Culture after the Hurricanes: Rhetoric and Reinvention on the Gulf Coast

2. New Orleans Shotgun: A Historic Cultural Geography

44 NEW ORLEANS SHOTGUN A Historic Cultural Geography JAY D. EDWARDS How are priorities established for saving different kinds of houses and neighborhoods in New Orleans? This issue has risen to the forefront following Hurricane Katrina because in a triage-type environment in which there is limited funding, planning commissions and governmental bodies must make Solomonic decisions about what is to be saved and what is to be bulldozed. Something on the order of 130,000 of the city’s former black residents have failed to return (Browne-Dianis 2006; Livingston and Livingston 2007).1 Approximately 75 percent of those living in low-lying, flood-prone areas of New Orleans were African Americans. These renters and owners of flood-ravaged houses have been most severely impacted, first by the flooding itself and second by the mechanisms through which recovery funding has been doled out by insurance companies and by local, state, and federal governments (see Logan 2007; Tarhakah 2005; Gyan 2007, 1A; Dreier 2006; Bohrer 2007: 17A).2 In New Orleans, square miles of residential neighborhoods lie significantly abandoned three years after Katrina (fig. 2.1). Numerous commentators have remarked on the fact that New Orleans is a seriously bifurcated city— large portions appear to be entirely back to normal, while others have hardly begun the recovery process. This situation impels us to consider whether we have been paying sufficient attention to the causes of the geographical differences in the recovery process. A number of factors, including topography, ethnicity, and history, have combined to render substantial portions of the city less able to recover, leading to their effective near abandonment. While other factors unquestionably play a role in creating the patterns that influence recovery, the interactions among these three have not been explored as 45 New Orleans Shotgun profitably as is necessary. Another insufficiently explored causal factor arises from the effects of the widely shared scale of value that decision makers have applied to different neighborhoods and different building types. In New Orleans, interest groups are factionalized along geographical and racial lines. The removal of Jim Crow laws in the early 1960s eliminated barriers to African American advancement on many fronts but substantially intensified the process of residential segregation. Jim Crow laws did not originally limit racial mixing in neighborhood contexts. In the city’s American Sector in antebellum times, blacks and whites lived in close proximity in a system geographer Peirce Lewis (1976) has called “superblocks.”3 Following the unrest and racial riots of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , however, blacks were increasingly economically and geographically marginalized. Their neighborhoods were progressively pushed to the edges of the swamplands, resulting in sharper division lines by the late 1930s. Dryades Street and North Rampart–St. Claude Streets became boundaries between black and white residential zones. Today, according to Richard Campanella (2002), neighborhood segregation is largely economically driven . The principal indicator associated with African American residence in New Orleans has been topography (Campanella 2006: 303). Less expensive land was located in the city’s lower-lying areas, leading to the close association between patterns of largely working-class African American residence and elevation. Before Katrina, a high percentage of African Americans lived at or below sea level. Fig. 2.1. Rows of abandoned houses, Upper Ninth Ward, August 2008. Photo by author. 46 JAY D. EDWARDS This pattern is revealed through cartographic comparison. Fig. 2.2 shows a newly revised elevation survey based on Lidar data provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The familiar pattern of high ground along the old natural levees is obvious. The highest ground in the city flanks the banks of the Mississippi, an area sometimes referred to as the Island. Secondary high ground is found along the Esplanade Ridge, along Bayou St. John, and along the Metairie-Gentilly Ridge complex. In between are bowls of land lying below sea level, the remnants of old cypress swamplands that were drained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the city pushed outward from the Creole Faubourgs, people with low incomes moved into these low-lying areas because land was cheap.4 Much Fig. 2.2. Elevations of Orleans Parish, based on Lidar data supplied by FEMA. Sketch by Mary Lee Eggart. 47 New Orleans Shotgun of the old swampland experienced substantial subsidence as a consequence of the drying, rotting, and shrinking of what were previously peat-laden anaerobic soils with high organic...