Last week on Thursday I went to the 7th Ward Neighborhood Center for the first time. Their office is small, but they have a large backyard that they share with a community arts program called "The Porch," which made me rather nostalgic for ASP's porch (ASP's is bigger! :). I added a whole bunch of names and emails from sign-in sheets for various events to Constant Contact, an online service that lets you keep track of emails and send mass emails. That was boring. But then Sarah drove me around for a tour of the 7th Ward.
The 7th Ward has a higher vacancy rate (about 40%!) than Freret/Milan and is more racially homogeneous (re: black). I would guess it also has a higher poverty rate. The lots looked smaller--more dense--but many homes were indeed falling apart or demolished. Sarah gave me some of the history of the ward. It used to be home to large numbers of creoles (freed blacks from before Louisiana was purchased by the US and before slavery was abolished) and was an intellectual and cultural hub for creole culture in particular. But several factors contributed to the 7th Ward's decline: first, when slavery was abolished, creoles lost their distinctive class and suffered under Jim Crow laws along with more recently freed slaves. Then the city decided (in the 70's I believe) that the beautiful boulevard/shopping center/meeting place/center of town wasn't all that important and build a highway on it... good job. To put the bitter icing on the cake: Hurricane Katrina... yeah.
Then yesterday I again went to the 7th Ward (except this time I biked--almost 12 miles round trip! Thankfully it was a bit cooler for once). We drove around in the 9th Ward and New Orleans East--two dramatically different parts of town! The 9th ward was all over the news when the hurricane hit--it experienced some of the worst damage. The wealthier part of town is already more rebuilt, which Johnathon explained were generally the homes of black doctors, lawyers, etc. But it's apparently been a huge hassle finding the owners of many of the now vacant lots on the other side of town--many have died/moved away/no one knows who owns it to even look for them.
You might also have seen the Brad Pitt "green" houses that have been built there--they are kind of funky looking, with solar panels and lots of weird geometric shapes, which has been kind of controversial given how much New Orleans tends to value it's traditional architecture. There were about 7-8 of them built, surrounded by several blocks of empty lots on all sides, which was kind of eerie. I remember when I was looking for an internship, Susan's contact down here in New Orleans suggested that I NOT work for that organization--"I dunno -what- they're doing over there!" he said. We also drove by Musician's Village, built by Habitat--they looked like typical Habitat houses, which is closer to the typical home design down here (yay Habitat!). I'd like to volunteer to build there on the weekends, but unfortunately it's hard to get there without a car.
New Orleans East is part of Orleans Parish, but much more suburban. It's interesting in that on one side of town, there is a bunch of smallish, run down Section 8 housing ("the hood" as Johnathan called it) and then on the other side are these gorgeous homes like I'd see in some of the wealthier suburbs back home (except with palm trees!). The population there is more mixed--black and Vietnamese. Apparently those Asians really love their fireworks on the 4th of July, I was told. Johnathan ended up giving us a sort of geographical tour of his life--he's now living in New Orleans East, and we also saw the home where he grew up, still standing on the nicer side of 9th Ward.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the make-up of the city--I'm getting there, but it's a lot to take in.
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