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A Fresh Look for New Orleans' Working-Class Neighborhoods
July 8, 2009
by Emilie BahrJust downriver from the French Quarter—New Orleans’ oldest and most famous district—the wrought iron balconies and handsome Creole townhouses give way to a scruffier set of neighborhoods that are getting lots of attention lately thanks to new development plans.
The Faubourg Marigny and Bywater districts in recent years have become the city’s new havens of bohemia—places where artists, musicians and eccentrics thrived after the French Quarter became overrun with tourists (many of them in search of 3-for-1 beer specials) and wealthy folks.
Now, locals—and good music—are more likely to be found at one of the bars in the Marigny than along bead-laden Bourbon Street.
Hurricane Katrina—the 2005 storm that went down as one of the deadliest in U.S. history—only strengthened the two neighborhoods’ appeal. Like the French Quater, they escaped serious flooding due to their strategic location along the Mississippi River, on some of the city’s highest ground. Today, these traditionally working-class neighborhoods are also the site for an ambitious project set to break ground in the fall that will transform much of the riverfront into a park. Not surprisingly, housing values have skyrocketed and investors are busy buying up the peeling shotgun structures that can still be had at bargain prices.
Running just north of these two neighborhoods is St. Claude Avenue—a stark dividing line between areas of increasing vibrancy and those where the poverty is more heavily entrenched and the flood damage, even four years after Katrina, pronounced. St. Claude today is a patchwork of grand and ramshackle buildings, many of them boarded up and abandoned or donning signs advertising payday loan outlets and fast-food joints. Followed for a few miles, St. Claude leads into the city’s infamous Lower Ninth Ward.
But the avenue is staging a comeback. It is already home to a burgeoning arts community, with galleries and music venues cropping up with regularity alongside funky standards with names like Sweet Lorraine’s and Saturn Bar.
This spring, a group of MIT urban planning students adopted the avenue, tasked with developing a plan for revitalization. In May, they presented their findings at a former St. Claude public school that has been converted into artists’ studios and a performance space.
There is also talk of bringing the city’s iconic streetcar back to the avenue, which was once home to one of 26 streetcar lines that crisscrossed the city at the peak of service in the mid-1920s. Plans to extend the streetcar to St. Claude Ave. have been in the works since the late 1990s, but floundered after funding for the project proved elusive. Transit officials and streetcar advocates are now optimistic that the plan can be realized with the help of public transit funding included in the federal stimulus package. The proposed extension is dubbed Desire, after the streetcar line that once ran parallel to St. Claude and lent its name to Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire.
Among the other players agitating for the St. Claude transformation is developer Pres Kabacoff, who intends to soon begin construction on a multi-million dollar “Healing Center” to be housed in a former furniture store along the avenue. The multi-purpose center will include such signature urban amenities as a yoga studio, food co-op, organic café, and meditation space. An athletic 60-something who sports a silver goatee, Kabacoff, through his firm, was responsible in the early 1980s for the redevelopment of the city’s Warehouse District, then a mishmash of discarded one-time manufacturing facilities, into the high-end condos and apartments of today.
Kabacoff’s current venture, undertaken with his voodoo priestess girlfriend, has garnered widespread praise. Still, there are those who wonder how they figure in to the grand plans being hatched in their midst. The concerns are perhaps most pronounced among the residents of the mostly poor, African-American neighborhoods on the northern side of St. Claude.
As Reggie Lawson, an African-American resident of a nearby neighborhood told me: “You can’t force evolution. They want coffee shops and antique boutiques and on and on and on. That’s not the history of the neighborhood.”
His concerns might be exaggerated, but they speak to an ongoing challenge among myriad ones confronting New Orleans as it continues to rebound from Katrina: balancing the new opportunities that stand to benefit the city as a whole with the interests of those that help make it so special in the first place.
Emilie Bahr is a guest blogger to AmericasQuarterly.org. She is a staff writer at New Orleans CityBusiness.
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Thirty Pieces
First let me say that, as a resident of the Marigny, I'm not a newbie who moved here 'a few years ago'. I've run a gallery here for a decade, and lived in the Bywater for many years before that. Just like a lot of my neighbors. Sean Cummings Atlantic Monthly quote that we should "import artists" to New Orleans is a horrible insult to those who live and work here, as many have for generations. As a member of the St Claude Art District, I find it ludicrous that a wealthy real estate kid takes it upon himself to 'reinvent' an entire art community that's older than he is. Kabacoff's "St Claude Community Center", an empty room in the 5th district police station house, the empty old Universal Furiture Building, has only joined SCADNOLA in recent months, yet they claim to be our Community Center, if in name alone. I wonder where they were when the neighbors & I were running the Crips Gang activities out of that same building? Starbucks? Finally, I would direct you to M. Styborski's article about Sean Cummings and his dad playing property grab with realestate well within the area to be improved by Cummings directorship of New Orleans Building Corp. These same tactics, using public office to enrich properties and put them in your relaitvies names, has just failed as a viable plan for Bil Jefferson and his wife. Will Sean & Dad fair much better? We all want to see improvements in our city, Emilie. I'd love a green space and park, down by the river. But at the price of having the neighborhhod bled white by the greed of another 'developer politician', and certainly not by having some rich kid's idea of cool rammed down my throat. Nice article anyway, Emilie, even though you're supporting carpet baggers and don't know which way the river flows. It was nice and fluffy. I hope you were well paid. Thirty pieces of silver is still the going rate, right?
Hey Lord David, Thanks for
Hey Lord David,
Thanks for your thoughts. The thing is, I didn't take a stance for or against any of the projects planned here. All this was intended to do was call attention to an area of the city that is largely unknown to people who don't live here, to lay out what's going on there and to highlight some of the very conflicts you mention these grand plans present.
Emilie
Neighborhood Conflict
Thanks for responding, Emilie; I suggest you read the articles linked here, including the following comment threads on each, to get a very real idea about 'the conflict' and what the local residents actually think of this guy. You may be stunned. best regards, Lord David http://humidcity.com/?p=2363 http://humidcity.com/?p=2326
Revitalization of a N.O. corridor and neighborhoods
The enthusiasm among most Bywater residents is very high for both private and public investments coming our way--a $30 million riverfront park along most of Bywater's Mississippi River border, the proposed expansion of NOCCA along Press St. and the Bywater riverfront, the promise of a mixed use facility at the Naval Support Activity Base, not to mention the
flurry of home owner investment in the restoration of beautiful
shotgun houses and even new home construction.
As controversial as Pres may be, let's not overlook the positive things he's done
for this area. His Bywater Art Lofts provide 30 beautiful,
affordable living spaces exclusively for artists, replacing
a blighted and abandoned factory.
He's also working hard to get the streetcar line
down St. Claude Ave. This will
increase the walkability of the adjacent neighborhoods and
draw much needed commercial services to the St. Claude
corridor.
By the way, according to a
near-lifetime resident and local historian, Bywater is known
as the Bohemian Bosom of the city.
Thanks for correcting my
Thanks for correcting my navigational naiveté. That was a glaring oversight on my part and I appreciate you reading (and commenting). You’ll see the river’s trajectory has been corrected in the first sentence.
As for the remarks on Kabacoff's vision -- I think this is essentially the point of this post: the conflict between his new urbanist plans for the area and the (sometimes disparate) desires of the surrounding communities. It's the same sort of tension that's bubbled up time and again in New Orleans and in just about every other major city I can think of.
Also, I never intended to imply that locals don't spend time in the French Quarter – they do. But I think it is safe to say that the Quarter is not nearly the center of bohemian life in the city that it once was. I, a staff writer with a steady paycheck, for one, could not afford to live there. And I also feel comfortable asserting that you're not nearly as likely to find locals on Bourbon as you are on, say, Frenchmen Street.
Emilie
Kabacoff
I can't stand this guy and I live in the Bywater. Once he's done with us no one will be able to afford a closet let alone a house, let alone rent an apartment. Because of people like him and the trust fund non-productive class that has moved here we are paying rents that are about on par with Manhattan - but for rat infested, falling down houses with wiring from the nineteenth century. I hope every single one of his projects FAIL and I will dedicate my LIFE to seeing it that way.
Kabacoff
Right on brother, the Bywater aint no suburb!!
Upriver? No, Downriver.
Your geographic ignorance of our city-- and the apparent laziness that's kept you from gaining even casual familiarity with such fundamentals as IN WHICH DIRECTION THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLOWS-- are signposts to the general wrongheadedness displayed throughout this article.
Kabacoff is a gentrification-mad menace, and silly fluff pieces from people who don't do their homework are just part of the problem.
furthermore, plenty of us locals can be found on Bourbon St (& everywhere else in the Quarter)... if one knows where to look.
I think you mean "down river"
The rest of this article is about as accurate as the first sentence.
My suggestion: if you're going to write about New Orleans, try to at least get the basic facts correct. Your ignorance is appalling.
The upper ninth is DOWN RIVER from the Quarter
& Kabacoff is a gentrification-mad menace
Downriver
That's downriver, dear, in the general direction of the Gulf.