Aching for Lost Friends ...
By Susan Saulny for the New York Times and about our former neighborhood:
NEW ORLEANS — “Backwater.” Or “cypress swamp.” That is how antique maps of this city describe what eventually became its far eastern edge, an area that juts out from the rest of the old town, hugging Lake Pontchartrain, and home for centuries to little more than wildlife and trees.
This came as a surprise to me years ago, because by the time my family moved to eastern New Orleans in the early 1990s, it had long been drained and tamed and offered some of the most attractive undeveloped land anywhere in the city. More than anyone else, black middle-class families like mine flocked to it, architectural plans in hand, eager to escape the crime and congestion in the tight neighborhoods of older New Orleans. They wanted to build something new.
And they did, by the tens of thousands, creating the only major upscale black suburbs in the region, although a significant number of white and Vietnamese families lived there, too. If there was already a new New Orleans — in contrast to neighborhoods like the French Quarter — before Hurricane Katrina, then this was it: New Orleans East, as the locals call it, a collection of typically American suburbs for a most atypical American city, born sometime in the early 1970s.
About 20 minutes northeast of the French Quarter, in Lake Forest Estates, the house my family designed was bigger, better-built and higher than the one we left in our old neighborhood, so we thought we were safer, too.
We were wrong. During the storm, the Gulf of Mexico ended up in my parents’ living room. Deep water. Just poured right in to the first floor and stayed for a while.
Hurricane Katrina left most of New Orleans East in a shambles that way, although as a whole, it received less attention than needier black areas or equivalent white neighborhoods. In terms of size — both geographically and in population — it dwarfs the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview. It had close to 100,000 residents. As of May, about 30 percent of them were back.
Not everyone in the East was well off. And some areas did not flood. Just like the rest of the city, it had its ridges and natural defenses. But Hurricane Katrina still managed to shred the fabric of the black upper middle class living there, at a time when New Orleans desperately needs its black professionals to have a voice in the recovery process.
Some of our relatives and friends were too old and feeble to rebuild. They are gone from the city for good, and we ache for them. Others were too angry to stay, overcome by the levees’ unnecessary failures. We understand their need to move on.
Lake Forest Estates did not have power for five months after the storm. I remember the day the lights came on, though I was in New York City. My phone did not stop ringing with the kind of calls a person might expect from a third world country: “We got lights! We got electricity!”
Now things are moving, but slowly.
One of my parents’ favorite talk-over-the-fence neighbors, Michael Darnell, a lawyer, is not over the fence any more. (Not that there’s a fence any more, either.) Mr. Darnell has been unable to repair his house because of delays hampering the Road Home, the state grant program for people who lost their homes.
“From the perspective of African-American professionals, there’s still a question about where this city is going,” said Mr. Darnell, who is renting an apartment elsewhere in New Orleans. “I’m seeing a disintegration of what this community stood for, and people are still traumatized.”
The Currys, a warm, retired couple who lived two houses away, have moved to Baton Rouge. The minister who lives to our west has repaired his house and is back. The family to our east, who own a computer technology company, moved to Texas.
On a surface level, looking out across the street from my parents’ front door, it is hard to know that Hurricane Katrina ever visited. Every house in sight is redone, landscaped, pristine.
But the neighbors’ view of our house is not as nice, as my parents have put their energy since the storm into a new escape from southern Louisiana’s perils, a home in Forrest County, Miss., about two hours north. They do intend to reconstruct their New Orleans East house, perhaps by Thanksgiving.
People who knew New Orleans East only from the Interstate that cuts through it could easily miss its appeal. From the highway, one could not see the swampy beauty of its park space, or feel how the sky seemed bigger. And I still think some of the best crawfish in town is there, served in humble establishments along Haynes Boulevard.
But the giant Lake Forest Plaza, once a great mall, had badly deteriorated before the storm and was downright dangerous. Now it is mostly torn down, and there is not even a grocery store nearby. Increasingly, however, there is hope.
“All of my neighbors are back, and I see houses being started from the ground up,” said Carrie Phillips, a real estate agent in the area. “I’ve always thought, if New Orleans East can come back, then New Orleans is definitely coming back.”
NEW ORLEANS — “Backwater.” Or “cypress swamp.” That is how antique maps of this city describe what eventually became its far eastern edge, an area that juts out from the rest of the old town, hugging Lake Pontchartrain, and home for centuries to little more than wildlife and trees.
This came as a surprise to me years ago, because by the time my family moved to eastern New Orleans in the early 1990s, it had long been drained and tamed and offered some of the most attractive undeveloped land anywhere in the city. More than anyone else, black middle-class families like mine flocked to it, architectural plans in hand, eager to escape the crime and congestion in the tight neighborhoods of older New Orleans. They wanted to build something new.
And they did, by the tens of thousands, creating the only major upscale black suburbs in the region, although a significant number of white and Vietnamese families lived there, too. If there was already a new New Orleans — in contrast to neighborhoods like the French Quarter — before Hurricane Katrina, then this was it: New Orleans East, as the locals call it, a collection of typically American suburbs for a most atypical American city, born sometime in the early 1970s.
About 20 minutes northeast of the French Quarter, in Lake Forest Estates, the house my family designed was bigger, better-built and higher than the one we left in our old neighborhood, so we thought we were safer, too.
We were wrong. During the storm, the Gulf of Mexico ended up in my parents’ living room. Deep water. Just poured right in to the first floor and stayed for a while.
Hurricane Katrina left most of New Orleans East in a shambles that way, although as a whole, it received less attention than needier black areas or equivalent white neighborhoods. In terms of size — both geographically and in population — it dwarfs the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview. It had close to 100,000 residents. As of May, about 30 percent of them were back.
Not everyone in the East was well off. And some areas did not flood. Just like the rest of the city, it had its ridges and natural defenses. But Hurricane Katrina still managed to shred the fabric of the black upper middle class living there, at a time when New Orleans desperately needs its black professionals to have a voice in the recovery process.
Some of our relatives and friends were too old and feeble to rebuild. They are gone from the city for good, and we ache for them. Others were too angry to stay, overcome by the levees’ unnecessary failures. We understand their need to move on.
Lake Forest Estates did not have power for five months after the storm. I remember the day the lights came on, though I was in New York City. My phone did not stop ringing with the kind of calls a person might expect from a third world country: “We got lights! We got electricity!”
Now things are moving, but slowly.
One of my parents’ favorite talk-over-the-fence neighbors, Michael Darnell, a lawyer, is not over the fence any more. (Not that there’s a fence any more, either.) Mr. Darnell has been unable to repair his house because of delays hampering the Road Home, the state grant program for people who lost their homes.
“From the perspective of African-American professionals, there’s still a question about where this city is going,” said Mr. Darnell, who is renting an apartment elsewhere in New Orleans. “I’m seeing a disintegration of what this community stood for, and people are still traumatized.”
The Currys, a warm, retired couple who lived two houses away, have moved to Baton Rouge. The minister who lives to our west has repaired his house and is back. The family to our east, who own a computer technology company, moved to Texas.
On a surface level, looking out across the street from my parents’ front door, it is hard to know that Hurricane Katrina ever visited. Every house in sight is redone, landscaped, pristine.
But the neighbors’ view of our house is not as nice, as my parents have put their energy since the storm into a new escape from southern Louisiana’s perils, a home in Forrest County, Miss., about two hours north. They do intend to reconstruct their New Orleans East house, perhaps by Thanksgiving.
People who knew New Orleans East only from the Interstate that cuts through it could easily miss its appeal. From the highway, one could not see the swampy beauty of its park space, or feel how the sky seemed bigger. And I still think some of the best crawfish in town is there, served in humble establishments along Haynes Boulevard.
But the giant Lake Forest Plaza, once a great mall, had badly deteriorated before the storm and was downright dangerous. Now it is mostly torn down, and there is not even a grocery store nearby. Increasingly, however, there is hope.
“All of my neighbors are back, and I see houses being started from the ground up,” said Carrie Phillips, a real estate agent in the area. “I’ve always thought, if New Orleans East can come back, then New Orleans is definitely coming back.”
posted by John V at 9:18 AM
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