. The last form of urban data that could not be integrated, but which would serve as the basis for a powerful study linking anthropology, cultural heritage, memory studies, urban geography, and economic analysis, would be a long-term sited ethnography of the disaster tour industry in the city post-Katrina. As examined in Chapter 6, tour operators began offering guided tours of devastated neighbourhoods of New Orleans shortly after the storm, tours which often followed prescribed routes (especially in the earliest days, when certain parts of the city such as the Lower Ninth Ward remained closed off by official order to all but emergency personnel). To map the prescribed routes of these operators (as well as to understand the role of the guide, who in such post-disaster scenarios is often a local resident) would result in an illumination of how certain mnemonic features become formed: how a prescribed route through the disaster-affected city can lead to a rote narration of disaster, which in turn fossilises both private and public -285- memory (both for the guide and for the tourist). Such a study would inform psychological and neurobiological approaches to contextual memory formation after disaster (e.g. Neisser et al (1996)), as well as contribute significantly to the understanding of the construction and impacts of tourist representations of disaster (including conflict, as discussed below). That the absence of a future disaster which would occasion the collection of this data is preferable to obtaining it goes without saying; yet the presence of these operators in New Orleans after the storm suggested that, as Lennon and Foley (2000) have noted, finding heritage in disaster is an experience not limited either to academic researchers or to theme park designers. 7.1.2: Future Cultural Work While this study has examined culture primarily through the lens of heritage—the sites, practices, beliefs, and traditions handed down from the past to the present—its situatedness in a post-disaster zone invariably entailed assessment not just of the transformations wrought on the extant forms of heritage, but as well of those forms of culture that only arose after the storm (in other words, that arose specifically in response to it). Instances of this process in the creation of post-Katrina iconography include new recipes and culinary traditions, new musical compositions, new environmentally-minded architectural designs, and new memorial acts and sites. But the range of post-Katrina culture is as expansive as the interpretations of the word itself (Williams 1983), and this study revealed scores of events, works, developments, installations, and performances that could not be included. Among those which deserve fuller incorporation and understanding include the visual arts, the literary arts, and the cinematic arts, taken in turn. As noted in Chapter 2, the earliest attempts in the visual arts to make sense out of the storm frequently involved making art out of the storm debris; this response (and its subsequent impact on the reimagining of material culture) is in great need of further understanding, as debris is one of the most ubiquitous byproducts of a natural disaster. As the months progressed, however, debris art began to yield to other visual explorations of the storm; as residents began to -286- return home to the city and rebuild their lives and livelihoods, the painters and photographers among them began to undertake new works exploring their experiences. Painters such as Phil Sandusky, Rolland Golden, Robert Warrens, Maxx Sizeler, and Willie Birch began to depict the storm from a range of perspectives, representing narratives and images of the storm, the evacuation, and the devastation on canvas (Sandusky 2007, Golden 2007, Warrens 2007, Sizeler 2007, Birch 2007), and other nonlocal artists such as Kara Walker retooled their work to respond to the storm (R. Smith 2006). Photographers took the role of documenting the storm—an often controversial process, given that some photographers such as Robert Polidori entered the homes of displaced residents without their knowledge in order to capture the visual record of decay that would otherwise have been lost in early demolitions (Polidori 2006). Other photographers such as Chris Jordan, Susannah Sayler, and David Spielman took the opportunity to document specific narratives; Spielman’s Katrinaville Chronicles documents his experiences tending to the convent of the Sisters of the Order of Poor Clare in the days after the storm, when the sisterhood had evacuated from the city (Spielman 2007). Despite photography’s singular ability (as Sontag 2002 has argued) to create and transmit iconic images of an event—such as Brett Duke’s photograph of Angela Perkins (Figure 7.6), or the 2006 Katrina Exposed exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, which democratised the museum space by accepting every submission of a photograph by any resident who wished to submit one (Maklansky 2006a)—the extent and impact of this role of the visual is still poorly understood, especially from the perspective of a metaphorical infrastructure. One means of investigating this role would be to examine the development and launch of the first New Orleans Biennial art exhibition: Prospect.1, organised by curator Dan Cameron. Subject of considerable local and national attention, Prospect.1 galvanised the art community into making new work and situated New Orleans, if briefly, as an international destination for arts tourism (Cameron 2010). While the exhibition ran into financial difficulty that has jeopardised its reappearance (Winkler-Schmit 2009b, MacCash 2010), its impacts were profound and merit closer attention. -287- Figure 7.6: Angela Perkins outside the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center. Photograph by Brett Duke. 2 September 2005. -288- As with the visual arts, the vast amount of literary work that has emerged since the storm merits consideration from a variety of perspectives. As Cardin (2007) has noted, writers working in every genre and form of writing imaginable (novels, short stories, narrative nonfiction, poetry, satire, comedy, and plays, including Gabrielle Reisman’s Taste, which opens this chapter) have set their craft to make sense out of the storm, to document their own and others’ experiences, and to chronicle events both life-changing and quotidian. Many of these literary works are narrative in nature, reflecting a need to express personal experiences after the storm and let that act of storytelling serve as a catalyst and point of connection for others who have shared similar experiences. Yet as the first part of this conclusion considers from a research-based perspective, one of the most problematic considerations from a literary perspective is how to identify and represent the divide between the storm and the end of the storm. While narrative works directly fictionalising the storm and its immediate aftermath do exist (as in James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown, or Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge), a different form of fictive representation of Katrina is found in works such as Richard Ford’s short story ‘Leaving for Kenosha’ (Ford 2008). Unlike Burke’s and Piazza’s works, which vividly recreate the storm and the flood in all its fury, Ford’s story is set long after its immediate impacts, on the second anniversary of the storm, as a family decides to resettle in a small town in Wisconsin having been unable to rebuild their lives in New Orleans. The tensions between these approaches, and the narrative implications of their differences, are ripe for exploration from literary and historical perspectives—reintroducing the storm back into public consciousness even as its other impacts recede. Of all the above genres, however, none has the ability to resurrect the storm in public consciousness on such a widespread scale and in such a concerted span of time as film, given its reach and extent. Indeed, since the earliest days of home-shot video footage (which features in the Louisiana State Museum’s ‘Katrina!’ exhibition, discussed in Chapter 6) filmmakers have taken a keen interest in documenting not just the days and weeks after Katrina made impact (Lee 2006, Lessin and Deal 2009), but in setting new fictional work in the post-Katrina landscape -289- (Lim 2008). This transformed landscape, as detailed throughout this dissertation, and certain neighbourhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward in particular, have become a place where filmmakers have found a provocative form of ruination to which to set their craft. Films such as Tony Scott’s Deja Vu (2006), Zack Godshall’s Low and Behold (2007) and Werner Herzog’s The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2009) have used the post-Katrina landscape as a stage on which dramas within the post-Katrina landscape are played out (in contrast to a film such as John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (McCarthy 2006, Bowles 2008, Hillcoat 2009), which take the ruined landscape and use it to represent a different story altogether, in a form of geographic appropriation). But the most sustained filmic explorations have been found in television series, wherein the post-Katrina city, as well the impacts of the storm on the fictional characters and their livelihoods and communities, is regularly revisited over a period of weeks and potentially years. I have already discussed K-Ville, a series that as discussed in Chapter 3 briefly gave rise to a new culinary tradition in the city (cf. also Morris 2010a); a series which has debuted as of this writing, Eric Overmyer and David Simon’s Treme on the HBO network, is an exploration of post-Katrina musical communities that is eagerly awaited by local and national audiences alike. While these examples deserve more than the brief mention given here, taken together, a study examining the different forms and styles of representations of the city through this medium would contribute greatly to the understanding of how public opinions and impressions of disaster are formed and how cultural artefacts act as a vessel for this process, and would help to situate a strategy whereby cinematic representations of disasters might be geared towards efforts of relief and recovery (rather than for commercial gain). 7.1.3: Future Policy Work As noted above, at every stage in the rebuilding process the storm has been impacted by policy and has impacted it in turn. The advent, in particular, of a new cultural policy initiative launched in August and September 2005 has proved a salient presence in the rebuilding process. -290- As one of the widest-ranging cultural policy initiatives to be put forth in recent years, it has the potential to impact actors in the culture and cultural heritage sectors in profound ways. While it has not been possible to analyse these policies fully, a way of exploring their preliminary impacts can be found in one specific venue: in the representations of post-Katrina New Orleans in municipal advertising campaigns that have emerged since the storm. These advertisements were designed under the commission of the Louisiana state Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism (the DCRT, headed until May 2010 by then-Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, until he was sworn-in as the new mayor of New Orleans) in order to communicate both the city’s and the state’s heritage to a wider public, and offer a revealing window into the narrative of culture and rebuilding that the state promoters of its heritage wished to tell. Before considering these representations, however, it is necessary to give the policy background. The seeds for these campaigns were sown in a report that the DCRT had commissioned prior to the storm to study the cultural economy of the state, a report that was published, ironically, on August 25, 2005, the day Katrina made landfall in Florida and four days before it made landfall in Louisiana. Entitled Louisiana: Where Culture Means Business, the report outlined the role that the cultural industries played in the lives and livelihoods of the state— taken together, they were, prior to the storm, the second-largest industry in the state after transportation and shipping, representing a combined 144,000 livelihoods (Mt. Auburn 2005: 34)—and recommended specific means to develop their economic impact. Immediately after the storm, however, when nearly every stakeholder, institution, and sector detailed in the report faced an uncertain future, the DCRT assessed what remained of the study’s value and retooled it to serve as the blueprint for the “economic engine of the rebirth of the state,” publishing this revised vision of the cultural economy on 20 September 2005, while New Orleans still remained underwater (data and provisions in the wake of Hurricane Rita, which struck the coastal parishes of southwestern Louisiana on 24 September 2005, were added in later versions of the plan). This subsequent vision, entitled Louisiana Rebirth: Restoring the Soul of America, argued that -291- Suddenly, our world had changed. But suddenly, too, the immense treasure represented by our people and our resources had leaped into sharper focus. Suddenly, OLG [Office of the Lieutenant Governor] / DCRT’s efforts to strengthen the networks that support our culture industries had a new significance. Suddenly, the value of our cultural economy report … had risen dramatically. By strengthening our cultural network and cataloguing our vast cultural assets, we had laid the groundwork for rescue and recovery. (DCRT 2006: 16) Calling for numerous policy interventions into the economic structure of culture and cultural heritage in Louisiana, the Louisiana Rebirth plan also called for a $550,000 marketing campaign featuring celebrities with ties to New Orleans and Louisiana, appeals to in-state tourism, and reassurances that tourism would not be interrupted on account of the hurricanes, echoing the aftermath of Betsy years before (Louisiana State DCRT 2005a). The idea of rebranding the hurricane-stricken city to national and international audiences proved contagious: a little over one year later, in January 2007 the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau launched the Forever New Orleans advertising campaign, featuring attractive images of the city and its attractions with similar exhortations: slogans such as ‘Soul is Waterproof’ accompanying a trumpet, or an image of the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas with the tagline ‘To Be Clear, This Is The Only Part Of New Orleans Still Underwater.’ (NOCVB 2007; Figures 7.7, 7.8, 7.9). -292- Figures 7.7, 7.8, 7.9: Forever New Orleans Advertising Campaign. Undated images. -293- These representations undertake their work through two means: first, by selectively appropriating specific aspects of the event in order to condense it into reproducible form, and second, in so doing, making a claim upon the reader or viewer to remember the storm, even if they were not directly impacted by it. This form of representation is, in that sense, an invitation to remembrance; in some cases, it is an injunction, making the reader or viewer of the representation a stakeholder by implication. But more importantly, in distilling the essence of the city’s culture into single images, they draw on stereotypical iconographic elements of the city that would likely be recognisable to viewers in markets outside Louisiana: musicians with instruments, people enjoying culinary delights, and iron latticework balconies representing the architecture of the Vieux Carré. In so doing, they trade on the discourses of uniqueness in New Orleans, simultaneously deploying and extending the ‘sense of place’ in the city. But they also rely on a process of essentialising the culture of the city, forms of essentialisation which stand in sharp contrast to their context of origin (the miscegenated aspects of New Orleans’ culture, detailed in Chapter 2) and which obscure the signatures of disaster—while references to the storm are tongue-in-cheek, their humour is selective: none of them features a waterline, a security X, or an empty porch. The representations remember the city but forget the disaster, despite its fundamentally transformative effects on the city the tourist will visit (as after Betsy, noted above), and so serve as a staging ground for remembrance whereby the tourist is invited to consider their own experience of the storm (however distant) and be assured in the same stroke that within the affected region, the storm—or at least the obstacles to their entry it poses—has disappeared. Like many of the interventions detailed in this dissertation—the Hyatt National Jazz Center, the ICInola development, the Hurricane Katrina Memorial, and Disneyfication generally—the overarching achievement in these representations is to cleanse, order, and sanitise a naturally unkempt, sprawling, and messy local culture. Moreover, their effectiveness comes partly from their approach in taking hold of the ‘unified’ culture (described by Piazza and Wagner in Chapter 2), separating it into its component elements, then re-packaging them for sale: -294- they present individual elements of the city’s heritage (the food, the music, and the architecture) collectively throughout the campaign in such a way as to prime the prospective tourist to consume them all of a piece. As Piazza (2005) and others have argued, however, such a distillation is not just unnecessary, but unrepresentative of the nature of the city’s culture, which requires neither ordering and sanitization, nor disassembly and reassembly. To represent any one of the dimensions of New Orleans’ culture independently of any other—to reinvent it for a new audience—becomes therefore an act of elision contrary to the promotional spirit of the campaigns. From a research perspective, as I argued in Chapter 2, this method—the ecological approach to heritage—enables a more nuanced understanding of the relationships across and between sectors; from a policy perspective, however, as a mechanism for dissemination and promulgation it risks the standardisation and commodification of that heritage. As Bortolotto (2009) has argued in her analysis of intangible heritage discourse, interventions into cultural traditions by cultural policy organizations such as UNESCO can have unexpected and adverse effects on those traditions, despite their benign intentions of preservation and conservation. In selecting and standardizing the forms of cultural heritage they attempt to preserve—in Bortolotto’s instance, traditional clay whistles produced in the town of Gravina in Puglia, Italy—the effect of policy is to create simulacra which are extended and reproduced beyond their original contexts. This process was evident in the creation of a reproduction downtown New Orleans in the O2 Arena in London on 24-25 October 2008, a DCRT-sponsored cultural festival featuring local musicians, chefs, and reproduction street signs entitled “Festival New Orleans.” (Figures 7.10, 7.11, 7.12). Over that weekend, signature elements of Louisiana’s culture were on display for consumption by an international audience, which the DCRT hoped would galvanise international tourism to the city over the long-term (the festival coincided with the arrival of the New Orleans Saints professional football team, who were in London to play an exhibition game against the San Diego Chargers). But in their process of selection, arbitration, and promotion of specific cultural elements to represent—backed by -295- corporate sponsors such as the McIlhenny Company, whose Tabasco hot sauce was used in Cajun cooking demonstrations—the initiatives of the DCRT illustrate the wider impacts of policy on cultural practice. In stabilising the means of its production into established channels (as Bortolotto outlines) and in diverting resources (such as funding and public exposure) to specific entities or narratives, such policy interventions risk commodifying the culture they seek to promote: there is no more commodified street in New Orleans than Bourbon Street, so the choice of it to recreate further engrained the metonymic narrative of the city outlined in Chapters 2 and 5—that the Vieux Carré is New Orleans, and vice versa. Figure 7.10: Flyer for Festival New Orleans, London, United Kingdom, 24-25 October 2008. -296- Figure 7.11: Recreation of French Quarter street signs, Festival New Orleans. 24 October 2008. Figure 7.12: Soul Rebels Brass Band performing at Festival New Orleans. 24 October 2008. -297- In this sense, policy can be seen to act as a powerful agent within the wider approach of heritage ecology: directing and stabilizing relations among elements and resources. Ultimately, in its fixed, stereotypical representations of lived traditions that continue to evolve in organic ways in response to their environments, these forms of policy become, over time, a form of memory, fossilizing and standardizing the culture of their cities and communities into resources themselves, as Bereson and Hackler have argued in their analysis of the rhetoric of the DCRT, noting its linkages between cultural heritage and natural resources. “The oil-drilling imagery is offered quite unashamedly as a model for how ‘culture’ works,” they argue. “It would seem that it is just somehow there in abundance. All the speculators have to do is drill for it, offer to pipe samples of it to rich tourists, and then work hard to jack up the price.” (Bereson and Hackler 2006: 4) When asked about the prospective impact of this language, the DCRT has argued that “to develop an economy,” …requires the use of economic language and production. Now, to create a cultural economy you don’t necessarily have to make a painter into a producer—but the question is a tough one. We enter into this language for one reason: to make a better climate for those in arts and cultures, because as policymakers we have the ability to do so. (Breaux 2007) While they may not seem obvious sites in the first instance, examination of these discourses, representations, and processes at work shows that here, too, is where the process of ‘Disneyfication’ can be localised: policies and representations such as these increase the risk of an institutionalised forgetting—not just a failing to remember, but forgetting as a “remembering otherwise” as Esbenshade (1995) has argued. Or a forgetting which singles out specific forms of culture for remembrance and development. As one of the advertising images for Forever New Orleans claimed: “The French Quarter: The Only Mall That’s Also A Museum.” (Figure 7.13). The implications of this message are not just found in the order of the nouns. It is crucial to acknowledge that the impacts of these policies remain poorly understood, and must therefore be tracked over the long-term (McCrone et al 1995; Cunningham et al 2010). While it is tempting to reduce this particular programme of works to an interpretation of it as an -298- experiment of an administration in desperation, or subsequently, a re-election platform for the then-lieutenant governor of Louisiana (and now mayor of New Orleans), it is undoubtedly true that the breadth and scope of these initiatives will impact on the creative industries in ways that at this moment can barely be imagined. As noted, the impacts on standardisation, commodification, and distribution of the city’s creativity (in all its tangible and intangible forms) must be understood, and must be understood from a fundamentally sceptical position: if they follow the same aims and intents of the policies already in place, these initiatives have the potential to fundamentally transform the city’s culture. Therefore the dialogue between artists, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners must not be allowed to falter, even as the storm recedes in memory, and future risks to the heritage are envisioned in the future. And that the artists themselves—in all genres, forms, styles, keys, and voices—must be at the center of this conversation, rather than incidental or ornamental to it, is imperative. Figure 7.13: Images from Forever New Orleans advertising campaign. 2007. -299- 7.2: Contribution to Heritage Studies If research into cultural heritage is, in its most basic expression, the study of the impact of the past on the present, it is rare that the field is presented with an opportunity to witness and trace that impact in real-time: either when the heritage is actively jeopardised and placed at risk of loss, or conversely, when it is being crafted for the first time, as Julian Barnes has satirised in the novel England, England. On witnessing the birth of a new ritual among a community in the broken remnants of the former England, Martha Cochrane, the inadvertent architect of its demise, reflects: “The Fête was established; already it seemed to have its history. Twelve months from now a new May Queen would be proclaimed and new fortunes read from tea-leaves” (Barnes 1998: 266). Yet occasions do arise, as this study has sought to recognise. As noted in Chapter 1, Hoffman and Oliver-Smith have argued that disasters (of any sort) “offer the investigator amazing situations in which to analyze hypotheses pertaining to the constitution of society and culture, to reap data sustaining or confounding such maxims, and, potentially, to create new suppositions” (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 1999: 11). In this context, it has been possible to witness how culture and cultural heritage have been recalled, mobilised, and deployed in the wake of mass trauma in order to give meaning, stability, and identity back to those affected. Focusing on heritage undergoing complex forms of transformation (in which loss is one form) enables a clear exposition of the values and significances afforded it, as well as the ground on which these values operate. Acts as ostensibly simple as cooking a pot of gumbo, playing a song in a concert (or playing any concert at all), repairing a damaged home, or staging a play in a ruined neighbourhood contribute as much to a society’s rebuilding process after disaster as any physical infrastructural repair effort addressing health, transport, or food security. While the impact of these acts on the society in question may be less readily measured or quantified than those measuring electrical output or water and sewerage flows—though not always, as the work of Sweet Home New Orleans has demonstrated—they are just as vital. -300- 7.2.1: Materiality and Immateriality In looking at the rebuilding process of New Orleans after Katrina, however, certain issues central to heritage research have emerged as in need of revision. The first is the distinction heritage research frequently makes between materiality and immateriality (or ‘tangible and intangible’), a distinction that the specific cases examined here demonstrate is detrimental to contemporary conceptions of heritage. A recipe, whether for gumbo or for a Sazerac cocktail, as I argued in Chapter 3, occupies a space between materiality and immateriality, in that it occupies a physical form in its initial (written) and final (edible or drinkable) incarnation, but requires a form of practice—of performance—in order to cross that divide. Likewise, the ability to play a traditional musical piece such as ‘Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?’ requires that same element of craft, an element located neither in the performer nor in the instrument, but in the interaction between them: even when the instrument is imbued from the start with symbolism, as in the Elysian Trumpet described in Chapter 4, it remains inert without a body of lived experience and understanding informing it. In this sense, materiality and immateriality are not opposed to one another, but rather occupy a third, dialectical space of performance, as I among others have argued elsewhere: “Material culture can only be fully understood in the context of its capacity for social or epistemological action, and likewise, the conceptual bases of material heritage to which we owe a great deal of our cultural identity … could not exist without the objects and spaces to which they belong” (Andrews, et al. 2007: 128; cf. also L. Smith 2006). 7.2.2: Authenticity Similarly, the opportunity to examine a society with a finely-tuned awareness and celebratory instinct of its own past alongside reproductions of that past in numerous other locations around the country—as in the fake French Quarter in Disneyland in California, and indeed the world, as in Festival New Orleans in London—has provided an opportunity to examine the concept and work of authenticity in a post-disaster setting. One of the most -301- contentious themes in heritage research (Cornejo 2008), authenticity occupies a pivotal place in the cultural life of New Orleans. Its promise, found in advertising images, literary and film representations, and the public imagination, sustains local economic activity through tourism, and its presence, found in unnamed bars and music venues, salvaged architectural elements from demolished homes, restaurants operated by the same family over generations and storms alike, anchors the traditions and practices that underwrite the city’s claim to uniqueness. But the fears of residents after the storm that the city would be replaced by a version of itself—the Disneyfied post-Katrina New Orleans—also illustrate the perils of authenticity: that it, too, like a photograph, can be swept away at a moment’s notice in the flood. It is a fragile concept— Bywater has argued the authenticity of material culture can be “fatally compromised by its insistence on its own authenticity” (Bywater 2004: 180)—but it is precisely that fragility that gives it such power. As noted throughout this dissertation, the discourse of Disneyfication has hung like a pall over the debates surrounding the future of the city—behaving, in truth, like a second city that operates in the same time and space as the extant New Orleans. The fear of its realisation is found at every level, from City Council debates to conversations in a neighborhood bar—acknowledging that in New Orleans, there is often little distance between those two—the fear that the authentic spaces of the city will soon be displaced by a living rendition of the derelict JazzLand, described in Chapter 4. (To consider JazzLand, which sits outside the New Orleans city limits, with Statue Park near Budapest, Hungary, a similar theme-park of heritage quarantined from its own capitol, would be fruitful.) Like materiality and immateriality, the authentic exists in a dialectical space, but it is clear from the lessons of the rebuilding process that it can in no way be arbitrated, legislated, or designated from an outside source (such as from policy, which as noted threatens to standardise and commodify). Rather, as Raeburn has argued, it is found, as above, in performance: “Authenticity is not defined,” he observed, “it is performed according to a set of personal rules.” (Raeburn 2006) -302- 7.2.3: Infrastructure Finally, while it is typically a concept that has been understood in terms of visitor facilities to heritage sites (e.g. Garden 2004), examining the many different forms of cultural heritage throughout the post-Katrina rebuilding process has offered a unique opportunity to revisit the concept of infrastructure, and to understand it in new and innovative ways. As suggested in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, in considering the role of craft in maintaining traditions, dialectical encounters between material and immaterial cultural heritage (and within a context whereby those involved mutually consider it authentic—which is to say, the concept labelled as such never arises) are both part and proof of a functioning infrastructure. As I have argued, acts of preparing traditional dishes, playing celebrated music, or repairing historic homes are just as much a form of infrastructure as the street itself on which those acts take place (which, as I argued in Chapter 4, is a likely local setting). In such a way these acts comprise a form of passing on traditions across generations, and so comprise a metaphorical form of infrastructure no less crucial than their physical counterpart. Undoubtedly the physical spaces which catalyse those acts—a kitchen where one chef trains another in the art of roux, a bar where musicians meet to practice, or a school where a child learns to write or paint—also comprise part of that infrastructure, even though they may not initially appear to do so. This approach does not exclude potential convergences of traditional infrastructure and metaphorical infrastructure—as the examples of New Orleans’ most noted chefs staging emergency kitchens in the neutral grounds in the days immediately after the storm (described in Chapter 3), or a free municipal hospital literally and figuratively incubating generations of the city’s culture-bearers (described in Chapter 5), illustrate—but it does rehabilitate previously unconsidered spaces that are just as vital to the preservation and conservation of cultural heritage in the city, and open the way for innovative strategies to further safeguard them. The most original and unique forms of cultural heritage have always been made and sustained in the most unlikely of places; as the broadest example considered in this study—the city itself—shows. Seen in these terms, infrastructure -303- becomes a powerful concept that enables a swifter, more precisely targeted disaster mitigation response: a recipe alone may not preserve the knowledge of how to make a gumbo when the floodwaters begin to rise, but prior instruction, the local knowledge passed down through generations, will. Reconsidering all of these above aspects—materiality, authenticity, and infrastructure— requires that core approaches to cultural heritage be recast, and that the idea of heritage itself, finally, be reconsidered. Cultural heritage can no longer be interpreted as an inert site, structure, tradition, or practice that exists independently of its environment, especially not an environment which undergoes significant transformation. This is true regardless of the specific form of environmental change: whether sudden or gradual, unforeseen or expected. The forms of cultural heritage I have examined in this dissertation have undergone profound change along with their respective environment, yet despite the many and tragic losses here detailed, have emerged as resilient and adaptive. The culture of New Orleans has re-emerged as a living organism today, four years after Hurricane Katrina, not despite the impacts of the storm but in part because of them—it is as impossible to extricate living cultural heritage from the sites and conditions of its creation as it is to extricate it from its natural environment. Rather, as I have argued throughout this dissertation, the aspects of resilience and adaptation present in New Orleans’ culture are jeopardised less by the physical environment itself (to which its culture has adapted throughout its history, a continual reinscription of the natural and the cultural) than by the economic and political factors which seek to standardise, sanitise, relocate, essentialise, and brand that heritage at a moment when the heritage is perceived to be most at risk. In this sense, poorly-designed rebuilding efforts after a disaster can again be seen to do more damage to living culture than the disaster itself, and it is against those efforts that heritage must be safeguarded. That different stakeholders may not necessarily agree on what the definition of heritage entails is irrelevant; that the conditions for that difference are preserved in the wake of a disaster is critical. -304- Figure 7.14: Political cartoon by Ben Sargent depicting New Orleans as Baghdad. 2007. -305- 7.3: Heritage Ecology: Summary and Conclusion The above references to dialectical relationships, and the insights that they have made possible, are not just insights gained by reinterpretation for its own sake. Rather, they are made possible by the approach of heritage ecology, outlined at the beginning of this dissertation; the word ‘dialectical’ could in most cases above be replaced by the word ‘ecological’ with little loss in translation. As I have argued throughout this dissertation, the advantage of heritage ecology is twofold: taken literally, it anchors the research project upon the physical, environmental stage on which the specific aspect of cultural heritage is played out, and taken metaphorically, it expands the opportunities for interpretation in order to unpack, reframe, and analyse the research according to ecological principles inherently at work within cultural relationships. Seeing a heritage site as an ecological system in simultaneously physical and metaphorical ways enables the researcher to reconsider previously unnoticed (or inadequately theorised) elements, such as dominant actors, contests for resources, miscegenation and mingling (of ideas and of histories as much as of organisms and genetic material, as Dawkins (1976) originally outlined), webs of interaction, impacts along varying scales, and situational dynamics and pressures as Oyama (2000) and Harvey (2003) have articulated. In this sense, the ecological approach to heritage views it as mutually co-produced with both its human society and its natural environment, whereby no element remains independent of one another: this approach therefore has the potential to serve as a point of rehabilitation for societies experiencing dissonance with their heritage, as Ashworth and Tunbridge (1996) have outlined. Moreover, investigating heritage sites and practices from an ecological perspective offers the opportunity to reintroduce an awareness and reconsideration of risk factors as a salient feature of those sites. Because heritage sites in particular are grounded in physical places (whether wetlands, deserts, forests, or other biomes), the specific environmental factors that make up those places must be accorded due interpretation and integration, especially if they pose a threat of potential loss to that site. Analysis of those factors offers two benefits; the first is a -306- more nuanced understanding of the resilience of a site, and its capacity to withstand specific impacts and adapt to changing environmental phenomena. The second, reconsidering the fundamental bases of heritage conservation, is a revised approach towards loss. Following Stearns & Stearns (1999), Weidensaul (2002), and McKibben (2003), I have argued previously (Morris 2006) that loss is as integral an ecological process as any other, and that the transformation of heritage via loss—what Jerome (2009), further echoing the obsolescence of that dichotomy, reported as “the transformation of heritage from tangible to intangible”— should not merit an automatic pejorative response either from researchers assessing the situation or local communities involved. In conjunction with efforts to mitigate against it, the loss of heritage must also continue to be understood; the approach developed here enables a means of undertaking that process. The factors that can lead to that loss, moreover—regardless of their specific nature, whether mundane and expected or exceptional and unforeseen—also merit further inquiry, factors to which environmental impact assessments of a site (from atmospheric, climatic, hydrological, and geophysical perspectives) can usefully contribute. As noted above, this approach offers as a result a strategy for the future mitigation and protection of cultural heritage in those contexts where it is deemed feasible and appropriate to do so, for identifying aspects of the heritage that would not otherwise be considered vital to that process, and for adapting to inevitable loss when those risks are determined to be too high to preserve it. Finally, while its concerns have been primarily attuned to environmental change rather than climate change (anthropogenic global warming, discussed in Chapter 1), this dissertation acknowledges that the potential hazards posed by the coming century are severe, and that cultural heritage sites, practices, and traditions around the world are set to face considerable impact if those processes remain unchecked. As noted, national governments, NGOs, and research institutions alike have in the past decade responded to this reality and offered assessments of the specific scenarios facing heritage locally and internationally; while climate change may remain a complex, abstract context, it will without question entail (or be translated -307- into) direct environmental impacts across the globe. The ecological approach to heritage offers an opportunity to extend this awareness into new research contexts: new forms of monitoring and conservation technology, awareness of changing borders and transnationalisms, and finally, given the impacts that environmental migration in particular will entail (Smith et al. 2007, Bravo 2009, Lazrus 2009, Wrathall and Morris 2009), a revised assessment of local, regional, state, and global spheres of identity—all issues that will invariably impact again upon cultural heritage in years to come. This approach offers advance awareness and understanding of those changes, and with them, the opportunity for more finely honed mitigation and recovery strategies. At the beginning of this dissertation I posed three interrelated research questions. Over the past four years, those research questions have not been answered in any conclusive way, but this research has shown that they can at the very least be reversed in form, and made declarative. Cultural heritage is transformed after a natural disaster, in unexpected and profound ways; societies do rebuild their heritage, in inventive and determined ways; and finally, heritage does contribute to rebuilding after a disaster, in ways that have yet to fully understand—but which, when disaster dawns, can be witnessed. Prior to the storm, who could have predicted a battle over tacos, a silent musical procession, or a house built out of latex? These three declaratives must therefore continue to form the basis for a continued investigation and an ongoing dialogue across post-disaster work: “the challenge of responding to the disaster,” Clark argues, is to do everything that can be done to help restore order, to rebuild the guardrails and relight the pathways, but at the same time, to try and hold open the moment of disturbance or shock, to feel the disaster also as a disaster of thought, something which fractures and fissures the ground we stand on, work from, think from. (Clark 2006: 386) The disaster thus authors a fissure in the ground underneath both physical and conceptual divisions, fissures to which future generations of researchers, policymakers, and activists must gravitate. In particular, the divisions between the categories of post-conflict and post-crisis—like the divisions between tangible and intangible—must undergo concerted revision (Figure 7.14). While the past generation of disaster research (launched by Hewitt (1983)) has set -308- the stage for the present generation of work, the emergent field of post-disaster work is still in its infancy, especially in the context of a mutual understanding between crisis, culture, and the arts. While cases abound from which we may learn much—such as the rebuilding of San Francisco after the 1905 earthquake (Sydell 2006), the rebuilding of Charleston after Hurricane Hugo in 1989, or the rebuilding process underway in Port-au-Prince after the recent earthquake in Haiti (Romero 2010)—it remains true, as this examination of Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on New Orleans has shown, that the history of the ordinary cannot be written separately from the history of the extraordinary, and indeed, in certain cases, it is impossible to tell the difference between the two. Yet future disasters will emerge in years to come; it is crucial, therefore, to form links in post-disaster studies across crisis and conflict to explore what the fields can contribute to each other. Only by a sustained exploration which productively disrespects the boundaries of discipline, method, and intellectual province can any meaningful work proceed; to find the strengths in response across fields and communicate those results to all waves of responders— from emergency personnel arriving with food, water, and blankets to the historians of disaster writing a century from now, under their own ‘ill stars’—is the only way to ensure that future disasters are less likely to occur, and that even when they do, the societies impacted will be prepared. There is no such thing as a natural disaster—not anymore. The human capacity to prevent disaster is met only by our ability to respond to it with compassion, swiftness, and care. This dissertation concludes with the hope that this realisation will reach those powers—both individual and institutional—that need to hear it, and that having reached them, they will not refuse the responsibilities it requires. -309- Appendix A: Afterword—Hurricane Gustav, 2008 The disaster: stress upon minutiae, sovereignty of the accidental… —Blanchot 1995: 3 This research nearly did not exist. In the summer of 2008, New Orleans was preparing for the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association announced on 25 August that yet another tropical storm had formed in the Atlantic. This was, of course, no immediate cause for concern; after all, storms come and go, not all of them become depressions, not all depressions become hurricanes, and not all hurricanes even strike land. But within a few days of the announcement, after Tropical Depression Seven had become Hurricane Gustav, had ravaged Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba, and was set to make a beeline for New Orleans, the city began to brace itself for a replay of the devastation that had occurred just three years earlier—and to imagine the setbacks in the rebuilding process were the levees and flood defences, still years away from the optimum protection that federal and state authorities and the Army Corps of Engineers had promised, to fail again. As the city, fearing the worst—then-Mayor Nagin famously warned that ‘the mother of all storms’ was headed towards the Gulf Coast—began to abridge and then cancel its observances of the Katrina anniversary (Gonzales 2008), and residents began to curtail their plans for private, community, and religious observances as well, Gustav continued to gather in strength, reawakened by the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico just like Katrina had been before (Figures 8.1, 8.2). While some residents decided to ride out the storm, deciding in the grand tradition ‘not to run from hurricanes but to drink them’ (Figure 8.3), for the majority of the others, the memory of Katrina was too fresh, the impacts were still too present, and the risks were too great. The result was the largest domestic evacuation in United States history; city and state leaders ordered a mandatory evacuation of the entire region, resulting in over three million people fleeing the potential landfall zone, with remarkably little direct loss of life in the process (E. Anderson 2008). -310- Figure A.1: Montage of path of Hurricane Gustav, 25 August – 1 September 2008. Figure A.2: Satellite rendering of Hurricane Gustav, 31 August 2008. -311- Figure A.3: Sign (slightly wet) taken from light pole on Frenchmen Street, 28 August 2008. -312- I was one of those evacuees, evacuating from New Orleans to my parents’ house in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, having said a hurried goodbye to friends and colleagues, taking one student researching Katrina with me and seeing another depart to Washington, DC, on one of the last flights out of Louis Armstrong International Airport. The drive, 106 miles long and normally two hours, took seven hours to complete; the first twenty-five miles, along Interstate 10 to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, took five hours alone. Throughout the experience we wondered endlessly what would happen: if Gustav would result in a death toll anywhere near Katrina’s; where our friends and loved ones would end up and for how long, whether we would be stranded in Mississippi indefinitely (or whether Gustav might actually veer north and strike the Gulf Coast, as Katrina had late in its formation); whether, if it did strike New Orleans directly, the flood defences would hold; whether, if they did not, and the city was inundated all over again, the cries for the permanent abandonment of the city leveled after Katrina (e.g. Shafer 2005) would, this time, take root. And on the good days, like so many scattered across the region stranded in front of our televisions and radios and waiting for the latest forecast from NOAA, we simply wondered when we would be able to return and get back to work. As this writing in some way proves, we were, in the end, able to do so. Shortly before it would have hit New Orleans, Gustav veered west before making landfall near Cocadrie, Louisiana, devastating the coastal parishes of the state (as Rita had three weeks after Katrina in 2005, and as Ike would a few weeks later in the season) and proceeding to cause $6.6B worth of damage before dissipating as far north as Michigan. Damage to New Orleans was slight, but questions lingered even in the absence of its wake: questions about the resilience of the city’s defences, about civic preparedness, and about the structure of disaster preparedness and response across the region. Reckoning from the perspective of a native of the region, Gustav forced us to consider yet again our relationship to the landscape, reckoning with the fact not just of future but of present risk (DeBerry 2008). Reckoning from the perspective of a researcher, however, it prompts those same questions but in different ways: is Gustav a pivotal moment in -313- the city’s history, a non-event that has still had, in some way, an impact on the city’s rebuilding process? The colloquial wisdom after the storm held that the city had ‘dodged a bullet,’ but this mentality raises the more fundamental question of whether one natural disaster can be ‘replaced’ by another. To what extent and in what ways do societies relive previous disasters when new ones arise to imperil them? Or does Gustav perform a different role, aiding the process by which Katrina recedes into memory, hastening its transformation (in some perverse way) into heritage? That Gustav coincided with the three-year anniversary of Katrina—threatening to ‘cap’ the experience of Katrina into a neatly bounded package by literally forcing the cancellation of Katrina observances, and clearing a space for its own role to play in the city’s long history of disaster—only threw these questions into even sharper relief. The question is, of course, counterfactual, for two reasons: first, because to imagine so would be to personify the storm unnecessarily (as I have refused to do with Katrina). Second, because Gustav did not ‘happen’ to New Orleans there is no way to consider what its impacts would be, nor to assess the recovery from Katrina from this ostensible three-year window (from any research perspective, with any methodology—the contingency of research, on this view, is the cruelest mistress). This is a counterfactualism for which we are all, natives and non-natives alike, undoubtedly grateful; but its formation invites a reconsideration of the issues I outlined at the Chapter 7: New Orleans is, by nature, vulnerable to disaster—as Pierce Lewis famously claimed, it is the impossible but inevitable city. And it will experience further hurricanes, some of which will in some way displace, or abridge, Katrina in memory. That process remains to be witnessed and understood, hopefully with no loss of life involved. But the storm cannot define the city forever; as I have tried to show, its heritage is too alive and vibrant for it to be streaked with those waters indefinitely. Hence the argument made at the outset that down in New Orleans, the words ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ are often interchangeable. -314- Figure A.4: Erosion of Chandeleur Islands after Hurricane Katrina. 15 October 2004 and 16 September 2005. -315- Figure A.5: Chandeleur Islands, before and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 7 October 2001, 13 October 2004, and 16 September 2005. -316- That said, until our impact on the Mississippi River delta process is fundamentally rethought, our reliance upon fossil fuels and petrochemical exploration and extraction is curbed, and our coastal wetlands and barrier islands undergo the regeneration they desperately need in order to serve once again as buffer zones for hurricanes (Figures 8.4, 8.5), and our civil infrastructure is strengthened to the point where it can withstand a 100-year storm (or, as the Delta Works system developed for flood defences in the Netherlands anticipates, a 4000-year storm), the risk of Gustav becoming the next Katrina or Katrina becoming the next Betsy remains unconscionably high. To observe that evolution in memory nearly transpire during Gustav—while thankfully only nearly transpiring—was a fascinating and revealing process, but it also ran the risk of occluding the work remaining to be done: the complex, arduous, but ultimately feasible work of ensuring a sustainable pattern of life within the region. The long-term future of the Gulf South must not be compromised by focusing on politically expedient, short- term initiatives; should this be the case, the risks involved in living in New Orleans would ensure that the storms yet to be named will render Betsy, Katrina, and Gustav mere footnotes to the true historic environment to which we are all subject. As the poet Galway Kinnell has written: if you commit then, as we did, the error of thinking, one day all this will only be memory… (Kinnell 1973: 49) Envisioning the fate of New Orleans as anything else but contingent upon our own efforts to safeguard it would be an error as grave, and would author a future as certain. -317- Appendix B: Partial list of Hurricane Katrina anniversary events, 2007-2009 Figures B.1, B.2: Great Flood Commemoration and Memorial Ceremony, 29 August 2006. -318- Figure B.3: Listing of memorial events, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 29 August 2007, p. A14. (1/3) -319- Figure B.4: Listing of memorial events, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 29 August 2007, p. A14. (2/3) -320- Figure B.5: Listing of memorial events, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 29 August 2007, p. A14. (3/3) -321- Figure B.6: Listing of Memorial Events provided by Mayor’s Office, 29 August 2007. -322- Figures B.7, B.8: Hurricane Katrina Memorial Groundbreaking Ceremony, 29 August 2007. -323- Figures B.9, B.10: Great Flood Commemoration and Memorial Ceremony, 29 August 2007. -324- Figure B.11: Listing of memorial events, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 27 August 2008, p. A14. -325- Figure B.12: Sankofa New Orleans Commemorative Ceremony, 29 August 2008. -326- Figure B.13: Listing of memorial events, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 27 August 2009, p. B4 -327- Figure B.14: Hurricane Katrina Fourth Anniversary Memorial Ceremony, 29 August 2009. -328- Appendix C: Remarks delivered by Dr Frank Minyard, Coroner of Orleans Parish, delivered at the dedication of the Hurricane Katrina Memorial, 29 August 2008. Thank you. I too want to echo the words about the Funeral Parlor directors. They helped us all along, in fact the help with the funeral parlor directors goes all the way back to Katrina for me, three years ago, when we were up in St. Gabriel without much help, and they came through and helped us—the Rhodes family had a funeral parlor there, and they helped us, and they’ve been helping us ever since. And not only the Rhodes family but all the other funeral parlors, and yesterday was really beautiful, to see so many volunteers coming out to help us do this. But what I want to do now is tell you about a jazz funeral. Those of us who are from New Orleans, and most of you are—I don’t know if the news people are—but we know what a jazz funeral is, and most of us want one. I certainly do—I’m in the book, the Preservation Hall Band, Rickie [addressing pianist Rickie Monie], and I’m gonna get a jazz funeral. But it’s something that you can’t purchase, you have to be a person of quality. And the musicians, we show up, and what we do is—I’ve been on hundreds of them, with the Olympia Brass Band—what we do is we follow behind the hearse, playing a slow, slow gospel number, any one of a hundred different gospel numbers, and we follow them to the cemetery and when they get to the gate of the cemetery, the leader of the band (it used to be Harold Dejan) would say, “Cut ‘em loose!” And that means we cut loose this loved one from all his worldly connections, and now we know he’s on a more grander and more glorious voyage into eternity than he could ever have had without the music, and we turn around and we jazz up that song, and we play it fast and furious and we go to the nearest barroom, and in New Orleans, that ain’t too far. So, I’m gonna show you a little bit of how we do this. This is my favorite gospel. [Performance of ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’] That was something that needed to be said a long time ago. When I decided that we were going to bury the remaining remains of New Orleanians—because two years ago in April we received 225 coffins, and quite frankly, we could do it at the city’s Potter’s Field out on the old Gentilly highway, but it would be very, very difficult—and once you put a coffin in the ground out there, I mean, it sinks, it’s gone, you can never retrieve it. So, we thought about the mausoleum, and Mayor Nagin—we brought that up to him—and I was only asking him for half a million dollars, but he came up with that million dollar check last year on this very same platform and I was dumbfounded, and very thankful. And some writer in the audience made a big, big show out of the fact that I hugged the mayor. [Minyard hugs Mayor C. Ray Nagin again] -329- And of course the City Council had to approve it all, which they did, thank you very much. And we raised about $300,000, plus or minus. I didn’t go to the usual people I go to on raising money for various things. We went to corporations and businesses, and they have come through for us, and now we are out of money and we are allegedly finished but we’re really not. We need a few more things to beautify the place. And a few more plants, and things like that. And as of this time yesterday there was no grass here, and last night at six o’clock I came by and there was no grass, so at seven o’clock I said ‘Let there be grass!’ And there we are. Anyway, we got lots of people to thank, and every time you do that as you all know if you’ve ever tried thanking people, you leave somebody out, and they jump all over you the next day. But our board of directors who guided me to this, and of course the Rhodes family, and the guy, the lawyer who worked pro bono for us—worked his fanny off—Ted George, stand up Ted—so I told Julia Powers, who kind of runs this organisation, I told Julia, we need to pay this guy something. I mean, you know, because he has devoted so much of his legal time because let me tell you getting this 1.5 acre plot of a cemetery that hasn’t been used in 50 years by Charity Hospital was no easy legal task. I mean every legal loophole that we could jump through our friends in Baton Rouge made us do it—for good reasons, I’m not flaunting them—but it really, really put a job on Ted. Ted came through on every phone call, and for two years. I mean, I just can’t thank him enough. You are our man and I really thank you. Linda Stewart, who represents the Stewart group of Lakelawn Cemeteries. They have been insurmountable in their help, and I know Linda’s here—I caught her driving, wonder where—there you go baby, stand up, Linda. She really helped us— you know, this is kind of a new business that I’m in, and believe you me I don’t want to be in this business. In fact, the reason I hugged the mayor is that I’m going to try to push it off on the City. But anyway, I don’t want to be in this business. But we’ve had a tremendous experience finding out about how to do a place like this, and how to keep it up, how to have the perpetual care account, which I never knew even existed. So we got all of that, and here we are today, and I am just so proud. And I just had to get that out of this old trumpet, because it’s been in there for three years, I’ve been wanting to play for these people. So—we finally got it done. Thank you very much, and God bless you, and God bless this wonderful city of ours. -330- Appendix D: Inscriptions, Hurricane Katrina Memorial (Figures 6.22, 6.23) THE NEW ORLEANS KATRINA MEMORIAL On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall upon the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast, bringing devastation to many communities. In New Orleans, storm surge and the failure of the levee system caused flooding in over eighty percent of the city, trapping thousands. In the chaotic aftermath, New Orleanians faced desperate circumstances in homes, hospitals, the Superdome and other makeshift shelters. Despite the heroic efforts of first responders, medical personnel, volunteers, and the military, over 1,100 citizens lost their lives in the disaster. Most of the deceased were identified and buried by loved ones in private ceremonies throughout the nation. Here lie the remaining, the unclaimed and unidentified victims of the storm from the New Orleans area. Some have been forgotten. Some remain unknown. This memorial is dedicated to these individuals and to all who suffered or died during Hurricane Katrina. Let the victims here forever remind us of those harrowing days and the long struggle to rebuild our city. Let their final resting place call us to constant preparedness. Let their souls join into an eternal chorus, singing with the full might of the indomitable spirit of New Orleans. Jeffrey Rouse, M.D., Chief Deputy Coroner August 29, 2009 THE NEW ORLEANS HURRICANE KATRINA MEMORIAL CORPORATION More than 1,100 persons in New Orleans and the surrounding communities perished in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. An unprecedented effort to recover and identify the dead was carried out, yet scores remained unidentified or unclaimed. Dr Frank Minyard, coroner of Orleans Parish, created the New Orleans Katrina Memorial Corporation to build a final resting place to honor those victims. The site of historic Charity Hospital Cemetery was selected and the memorial was designed to preserve and enhance its dignity. The memorial’s design evokes the hurricane’s shape and creates a meditative labyrinth, a healing space for reflection. The memorial received the remains of the unidentified or unclaimed victims and was dedicated to their memory on August 29, 2008. May they and all other victims of Hurricane Katrina find eternal peace. 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E-mail message (to third-party), 2 November. -363- Secondary Image Sources All images remained available on 1 April 2010 except where otherwise specified. Cover image: Winds of Hurricane Katrina. Image adapted from model generated by Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS-5), 28 August 2005. NASA Earth Observatory. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6882. 1.4: Global and continental temperature change 1906-2005. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, Figure SPM.4 (2007). http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_figures_and_tables_IPCC_ AR4_synthesis_report_SYR.htm 1.5: Variations of the Earth’s surface temperature: years 1000-2100. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report, Figure 9-1b (2001). http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_figures_and_tables_gr- climate-changes-2001-syr.htm 2.1: Satellite image showing Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico, 28 August 2005. http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/archive/2005/storms/katrina/katrina.html 2.2: Satellite image showing Katrina at 9.15am, shortly after landfall, 29 August 2005. http://www.katrina.noaa.gov/satellite/satellite.html 2.3, 2.4: “Hurricane Katrina Floods the Southeastern United States.” 4 September 2005 and 30 August 2005 (detail of greater New Orleans region). NASA Earth Observatory. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=15433 http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=15419 2.5, 2.6: Hurricane Katrina flood depth estimations, 31 August 2005 and 20 September 2005. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. http://www.katrina.noaa.gov/maps/images/katrina-flood-depth-estimation-08-31-2005.jpg http://www.katrina.noaa.gov/maps/images/katrina-flood-depth-estimation-09-20-2005.jpg 2.7: Undated aerial photograph of flooded New Orleans, September 2005. http://www.katrina.noaa.gov/helicopter/images/katrina-new-orleans-flooding3-2005.jpg 2.8: The security ‘X’ diagram, detailing building hazard codes. Undated photograph from 2007. Photograph by Christina Bray. From MOYE (2009). http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2009/moye/Images/1a-004-ss-09-dmoye-lg.jpg 2.9: Thomas Mann, “Markings No. 3.” Selected work from Storm Cycle (2006). Image courtesy of Thomas Mann Gallery. 2.10: Photograph of flood waterline, 24 August 2006. Courtesy of Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. http://hurricanearchive.org/object/3474 2.11: Political cartoon by Jack Ohman satirising the waterline as metaphor. 2006. Image originally from http://cartoonbox.slate.com/static/5.html. No longer accessible. -364- 2.14: Undated illustration of art installation “Steps Home” by sculptor Dawn DeDeaux. Image courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery. 2.15: Photograph of mould in the interior of a house, 29 October 2005. Courtesy of Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. http://hurricanearchive.org/object/500 2.16: Undated photograph of Katrina landfill by C.C. Lockwood. From DAWDY (2006). 2.17: Undated photograph of installation by Henrique Oliveira at the Center for Contemporary Art, New Orleans (image from MACCASH 2008a). http://www.nola.com. No longer available. 2.18: Floodwall installation by Jana Napoli, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 21 July 2007. http://www.jananapoli.com/2007/07/floodwall-stands-on-its-own-feet-till.html 2.20: Political cartoon by Steve Kelley depicting the fleur-de-lis as symbol of New Orleans. 2006. Image originally from http://cartoonbox.slate.com/static/5.html. No longer accessible. 2.23: ‘renew orleans’ design apparel, from ROPEADOPE (2006). http://www.cafepress.com/renew_orleans.51657488 3.1: Tres Banderas taqueria. Undated photograph by John McCusker. from WALLER (2007). http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/06/jefferson_bans_taqueria_trucks.html 3.2: A pot of gumbo. Recipe by author. Photo courtesy of Helen Mort. 3.3: Dooky Chase restaurant, Orleans Avenue, 8 May 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DookyChase8May.jpg 3.4: Angelo Brocato Ice Cream Parlor, Carrolton Avenue. Southern Foodways Alliance. http://www.southernfoodways.com/documentary/oh/neworleans_eats/brocato.shtml. 3.5, 3.6: New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival 2007, 2008. http://poboyfest.com. 3.7: Abita Springs Restoration Pale Ale. Undated photograph. http://brewreviewcrew.wordpress.com/ 3.8: Absolut New Orleans flavoured vodka. Undated image. http://www.absolutads.com/?p=748. 3.13: Circle Food Store, Claiborne Avenue and St. Bernard. 14 November 1954. Photograph by Charles L. Frank Photographers. Image from Historic New Orleans Collection (2007). 3.14: St Roch Market, St. Claude Avenue (undated, 2006). Photograph by D.P. Nicolls. http://www.flickr.com/photos/niccollsdp/2179316783/ 3.15: Political cartoon by Walt Handelsman on the effects of hospitality towards displaced New Orleanians. 2005. Image originally from http://cartoonbox.slate.com/static/5.html. No longer accessible. -365- 4.1: Plaque marking the vicinity of Congo Square. http://www.jazzfm.com/wp-content/uploads/congo-square.jpg 4.2: Reopening of the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts, 9 January 2009. New Orleans Times-Picayune. Photograph by Ted Jackson. Image from KRUPA 2009b. 4.3: Map of displaced tradition-bearers, Sweet Home New Orleans. August 2009. Image courtesy of SWEET HOME NEW ORLEANS (2009). 4.4: New Orleans musician’s benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, 20 September 2005. http://www2.msg.com/msg_photogallery.jsp?galleryID=69&photoID=683. 4.5, 4.6: The Elysian Trumpet. Accessed 10 September 2007. http://www.elysiantrumpet.com/ 4.9: Political cartoon by Jack Ohman satirising federal leaders at Mardi Gras. 2006. Image originally from http://cartoonbox.slate.com/static/5.html. No longer accessible. 4.10: Mardi Gras float, “Refrigerator Heaven,” Krewe of Mid-City. February 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MidCity06FridgeHeaven.jpg 4.11: Mardi Gras floats, Krewe of Chaos. February 2006. Image scanned from Jumonville (2006). 4.17: Design sketch for Habitat for Humanity Musician’s Village. Undated image. http://www.nolamusiciansvillage.com/images/habitat.jpg 4.18: Row of newly-constructed shotgun houses, Habitat for Humanity Musician’s Village. Undated image. http://ap.lancasteronline.com/5/katrina_musicians_village. No longer accessible. 4.19: Ellis Marsalis Center for Music. Image courtesy of Aleis Tusa. Undated illustration. 4.20, 4.21: Digital rendering of design sketch for Hyatt National Jazz Center (unrealised). From Architectural Record magazine, and courtesy of Strategic Hotels. 4.22, 4.23: Digital rendering of design sketch for National Jazz Center. Morphosis Architects. http://www.morphopedia.com/projects/new-orleans-national-jazz-center http://www.morphopedia.com/projects/new-orleans-national-jazz-center/gallery/drawings/1/. 4.24: Mural by Bruce Davenport, Jr. Image scanned from MACCASH (2008b). 5.1: Photograph of “Social Dress – New Orleans”, sculpture by Takashi Horisaki. Undated photograph by Ellis Lucia, from RECKDAHL (2007c). 5.2: Photograph of “Social Dress – New Orleans”, sculpture by Takashi Horisaki. http://www.takashihorisaki.com/Sculpture/social%20dress%20new%20orleans/socrates_image s/LRG_Hori_SDNO_01.htm. -366- 5.3, 5.4, 5.5: Vernacular architecture in New Orleans: shotgun house, Creole cottage, and double gallery. Preservation Resource Center. http://www.prcno.org 5.6: Exterior view of St. Francis of Cabrini Church. Undated photograph. http://blog.prcno.org/2009/10/01/mid-century-modernist-architecture-demolished/ 5.7: Altar of St Francis of Cabrini Church. Undated photograph. http://www.neworleanschurches.com/fxcabrini/fxcabrini.htm 5.8, 5.9: Design rendering of ICInola development, Wayne Troyer Architects. Image from DRUEDING (2007). 5.10: Map of ICInola development. New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 2008. http://blog.nola.com/graphics/2008/02/icinola_development.html 5.14, 5.15, 5.16: Digital renderings of design sketch for Make It Right Foundation house. Images retrieved from Architectural Record magazine. http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/071210Pitt/1.asp. 5.17: Charity Hospital prior to Hurricane Katrina. Undated postcard image. http://www.fhl.org/FHL/News/PresvAlerts/CharityHospital.shtm 5.18: Charity Hospital shuttered after Hurricane Katrina. Undated photograph. http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/southern-region/charity- hospital/endangered-charity-hospital.html 5.19: LSU/VA proposed medical complex map, Tulane/Gravier neighbourhood. from BARROW (2009). 5.20, 5.21: Digital rendering of refurbished Charity Hospital, RMJM Hillier Architects. 5.22: Photograph of second-line in support of Charity hospital refurbishment, 31 August 2009. Photograph by David Grunfeld. New Orleans Times-Picayune. http://photos.nola.com/tpphotos/2009/08/around_new_orleans_556.html 5.23: Demolition of CJ Peete public housing complex. Photograph by Karen Gadbois, 7 March 2008. http://www.squanderedheritage.com/2008/03/30/cj-peete/. 5.24: New Orleans Building Corporation schema, “Reinventing the Crescent,” 15 April 2007. http://www.noriverfront.com. Accessed 20 July 2007. (now http://www.reinventingthecrescent.org.) 5.26: Digital rendering of design for proposed conversion of Bywater Point, “Reinventing the Crescent.” Hargreaves Architects. http://www.hargreaves.com/projects/Waterfronts/NOLACrescent/NOLA_1.jpg. 5.28: Exhibition map of DesCours architectural installations, 2007. http://www.aianeworleans.org. Accessed 10 December 2007. -367- 5.29: Exhibition map of DesCours architectural installations, 2009. http://www.descours.us. 5.30: Photograph of NoLA rising. Undated photograph by Matthew Hinton. Image from Rose (2007c). 5.32, 5.33, 5.34, 5.35: Street art by Banksy, New Orleans. August 2008. http://www.woostercollective.com/2008/08/more_banksy_in_new_orleans.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/anthonyturducken/2801019213/in/set-72157606971636794/ http://gawker.com/5042936/banksy-does-new-orleans http://animalnewyork.com/2008/09/banksy-targets-the-gray-ghost-in-new-orleans/ 6.3: Memorial service (obscured), Industrial Canal, Lower Ninth Ward, 29 August 2008. Image from BEARN (2008). 6.17, 6.18: Proposed Hurricane Katrina memorial. Sponsored by New Orleans Katrina Memorial Corporation. Memorial designed by Mathews International Corporation. http://www.neworleanskatrinamemorial.org. Accessed 2 September 2007. (now defunct) http://www.neworleanscoroner.org/katrina_memorial.html 6.21: Undated image of angel for Hurricane Katrina Memorial (unrealised). Courtesy of Kim Griffin. 6.24, 6.25: Film still from “New Orleans for Sale,” 2-cent (2007). http://www.2-cent.com/Home.html. http://www.courtneyegan.net/curating.html. 6.26, 6.27: Silhouettes of former residents, Lower Ninth Ward, August 2008. from BEARN (2008). 6.28, 6.29: Stills from Waiting for Godot, Creative Time Productions, November 2007. http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/chan/events.html 6.30: Design sketch for Hurricane Katrina collections, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. 11 February 2008. Courtesy of David Shayt. 6.31: Diary wall created by Elton Mabry, BW Cooper housing complex. 24 August 2008. Photograph by Jennifer Zdon. Image from MULLENER (2008). 7.1: User-generated map of all hurricane-strength storms (Saffir-Simpson scale Categories 1-5) to strike New Orleans, 1908-2008. Map generated 10 February 2010. Historical Hurricane Tracks, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Coastal Services Center. http://csc-s-maps-q.csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes/viewer.html. 7.2: Katrina diaspora mapped by FEMA assistance applications, 23 September 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/10/02/national/nationalspecial/20051002diaspora _graphic.html 7.3: Katrina diaspora mapped by US Postal Service change of address forms, 1 July 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/08/23/us/24katrina_graphic.html -368- 7.4: Political cartoon by Dwayne Powell depicting the Katrina diaspora. 2005. Image originally from http://cartoonbox.slate.com/static/5.html. No longer accessible. 7.5: Political cartoon by Stuart Carlson with waterline representing underlying problems in New Orleans. 2005. Image originally from http://cartoonbox.slate.com/static/5.html. No longer accessible. 7.6: Photograph of Angela Perkins outside the Convention Center. Photograph by Brett Duke. New Orleans Times-Picayune. 2 September 2005. http://www.nola.com/katrina/pages/headfile.ssf?/katrina/pages/090205/index.html 7.7, 7.8, 7.9: Forever New Orleans Advertising Campaign. Undated images. http://www.imc.wvu.edu/about/whatisimc.php. 7.13: Images from Forever New Orleans advertising campaign. 2007. From NEW ORLEANS TOURISM MARKETING CORPORATION (2007). http://issuu.com/neworleansonline/docs/notmc_2007_annual_report-1. 7.14: Political cartoon by Ben Sargent depicting New Orleans as Baghdad. 2007. Image originally from http://cartoonbox.slate.com/static/5.html. No longer accessible. 8.1: Montage of Hurricane Gustav, 25 August – 1 September 2008, National Weather Service Southern Region Headquarters. http://www.srh.noaa.gov/images/lix/GUSTAV08-track.gif 8.2: Hurricane Gustav (31 August 2008), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, NASA Earth Observatory. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=20410 8.3: Sign taken from light pole on Frenchmen Street, New Orleans, LA, 28 August 2008. Author unknown. 8.4: Erosion of Chandeleur Islands, Gulf of Mexico. 15 October 2004 and 16 September 2005. NASA Earth Observatory. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=15534 8.5: Chandeleur Islands before and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. 7 October 2001, 13 October 2004, and 16 September 2005. United States Geographical Survey, Gulf Coast Science Coordination, Hurricane Gustav Impact Assessment Activities. http://ngom.usgs.gov/gomsc/hurricane/gustav2008/ -369- (this page intentionally left blank)