Photographer

New Orleans

“I was born in this town and I have never wanted to live anywhere else because
here there is everything that really matters. Great food, music and people”,
says Smokey Johnson, Fats Domino’s drummer in the Fifties and one of
the pillars of New Orleans’s jazz, soul, R&B, funk and blues output.
If a hurricane had devastated the 80 percent of another town, perhaps a lot of
people would have decided to rebuild it all somewhere safer.
But in New Orleans Smokey Johnson’s words could be said by pretty much
anyone and with the same loving and loyal face with which he says them raising
his head to look up from his wheelchair. This is the city with the largest amount
of people in the whole country who were born and have died in the same place.
“The big easy” has gained another, sad, record: Between the end of August and
the beginning of September 2005 the worst natural disaster in the history of
the United States happened here.
Again, last April another disaster, the BP oil spill,  whose consequences are yet
to be known,  hit the same area. One fifth of the city’s population,
(125 thousand people, mostly African Americans) has never returned.
On the morning of the 28th of August, when Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a
mandatory evacuation for all the citizens, Omar Casimire, 62 years old, a local
painter, believed that his duty as a citizen was to stay and see what would have
happened. He took a camera, pens and a notebook and moved to a hotel in a
high area of town. On the morning of the 30th, when the water overflew from the
town levels, Casimire headed to the Convention Center, where about 15-20
thousand people had found shelter.
During the whole day he helped rescue from their houses anyone he met along
his way, an eight kilometer trip separating him from his final destination.
He spent the night in a church along with other 30 people. The next morning
Casimire reached the Convention Center riding on an oil company’s boat,
on a truck and on foot. “On the way I passed the Super dome –home of the Saints,
which last spring won the US league- and saw thousands of people lying outside.
When I arrived at the Convention Center and I found a similar crowd, with no
police or media covering the scene, I decided to take everyone’s signatures and
addresses and then sue the government”, he recalls. Without water and food and
with 40 degree temperature for three days and a half Casimire collected around
10 thousand signatures and contacts, many of which are now listed in a book
waiting to find an editor. The women and children who were raped and the smell
of death he witnessed during those days scarred him for life.

When on September 4^th the National Guard and the Air Force showed up and,
“dividing families” moved everyone to other states, Casimire arrived by helicopter
in Arkansas. “As soon as I got there I found out my mother, who had gotten there
before the hurricane, had stopped eating and had died”, he recalls. “Instead of
suing the government I decided then to put all of my strength into building a
memorial for all Katrina’s victims”. The Katrina National Memorial Park’s
foundation was created in 2007, since New Orleans does not have a memorial
for Katrina’s victims. It aims to become a museum and a research center focussing
on weather and history of hurricanes; also it will include an observatory and a park
offering learning and work to young people in the arts, crafts and landscape a
rchitecture. “Make your donation” asks its web page like the many projects launched
during these years in town. The 46 billion dollars of Federal Government’s grants
and the other billions in insurance couldn’t recuperate the 182 thousands of houses
destroyed by the hurricane nor re-establish the whole city infrastructure.
Neighborhoods such as the Ninth Ward, Gentilly or Lake View (among the most
destroyed by Katrina) after five years still lack schools, grocery stores,
libraries and public transportation.
The American population had no time to stop and take a look at the problem.
However NGO’s and volunteers from all over the country started showing up
in the area. In some cases one thing led to the other.
When Oji Alexander, a 36 year old New York project manager, found out that
Barnes & Noble had started a non profit organization of sustainable housing
development for low and middle income families in New Orleans, he thought it
was a great opportunity for him to help out. In 2008 he arrived as a volunteer
and some months later, due to the increasing amount of work “Project home again”
(PHA) started hiring personnel, he was offered a job which he accepted promptly.
In two years the organization has built 45 houses and it’s finishing another 25 for
two to six member families who have lost theirs because of the hurricane.
Such families are all middle class with a 32 to 70 thousand dollars annual income
per family. All they have to do is sustain themselves and pay for home and flood
insurance. Families can swap property with PHA, whatever the market value of
their houses, and receive the new houses for free.  All the 100 houses PHA wants
to build in the Gentilly neighborhood, where the first African American middle
class started to move in the fifties, are almost two meters high from the ground,
built by local architects and realized through mechanisms which make them 60%
more energy efficient than the local standard.

The Gentilly neighborhood is where the first African American middle class started
to move in during the fifties. Here PHA will build one hundred houses with the
highest standards in energy savings and recycling. They will be built with basements
elevated up to two meters from the ground according to the new local regulations.
Sustainability has become one of the most heard words in a town that, before
Katrina did not even have one “green building”. And Brad Pitt is the name most
associated to it. In its three years of existence his foundation “Make it right”  (MIR)
has built around 50 houses (plans on getting to 150), all equipped with solar panels
in the Lower Ninth Ward. “When Brad Pitt came to the neighborhood with the
intention of doing something there was nobody but me living in a FEMA’s trailer”,
explains Robert Green, 55 years old. “I gave him all the information I had about my
old neighbors and got in touch with all I could to explain ‘em the Project”.
Only people living in the area when Katrina hit can apply for it. According to the US
“Green Building Council” the MIR community was converted in the country’s largest
“green neighbourhood” Eve (72) and Brenda (64) Lewis’s house, some streets away,
used to be little more than an aluminium trailer, and is now a shrivelled and smashed
shell.  Like many houses in the neighbourhood, it still sports the indicatory X sign on
the front door, indicating FEMA’s ubiquitous house spot check sign inscribed days –
and in many cases weeks after the hurricane hit- indicating the number of people or
animals in need of rescue.
In showing us their house they have been living in since last March, their faces had the
excited gleam of two little kids at a funfair. The Federal Government awarded them
166 thousand dollars for damages suffered and with what remains of the 148 thousand
dollars they spent on the new house they will be able to re-pay seven years worth of their
home insurance premium, as well as the new solar panels on their roof.
In their words “the hurricane as been the best thing that could have happened”.
The chance to rebuild, not only a town but a whole community is undoubtedly what the
aftermath of Katrina has meant to many people. Katrina was also a chance for the bad
governance at local, state and federal level to be highlighted, as demonstrated by the
sentence carried out by the federal court which found that some of the worst flooding
cases following hurricane Katrina were caused by poor maintenance by the Army Corps
of Engineers of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet , a major navigation channel.  “Both the
construction and maintenance of the channels, canals and pipelines dredged by oil and
gas companies have led to a deterioration of the coastal ecosystem around New Orleans
and have removed natural vital storm surge protections such as the wetlands”, Amanda
Moore of the Nat. Wildlife Fed. doesn’t get tired of repeating this.

“The loss of wetlands along Louisiana’s coast made communities more vulnerable to
both Hurricane Katrina and the oil spill. In the case of Katrina, the state of the coast
made communities more vulnerable to storm surge.  In the case of the oil spill, the
state of the coast made the impact on wetlands even more of a devastating blow than
it would have already been if we had a healthy coast”.
The local wetlands are vanishing at an alarming rate – a football field every 38
minutes. The federal judge’s decision, though, considered it was the maintenance
rather than the construction of the canal itself, which led to widespread flooding,
therefore the liability applies only to damage around the Lower Ninth Ward of New
Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, east of the city and only sets up a precedent for the
80,000 people living in these areas and not for all the New Orleans.
Almost five years after Katrina only one part of the town’s levees have been rebuilt.
However the city does now have a systematized evacuation plan designed for those
who cannot move by themselves or do not have the means to, two conditions which
were not taken into account then.
Like in Camus’ “The Plague” a collective tragedy can bring out the best but also the
worst of humanity. Often, both at the same time. Katrina gave vent to some of the
deep seeded and in some cases deep running hatred, racial violence (at present the
Department of Justice is carrying out investigations for violations of civil rights and
murder in the days after Katrina involving police officers and civilians alike) and
discrimination ever-present in this most diverse of American cities. Last August
another federal court ruled that the Louisiana Road Home programs’ method of
calculating grants discriminated against African American homeowners because it
used pre-storm home values. Homes in largely ‘black’ neighborhoods tended to see
less than equivalent homes in largely white areas. The sentence, however failed to
impose a recalculation on the rebuilding grants given over four years to almost 128
thousand home owners. However, for the vast majority Katrina was an unqualified
catastrophe. Residents such as Henry, 69, a taxi driver from the town’s Ninth Ward,
who not only lost his sister in the hurricane but now lives with his 10 children paying
almost double in rent –with no contract- than before the hurricane. According to his
landlord the reason for this is the high expenses he had to bear to fix the building.
After paying the rent every month Henry only has 553 dollars left.
Robert Green’s new home has been built on the same ground as his old one, as the
three stairs he left as a memorial of what happened show.
To Mr. Green, who lost his mother and grand-daughter in Katrina, “it was a very bad
situation but we did all we could to turn it into a good thing and move on”.

The Lewis sisters’ house, some streets away, carrying the FEMA X left on its doorway a
few weeks after the storm the X police left during their house check weeks after Katrina.
The street is full of the signs and  according to the Greater New Orleans data center, a
non-profit research group, more that 50 thousand houses of the town –around 27%
of the total- are still “blighted”, the highest percentage of any other city in the country.
The disputes –often lost- with insurance companies, the lack or loss of ownership
documents – especially where inherited houses are concerned- and the spate of bogus
contractors that arrived after Katrina are all elements influencing significantly the so
called “blighted houses” phenomenon. Of the 1500 to 1800 thousand people who died
and of the 125 thousand (a fifth of the population at the beginning of 2005) who have
not returned, many were elderly, living in the Ninth Ward, thus turning this place once
cradle to the Big Easy’s music culture, into a veritable ghost neighborhood.
None but two of the city’s best loved local musicians could set up a project for the
reconstruction of the city’s music heritage and a meeting point for artists and sounds.
The “Musicians’ Village”, conceived by Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis -
a cornerstone of the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity (NOAHH) post-Katrina
rebuilding effort- is a community of 72 colorful houses where, since 2006, musicians
from all the city’s areas started to move. In its heart is now being erected the Ellis
Marsalis center for music, named in honor of Branford’s father, the New Orleans native
and legendary jazz pianist and teacher.
When the center will be complete, it aims at becoming both a school and a space for
concerts, will be open to the whole citizenry.
“I came here for the fantasy that the music we make could reflect a way of living”,
says Fredy Omar, 40 year old from Honduras, for 18 in town and the first musician in
standing up for the 350 hours volunteering in the building construction which
constitutes the minimum requirement to access the “village”. The idea that one’s art is
the extension of one’s community is deeply rooted also in Rashida Ferdinand, a 35 year
old visual artist, born in the Ninth Ward. Thanks to public grants Rashida could not only
rebuild but also enlarge her house after the hurricane. She then founded the
Lower Ninth Ward Council for Arts and Sustainability organization which organises
education programmes in schools and in public spaces –in a neighborhood where it’s
impossible to buy fresh products- also works to restore the primary school named after
the brightest start ever of the city music, Louis Armstrong.
The 1930’s building still carries announcements dating back to the beginning of 2005.
As she makes her way carefully across the ruined centre, Ferdinand points out what she
dreams of seeing in every corner of the building.

A ceramic workshop, a rehearsal room for the local groups “who don’t have where to
do it”, a contemporary art gallery and exhibit spaces dedicated to the history and
culture of the Lower 9th Ward further and, why not, a gift shop and a café.
If she found the grants, Ferdinand would immediately turn the gardens into botanical
gardens, farming area and community gardens. In the neighborhood, where around
1800 people live, there is only one public school open. Like the 90 percent of the city’s
public schools, Louis Armstrong is now part of the “Recovery School District” (RSD).
The Nueva Orleans RSD was created in 2003 to try to recover those schools
considered “academically unacceptable” by the state. By then not 10 percent of
New Orleans schools were deemed as “acceptable”. Before Katrina only five schools
belonging to the other 90 percent had opened under the new system, which includes
“normal” and “charter” schools (funded and run also by private or non profit entities,
from universities to philanthropists). The charters are undoubtedly the big news
that’s stirring up the local school system.
“Katrina was the chance to accelerate the change public school needed and to better
meet students needs”, says Kristen Lozada, Director of Operations at the New Orleans
College Prep, one of the 37 charters open in town.
“80 percent of our kids are two or more years behind academically. With the new
system we can put them together depending on their level and also accept students
coming from any area of town and not, like it used to be, only those living in this
neighbourhood”, she explains. “For many of these kids it is the first time ever they
actually see success”. Statistics seem to confirm it skating that 59 percent of the public
school students are now in schools that meet the state standards (in 2004 it was only
the 28 percent). Positive numbers are ascertained also in other key spheres of the town.
Tourism and crime. Concerning tourism, the proliferation of restaurants stands out,
which went from 800 before Katrina to the current 1100.
On the other side the number of crimes has decreased from around 29 thousand total in
2004 to almost 16 thousand last year. If it is true that there are less people living in town,
the same is true for the police forces, which have lost 3000 officials.
Far-off are the days of the hurricanes, when the arrival of the hurricane meant a break,
barbecues by candle-light and fear was not a common feeling. Since then everyone has
lost or gained something. But the will of being an active part of the city where
“every day is a party” like Fredy Omar says and where “anyone can be whatever he or she
wants to be”, like Ferdinand says has not changed and it is so strong and contagious
that not even Katrina seems to be able to destroy it.
Text by Elena Ledda