unfathomable
city
A New Orleans Atlas
being an atlas in twenty-two maps and nearly that many essays about the city that is at the bottom of the mississippi drainage of the interior of the north american continent and at the top of the gulf of mexico and at the center of the american unconscious, the small mortal city that is the immortal wellspring of much popular music around the world, a city not quite three hundred years old, half of that an era of slavery, all of that an era of striving for freedom; of segregation and mixing; of crime and corruption in secret and of the confident collective celebration in the streets that is their opposite; of wildlife flying over and oil pipelines cutting through; of shared recollection and complicated stories, not all of them in black and white; of various heroines, some heroes; of unfinished tasks and interesting possibilities; a city surrounded by water but by no means an island and resting on the pillowy softness of river-delivered muck, mud and, sometimes the hard ground of disputed memory; to say nothing of crawfish boils and second line parades and the sweet loud sound of brass bands
by
rebecca solnit and rebecca snedeker
with designer Lia Tjandra
editor at-large Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
cartographers Richard Campanella Ben Pease Jakob Rosenzweig Molly Roy Shizue Seigel
and principal artist Alison Pebworth
artists
writers
researchers
Luis Cruz Azaceta Jacqueline Bishop Willie Birch Bette Burgoyne Catherine Burke Hannah Chalew Shawn Hall Katie Holten Pableâux Johnson Kourtney Keller Deborah Luster Bunny Matthews Brandan Odums Megan Roniger Casey Ruble Jonathan Traviesa Monique Verdin Lewis Watts
Eve Abrams Garnette Cadogan Richard Campanella Evan Casper-Futterman Joel Dinerstein Lolis Eric Elie Khaled Hegazzi Antonia Juhasz Dana Logsdon Dawn Logsdon Lydia Pelot-Hobbs Nathaniel Rich Maurice Carlos Ruffin Billy Sothern Shirley Thompson Monique Verdin Andy Young
Alana Ackerman Amanda Beerens Matthew Carney Audrey Cropp Tara Foster Matthew Hendrickson Christine Horn Lauren Lastrapes Lillian McNee
university of california press
Berkeley Los Angeles London
contents
introduction Sinking In and Reaching Out ... 1
map 1. A City in Time: Nouvelle-Orléans over 300 ... 13 How New Orleans Happened, by Richard Campanella University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2013 by the Regents of the Universitiy of California Illustrations on half title and title page by Alison Pedworth Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [To come] Designer and compositor: Lia Tjandra Cartographers: Shizue Seigel, Penjamin Pease, Molly Roy, Jakob Rozenweig Text: Hoefler Text Display: Hoefler Titling, Akzidenz Grotesk Printer and binder: QuaLibre Manufactured in China 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
map 2. Ebb and Flow: Migrations of the Houma, Erosions of the Coast ... 19 Southward into the Vanishing Lands, by Monique Verdin
map 3. Stationary Revelations: Sites of Contemplation and Delight ... 25 On a Strange Island, by Billy Sothern
map 4. People Who ... 38
Here They Come, There They Go, by Lolis Eric Elie map 5. Moves, Remains: Hiding and Seeking the Dead ... 43 Bodies, by Nathaniel Rich map 6. Oil and Water: Extracting Petroleum, Exterminating Nature ... 50 When They Set the Sea on Fire, by Antonia Juhasz map 7. Of Levees and Prisons: Failures of Containment, Surges of Freedom ... 55
Lockdown Louisiana, by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs map 8. Civil Rights and Lemon Ice: Three Lives in the Old City ... 64 The Presence of the Past, by Dana Logsdon and Dawn Logsdon map 9. Sugar Heaven and Sugar Hell: Pleasures and Brutalities of a Commodity ... 67 No Sweetness Is Light, by Shirley Thompson map 10. ¡Bananas! ... 73 Fruits’ Fortunes at the Gate of the Tropics, by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
map 11. Hot and Steamy: Selling Seafood, Selling Sex ... 82 Salacious and Crustaceous, by Evan Casper-Futterman map 12. The Mississippi Is (Not) the Nile: Arab New Orleans, Real and Imagined ... 88 The Ibis-Headed God of New Orleans, by Khaled Hegazzi and Andy Young
map 13. The Line-Up: Live Oak Corridors and Carnival
Parade Routes ... 94 Sentinels and Celebrants, by Eve Abrams ... 91 map 14. Repercussions: Rhythm and Resistance across the Atlantic ... 100 “It Enriches My Spirit to Be Linked to Such a Deep and Far-Reaching Piece of What This Universe Is,” a Conversation with Herreast Harrison and Donald Harrison Jr. map 15. Thirty-Nine Sundays: The Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs Take It to the Streets ... 107 Rollin’ Wid It, by Joel Dinerstein map 16. Bass Lines: Deep Sounds and Soils ... 116 The Floating Cushion, George Porter Jr. on the City’s Low End map 17. Where Dey At: Bounce Calls Up a Vanished City ... 121 A Home in Song, by Garnette Cadogan map 18. Snakes and Ladders: What Rose Up, What Fell Down During Hurricane Katrina ... 127 Nothing Was Foreordained, by Rebecca Solnit map 19. St. Claude Avenue: Loss and Recovery on an Inner-City Artery ... 133 The Beginning of This Road, by Maurice Carlos Ruffin map 20. Juju and Cuckoo: Taking Care of Crazy ... 142 Holding It Together, Falling Apart, by Rebecca Snedeker map 21. Lead and Lies: Mouths Full of Poison ... 147 Charting the Terrirories of Untruth, by Rebecca Solnit map 22. Waterland ... 154 The Cement Lilypad, by Rebecca Snedeker
acknowledgments ... 151 contributors ... 155
introduction
sinking in and reaching out rebecca snedeker and rebecca solnit
“Fathom” is an Old English word that meant outstretched arms and an embrace by those arms. It came to mean a measurement of about 6 feet, the width a man’s arms could reach, as well as the embrace of an idea. To fathom is to understand. Sailors kept the word in circulation as a measurement of depth, and it survives into the present day mostly as a negative, as unfathomable, the water so deep its depths cannot be plumbed, the phenomenon that cannot be fully grasped. New Orleans is all kinds of unfathomable, a city of amorphous boundaries, where land is forever turning into water, water devours land, and a thousand degrees of marshy, muddy, oozing in-between exist; where lines that elsewhere seem firmly drawn are blurry; where whatever you say requires more elaboration; where most rules are full of exceptions the way most land here is full of water. A fathom was an embrace, but you can put your arms around a mystery, and maybe you truly love something only by granting it its full complexity, its unknowability. When you realize you could spend your whole life trying to understand someone or some place, this is love. And maybe love is always an attempt to embrace what cannot be fathomed and to embrace the mystery of it, too. In a sense, every place is unfathomable, infinite, impossible to describe, because it exists in innumerable versions, because no two people live in quite the same city but live side by side in parallel universes that may or may not intersect, because the minute you map it the map becomes obsolete, because the place is constantly arising and decaying. Cincinnati has its enigmas and Albuquerque its contradictions, but New Orleans is particularly rich in these things. We have mapped New Orleans and its surroundings twenty-two times, sometimes with two or more subjects per map, but we have not drained the well with these few bucketloads. Instead, we hope we have indicated how rich and various, how inexhaustible is this place, and any place, if you look at it, directly and through books, conversations, maps, photographs, dreams, and desires. We never intended to make a comprehensive guide to New Orleans, only a provocation, an invitation for you to argue with our versions, to take them further, to go map on your own, in your head or online or on paper, whether you map this city or your own region from scratch. You can row across unfathomable waters.
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D issolving D efinitions
There are so many ways to define New Orleans, and none of them can contain it. Trying to define New Orleans is like trying to hold water in your hands, like trying to walk through a wetland, like trying to draw a coastline that keeps shifting. Here, all that is solid dissolves into water, and much of it seems to exist in an amorphous state of muddiness and murkiness. You can’t hold it, but it sticks to you. Southern Louisiana was built up over millennia as the Mississippi River continually laid down sediment, so that even what is solid was dissolved into and delivered by water and even what is local came from afar. New Orleans, founded in 1718 and drenched in the past, might be one of the oldest places in the United States in terms of culture and memory, but geologically it is part of the youngest, a region of soft alluvial soil that turns to mud, melts away, and erodes into the surrounding waters, a land so watery that bodies have to be buried aboveground, and those bodies in their marble tombs still get snatched away by floodwaters from time to time (as Nathaniel Rich describes in his essay “Bodies”). It’s newborn mud through which the last dinosaurs, the alligators, creep. All around New Orleans is a landscape abundant with migratory birds—ibises, egrets, gulls, terns, and pelicans, to name only a few of the hundreds of species—with possums, armadillos, poisonous copperheads and cottonmouths (or water moccasins); with oysters, crawfish, crabs, and shrimp; and now with nitrates washed downstream from farms in the heartland and the toxic byproducts of petroleum production, which always ooze and drift even when they don’t spill. A medical expert once described the difficulty of surgery on the liver, a soft, fragile organ that can shred in your hands and rip with every stitch. The heart is a hard lump of muscle, but the liver is delicate spongy tissue. Manhattan is a rocky island, San Francisco is as solid and situated at the end of a long peninsula; those cities are as clearly defined as a fist or a heart. But think of New Orleans as a liver, an expanse of soggy land doing some of what a liver does, filtering poisons, keeping the body going, necessary to survival and infinitely fragile, hard to pull out of context, and nowadays deteriorating from more poison than it can absorb, including the ongoing toxins of the petroleum industry and the colossal overdose delivered by the 2010 BP blowout (whose devastation Antonia Juhasz describes in her essay “When They Set the Sea on Fire”). To draw New Orleans, what systems should you include? The Mississippi River drainage extends over much of the North American interior up into Canada, so New Orleans perches at the southern tip of that vast system. But it’s not just the bottom of the north. It’s the top of the south, sometimes said to be the northernmost city of the Caribbean. It is part of that region in many ways—in climate, in culture, in the origin of many of its residents in West Africa, in music (which is part of the subject matter of the map “Repercussions: Rhythm and Resistance across the Atlantic”). New Orleans belongs to the Catholic world of Carnival, a realm that stretches from remnant parts of southern Europe through the Caribbean and Latin America (and parade routes of New Orleans are celebrated in the map called “The Line-Up”). All these places still celebrate the several weeks of Carnival, the festival American outsiders know by the name of its last day, the day before Lent begins: Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras. From the waters south of Louisiana the Gulf Stream emerges, the flow of warm water that keeps the North Atlantic world all the way up to the edge of the Arctic far warmer than the latitudes would otherwise allow. New Orleans is tiny and it is vast.
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It is hard to explain and understand its geography. It is not quite at the bottom of the Mississippi, not quite on the Gulf of Mexico, a crescent of high ground along the river that early explorers looking for a place to start a colony missed repeatedly, once they’d located the elusive mouth of the Mississippi. Here, the river that everyone knows flows south is actually flowing more or less west-east along the southern edge of the city, though what is below it is called the West Bank. The river curves and bends and loops so that direction itself is uncertain, and there are parts of the Mississippi abutting New Orleans that flow north. Above the city is more water, in Lake Pontchartrain, which isn’t a lake but a vast brackish estuary. All around, the land is soft and marshy. This is not quite the Mississippi Delta, “the land where the blues began,” but something below it where jazz and funk began, where American cultural immortality launched itself and still sings all night if it’s not busy in bed. But the region itself is vanishing. Coastal southern Louisiana, as Monique Verdin points out in her essay “Southward into the[?] Vanishing Lands,” is one of the fastest-eroding coastlines on earth. More than an acre of land is lost every hour, about 25 to 35 square miles a year. Nearly 2,000 square miles have already vanished in less than a century. Normally a chunk that size doesn’t disappear without fanfare, but this region of wetlands and backwoods and people who are as at home on water as on land remains out of sight. This land disappears because of the intervention of industry, which channels the river and limits its sediment flows, carves up the Gulf of Mexico into oil and gas leases, and draws straight lines for ships and pipes through the soft wetlands into which saltwater flows, ripping and shredding the land into nonexistence. D rawing Lines
This soft, shifting landscape poses a specifically cartographic problem, because mapmakers ordinarily draw clear lines and delineate coherent bodies: this is land, this is water. That is the most basic distinction in cartography. On the Louisiana coast, the land is so pervaded with water that it’s both or neither. As we created this atlas, we asked again and again whether we should show the old coastline before the colossal erosion of recent times and how we should indicate land in the process of disappearing and the stuff that is neither solid nor liquid. The lines blur and melt. And if conventional maps make the land here more solid and stable than it often is, they tend to make the waters of the Gulf look more like pristine open waters than they actually are. Specialized maps show the same region as a checkerboard of oil and gas leases: this aquatic space has all been carved up as extractive-industry real estate. Other maps show the oil platforms and other industrial apparatus, and still other maps—including “Oil and Water” in this volume—show how many pipelines crisscross the sea here. These actual lines destroy this place: the straight lines cut for oil and gas pipelines open up space for water to move faster and harder than it does in meanders, and the water works like a saw to cut away land. Native American activist and bayou dweller Rosina Philippe once took one of us through open water channels 30 feet wide and more between low islands of grass and described the landscape as it had been in her father’s time: a forested place where you could jump across the channels. A world is being lost. A bigger straight line, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, cut to let ships come into New Orleans from the Gulf without bothering to follow the meanders of
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the river, was nicknamed the Hurricane Highway. Its saltwater killed the swamp cypress groves that buffered the city from hurricanes and brought storm surges from the open ocean that devastated the Lower Ninth Ward. The Lower Ninth itself and New Orleans East were isolated from the central city by the Industrial Canal, completed in 1923, which was designed to facilitate shipping between Lake Pontchartrain and the river. New Orleans itself is a place of bad boundaries, one where the Orleans Parish boundaries don’t match the city limits and neither quite define the cultural area. As Richard Campanella’s map and essay demonstrate, the early city arose on the arc of high ground—the Crescent City’s “sliver by the river”—and then spread into lowlands and drained wetlands, some of which has sunk below sea level and continues to sink asthe water beneath and within it is pumped out. To understand this small city has required this atlas to venture outward, to the whole state to understand the problems of both water management and incarceration (in the map “Of Levees and Prisons”) and into the Gulf of Mexico to look at the oil industry there. Perhaps because the city is such a watery place, it is unbounded, or its boundaries are literally fluid. New Orleans’s fate is tied to the river that gathers waters from afar, to the Gulf, and to the whole Caribbean, even to the Atlantic, as various maps here testify. There are firm boundaries between uptown and downtown, and the Seventh Ward has different dance steps than the Ninth, but neat lines don’t define it. There is, along with the better-known poetry of the streets named after the nine muses and Desire and Piety and Sister streets, a short street in New Orleans named Mystery. Much of what you can say about this place you can also contradict. New Orleans is a city of firm racial divides and enthusiastic racial mixing, a city that contains both a poverty that can be measured by statistics and an extraordinary wealth of festivity and memory that cannot be quantified, a city that holds tremendous violence and what might be the opposite of violence: collective, confident, urban rejoicing in public, over and over again, in parades and music and greetings from strangers on the street. It is an insular city through which several million visitors stream every year; strangers fuel the principal economy of this deep-rooted place, along with its port, which is the thirteenth largest in the United States by value of cargo. New Orleans is an anomaly. Like San Francisco, it is an anti-America in which America invents itself, a place whose eccentric and libertine behavior and innovation have been deplored but also desired and often emulated. It’s a small, parochial city that connects the vast interior of North America drained by the Mississippi to the Caribbean–Latin American south and has shaped much of the music now listened to around the world. New Orleans is unfathomable, endless, protean, immortal, and fragile. U nfolding the Map
There are two endangered phenomena at the very center of Unfathomable City. The future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is deeply uncertain. And paper maps themselves seem to be fading from everyday use and losing status as a valuable technology, half a millennium after their rise. When President Barack Obama came to New Orleans on a campaign stop in 2012, he mentioned driving to the city as a young man and joked about unfolding a paper map, about the rustling of paper. People laughed as though he were Henry Ford talking about hitching up
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horses or pitching manure. Most people don’t use paper maps anymore. Instead, they use digital data devices—their smartphones, GPS devices that issue voice commands, or various versions of MapQuest and Google maps that generate specific directions. The problem with these technologies is that though they generally help get you where you’re going, that’s all they do. With a paper map, you take charge; with these other means, you take orders and don’t learn your way around, any more than you learn math by using a calculator. A map shows countless possible routes; a computer-generated itinerary shows one. Using the new navigational aids, you remain dependent, and your trajectory requires obedience to the technology— some GPS devices literally dictate voice commands you are meant to obey. When you navigate with a paper map, tracing your own route rather than having it issued as a line, a list, or a set of commands, you incrementally learn the lay of the land. Eventually maps become unnecessary, or, rather, the map has migrated inside your head. The map becomes obsolete as you become oriented. The map is then no longer on paper in front of you but inside you; many maps are, as you contain knowledge of many kinds of history and community in one place. You no longer need help navigating but can offer it. You become a map, an atlas, a guide, a person who has absorbed maps, or who needs no map intermediaries because you know the place and the many ways to get here from there. You know where you are, which may become an increasingly rare thing in an era of digital intervention. As Unfathomable City’s editor-at-large, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, put it in his Harper’s essay on cartography in the contemporary world, these new technologies of navigation don’t do “what maps are best at: providing context. Beyond simply getting us from one appointment to another, old-fashioned maps express what the geographer . . . Yi-Fu Tuan calls topophilia, our innate love of place, often shaped by sense and by memories.” Jelly-Schapiro quotes the German scholar Julia Frankenstein, who concludes that “the more we rely on technology to find our way, the less we build up our cognitive maps.” In other words, when you use the old-fashioned technology of paper maps, you build up the even more ancient resources of memory, mind, and spatial imagination—and you do it without monthly payments to a large corporation to gain access, or electricity, or a screen on which to read directions. Another aspect of the old maps to consider is beauty: many online maps have a cheerfully ugly aesthetic, one unlikely to provoke the wonder or craving of the handsome maps of yore; and what appears on screens may not inspire contemplation the way an atlas can. People do study the aerial photographs that function as online maps, and digital mapping has valuable roles to play in environmental defense, community mapping, and countermapping—the making of maps as acts of resistance to the powers that be. They have also extended some kinds of access to geographical information. But paper maps offer other strengths and glories— and beauties. Curiously, too, though the ephemerality of paper is often noted, there are hosts of maps and atlases half a millennium old; most digital maps are intended to be ephemeral, called up for a particular purpose, their pixels consigned to the past as soon as the use is over. So paper maps can offer beauty; they can also provide an edge on immortality; they never go blank; and the well-made ones are reliable in ways that aren’t always true of digital maps. One stormy summer evening when Jelly-Schapiro and this atlas’s two principal editors were on a paddleboat on the
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Mississippi, one of us glanced at our location via smartphone. The device was not programmed to admit the possibility that we were boating rather than driving, so the dot showing where we were remained adamantly onshore. But we knew where we were, and we could’ve found it on a paper map. Modern road maps, like online maps, show highways, roads, and streets and generally don’t show cemeteries, bird migrations, histories, economies, ethnic groups, parade routes, and the thousand other things that can be mapped and have been mapped in old atlases and are, to some extent, in Unfathomable City. President Obama’s old map, issued by a gas station or an auto association, likely as not, was made to get you around but not to tell you where you are and who lives there. There are things that cannot be mapped, but much of what moves through and stays put in this world can be. And should be. A great map should stir up wonder and curiosity, prompt revelation, and deepen orientation. It should make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. N orth, S outh, East, W est
rebecca solnit: There are so many kinds of unfathomable. One is what will come of a chance encounter or grow out of a first acquaintance. My friend Sam Green and I spent Easter weekend of 2006 exploring New Orleans, a city still in ruins, still ghostly, after Hurricane Katrina six months before. It looked as though the storm had happened yesterday in much of the city—the water was gone, but the wreckage was largely untouched. There were places without street lights and street signs, boats and cars tossed by the waters still sitting where they’d landed, and whole neighborhoods still depopulated. The spray-paint markings left by the search-and-rescue teams—the big X with a date, an investigator’s ID, and the results of the investigation in the quadrants—were on the façades of most of the houses, like prison tattoos. It was a ghost town, a town of missing people, one in which bodies were still being found and one to which many evacuees had yet to return. Some never would: the 2010 census revealed a city with 29 percent fewer people than in 2000 (343,829 versus 484,674). Other areas of the city were untouched and beautiful, the old parts of the city on higher ground, where flowers bloomed and shrubs flourished, and only a blue tarp on a roof here and there bore witness to what had passed over the city. The wooden houses with their lacy black ironwork balconies and pillared porches were painted vivid colors and bedecked with Mardi Gras beads, flags, and banners; the foliage was lush; the air was soft. At night, City Park was full of Latino laborers camping out and cooking over fires that you could see in the darkness; these were the hardworking newcomers who by day were moving quickly to gut and rebuild houses. Sam had arranged to meet a friend of a friend, Rebecca Snedeker, the first native New Orleanian we would meet with, a woman who had lost nearly everything she owned in the deluge and had come back to the abandoned city over Christmas. She sat with us in the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone on Royal and Bienville streets in the Quarter. She told me afterward how traumatized she’d been, but she seemed cordial, sparkling, and gracious. Before the drinks were done, this friend of a friend invited me to stay with her if I came back. I came back, because the untold stories and misrepresentations of the storm drew me in, and I asked to stay with Snedeker for a week in early 2007. She was living in a small cottage on Bayou St. John near City Park, and it was the first of several stays on her sofabed. In those close quarters, I was going to be either an
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awkward intruder or a good friend, and thankfully for my work and my life, it was the latter. She became my principal New Orleans host, guide, and supporter as I tried to make my own sense of what had happened, in magazine essays, in my book A Paradise Built in Hell, and through my friend A.C. Thompson’s investigations of post-Katrina crimes. But as I kept coming back, the city became so much more than the storm and the heroic and malignant behaviors of its aftermath. I learned about and danced in second line parades, checked out the several-week Carnival season that precedes the grand finale on Mardi Gras, caught a lot of beads and trinkets thrown from parade floats, admired the great spreading live oaks on the parade routes whose lower branches dangled beads, and relished the poetic street names. Using a gas-station map, I learned to navigate the drunken grid of the city and, visit by visit, watched it come back to life. Like a lot of the volunteers I met, who came for a week or a month and never left, I fell in love with New Orleans, and if I hadn’t had strong ties to another place, I might have moved there. I considered it, and every time I return to the city, the idea tempts me again. New Orleans has a kind of centripetal or magnetic or hypnotic force: when you’re in it, you’re absorbed, and other places cease to occupy much territory in your mind. Eventually, when I was called upon to explain Katrina, I began to tell people elsewhere that New Orleans’s exiles had lost things most of us hadn’t had for generations. Maybe our great-grandparents before they emigrated or our grandparents before they left the farm or the small town or the old city or our parents before their world was changed beyond recognition had the deep sense of belonging that comes from extended family, intricate and warm social relations woven into the fabric of a place, long memory, customs and rites, a sense of history, and the stability of a life lived in one place. Sometimes in New Orleans that means one house for generations, and often a neighborhood—Fats Domino has lived most of his life within blocks of where he was born, heeding the New Orleans principle that a musician belongs to his community (while his music became a key influence on certain Jamaican musicians who subsequently emigrated to New York and were crucial to the birth of hip-hop; Domino stayed home and got around). Snedeker’s own deep roots and strong ties were remarkable to me, as was her sense that that was normal; it wasn’t normal to a granddaughter of refugees whose language and world had been annihilated, who had grown up in rootless, amnesiac California. There was something whole and intact here that had been shattered everywhere else I knew in this country, even if it came alongside a host of social ills. More than anything, the warmth and cordiality and the capacity for joy and celebration got me. The United States is more and more privatized, a land where people are encouraged to confine their ardor to sex, family, and home, to indoor and individual loves. But in New Orleans people live in public: they love their city, their neighborhood, the rites of the calendar, the clubs or krewes they belong to, the legends and stories, being in public among the crowd. People talked to strangers, told stories, spoke with directness and sweetness, greeted me with endearments, knew where they were—it was a stark contrast to my own city, where people were often so busy with their new communications technologies that they regarded actual human contact as an intrusion, where few had a strong sense of place or deep roots. I had often heard civic life and public space in other countries celebrated, but I didn’t expect to find a spectacular version of those things in a U.S. town with a bad reputation and a tourist industry.
I met a Creole New Orleanian who told me about a man who moved to Houston after Hurricane Katrina. In Texas, his business was thriving and he did well, but he moved back. She asked him why, and he said, “Nobody knew me there.” He was praising the blessing and curse of this place, where people live in a dense network of ties that hold them up and sometimes hold them back and in place, tell them who they are and who they may be and where they may go. There are other pockets of such rootedness in the United States, but most of us are tumbleweeds, that invasive weed of the Russian steppes whose roots shrivel so that the bush can roll across the flatlands. Some of those tumbleweeds have rolled into New Orleans and put down roots in its mud and muck; it is a city where even the newcomers eagerly adapt and entrench themselves. Almost seven years later, as we sit at my San Francisco kitchen table to write the introduction to Unfathomable City, the place we two Rebeccas met, the Carousel Bar, with its twenty-five seats in a circle on a revolving platform, seems like an allegory for the city itself. The 1949 bar, whose upper portion resembles a fancy Victorian merry-go-round with mirrored and painted cartouches edged in lightbulbs, performs one full rotation every fifteen minutes, giving you a chance to get a little disoriented even before you have a drink; it also creates a space whose relationship to the outside world is in flux; a place apart. New Orleans is set apart from the rest of the country and perhaps the world. To be oriented to the city is to be disoriented to the rest of the world and vice versa. Every place has its own body of knowledge, its own history, its own culture, but what you find in New Orleans is deep, rich, and strange. Working on the atlas, we constantly came up against what I did not know or understand adequately— and up against what Rebecca Snedeker knew so intimately she sometimes forgot that everyone did not know it. Even so, she was the best possible guide an outsider could have, the consummate insider, one whose family goes back nearly two hundred years in New Orleans; whose work as a filmmaker has led her to question the customs—notably the segregated Carnival balls she had been raised with and which she took apart in her film By Invitation Only; who can hardly walk down the street for more than a few minutes before someone embraces her and invites her to a christening or a party or asks for a few minutes of her time to talk about a community organization or a project; someone who has thought deeply about—and deeply loves—her hometown. Snedeker pointed out that one marker of the distinctiveness of New Orleans is that cardinal directions are of limited use here. The river that borders the city meanders in many directions; many long streets follow the bends of the river and change directions themselves; the long cross-streets radiate; the city is low, with no hills and few tall buildings, so low that ships going by on the Mississippi appear to be above you, and the river itself is invisible behind levees. The compass that orients all the world makes little sense here and is not much used. Instead, Snedeker taught me, people define direction by the bodies of water. In place of north there is lakeside, for Lake Pontchartrain; in place of south there is the river; upriver and uptown are west; and downriver is east. These directions are also reminders that the place is very nearly surrounded by water, an enchanted isle with its own rules.
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Lakeside, R iverside, U priver, D ownriver
rebecca snedeker: When Rebecca Solnit and other writers, journalists, filmmakers, and artists showed up after Katrina, part of me recoiled. A sample of our city was being studied under a massive microscope; there it looked ugly, and we’re used to being pretty. I knew it was important for our survival to have this exchange, to have others bear witness to what had happened here and to share our stories, but the analyses were grim, oversimplified, and often inaccurate. Some of the outsiders were like thieves, taking our treasured stories in the night, or telling us what we needed instead of asking, and we had to stand up or be steamrolled. Others did us justice and helped communicate and document what was happening at a time when we were on our knees. A port city since its founding, New Orleans has always been a place of importing and exporting (and three of our maps testify to some of the commodities moved around here, bananas, sugar, and petroleum). In my life, import/export means: welcome people here and consider their ideas; get out of town when you can. When I met Rebecca Solnit at the Carousel Bar and invited her to stay with me, she thought it generous, but it was selfish, too. She was interested in the kindness and deep communalism some of us were manifesting, and she related us to people in other disasters in other places and times. Later, when she emailed me an article about the successes of civil society and the failures of institutional authority post-disaster, I wept with gratitude. Our breakthroughs and battles were not so unique after all, and this was reorienting, a different kind of relief. My understanding of my beloved city always grows deeper when I leave it; sometimes you see clearly or whole only from afar. At college, I learned that New Orleans has cachet. I’d escaped to the Northeast to experience the seasons in the picture books and get lost in studies, but I had more than that to discover. I knew all about the Rebirth Brass Band, or at least what they did every Tuesday night, and nothing of the rock band Nirvana. From a bathroom stall, I overheard two skeptical soccer teammates making fun of my southern accent and routine greetings. They challenged me to consider the difference between being nice and being trustworthy. Over time, I learned about the benefits of being more straightforward and less circular, and about being loyal to humanity—not just family. And all along the way, I had one thing going for me. Everyone wanted to know about my city, New Orleans. What’s normal here? Looking everyone you pass on the sidewalk in the eye and nodding, at the very least! Rolling thunder on summer afternoons, masked men on horses in parades, living your whole life here. (Before Katrina, we had the highest rate of nativity—the percentage of residents who had been born here—in the United States.) Guests visit and tell us that the city is different from other American cities—it hasn’t become a series of strip malls. These people say we’re friendly, yet we’ll talk behind your back; they say we celebrate life, yet we’re killing our own; they think it’s easy to get by, but most everyone I know is working hard to make ends meet, and since Katrina the groceries here have been more expensive than in most of New York. The opposite of everything you can say about this place is true, too. After college I returned, thinking it was just to “get a little” before I moved on, but I continued to choose New Orleans. I felt stagnant right before Katrina, but change pulled into town and keeps on coming. The eight years since Katrina have brought more dynamic flux to New Orleans than the city had faced in my lifetime. I’d always said that I would leave if I stopped learning from this place, but I
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get it now that one lifetime here is not enough. Whenever New Orleans starts to seem severely small, it expands again and unmasks itself as metropolis. Solnit came back and back again, which we locals call “the rubber-band effect.” One day, she said: We should do a New Orleans atlas! A spring gushed. I started driving and biking around the city, wondering about what maps we should make and thinking about how I knew the city and what I knew—and didn’t know— about it. Over time, the spring became a river whose waters have deepened my ardor for this place. The atlas has been, among other things, a mandate to get to know the place better—and as we were saying, is this not love? What forms our understanding of the landscape? What maps are we shown? My mother, Marilee, was Queen of Osiris, a Carnival krewe named after the Egyptian god of death and the underworld, but growing up I didn’t know anyone who was Egyptian. (I did later, and one of our atlas authors, Khaled Hegazzi, is Egyptian.) Her parents’ house on St. Charles Avenue was maintained by profits from the oil industry, but I didn’t know from whose lands those profits were extracted. She learned to shimmy in a sunroom in the Zemurray mansion, a home I later learned was purchased with a fortune built on the backs of Central American workers under U.S. military occupation (as described in Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s “Fruits’ Fortunes at the Gate of the Tropics”). My mom took me to float parades, but we never went to second lines. Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It’s so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city. Are we curious for more? The territorialism of those who were born here or have deep roots here is strong. Yet almost all of us are transplants—imported peoples by choice or force. Our past is troubled with slavery, the Indian Removal Act, the Civil War, and the rise of the oil and gas industry. We try and hold this past and understand where the city is, and what it can become—what we can be together. Our future is still being written, and some of it is being written in maps. After Katrina, we faced unfamiliar images of our city and neighborhoods in map after map by urban planners, even when the maps were of areas we knew intimately. These maps, with their north, south, east, west orientation, situated us in relation to the world at large. A few years later, my friend Robert Tannen turned Lee Circle, the one major rotary in New Orleans, into a compass. He planted boulders to mark the cardinal directions, placing us in relationship not only to our country (General Lee faces north), but to planet Earth, extending our understanding of where we are. (The boulders themselves had to be imported; there is little rock in the local landscape.) Protective as we may be of our place, our survival depends on developing strong and clear relations and coordination with the outside world. Several New Orleans businesses have fallen into decay because the local gentlemen who ran them never updated their systems to align with the nation; many businesspeople who came and set up shop have left because they weren’t welcomed into social spheres. Insularity can become inbreeding and lead to dead ends. Exchange brings prosperity. We export sugar, oil, seafood, music, movies, charismatic stars; and we welcome tourists and friends for festivals, conferences, conventions, even the new brands of disaster tourism for the curious and post-catastrophe volunteerism for those seeking meaning and purpose. New Orleans has push and pull. This book was created by a mix of natives, newcomers, and people who live outside the city. We need insiders and outsiders, each with their own internal compass,
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to describe this place. We have imported interpreters; we are exporting interpretations; but nothing is final, nothing is definitive, and our city remains unfathomable in the end. But this atlas is an invitation to plumb a little of its depths. Many maps were conceived for this atlas but never made: a map called New Orleans Not in Black and White, an attempt to get past the tendency to tell the city’s racial history in those two colors alone; a map of the Lower Ninth Ward as the wildlife refuge that part of it has become post-Katrina; maps of racetracks, of smells and song lyrics. There is a shadow atlas, or several, lurking down several forking paths we did not take, and we knew that twenty-two maps could only hint at some of the lineaments of a complex city and offer an invitation to settle in. No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming to know it more. New Orleans is a City Incognita, an unknown city, because even those of us who live here tend to know our own fragments, because outsiders know the stereotypes and officially marketed versions, because the city is not its clichés. There is always more. There are also divides and privates and secret societies and prisons (mental and literal), because incognita is a Carnival mask. Everyone loves a secret, except when they’re left out, and this book invites people in. Mapping the R outes to I mmortality
For a while, this atlas was called Immortal City, a cry of defiance against the threats posed by economic decline, water, and climate change and an invocation of what New Orleans has given the world, gifts that live far beyond its borders and will live on, come what may to this bend in the river. There is the immortality that means an indelible impact and a superlative performance, in the sense that Dante and Billie Holiday are immortal. More conventionally, immortality means a limitless future, which is impossible to ascertain; New Orleans, however, has an undying past. The city is a bowl that nothing ever leaves, and even “past” is not the right word to describe how the old sins and rites are still alive here; how the city remains a French city, a Spanish city, a Catholic city (with strong Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, and voodoo traditions), a port city; how the dead never go away, but remain as an ancestral population. You could say that here death lives as it does in Mexico, where it’s celebrated and contemplated. The abundant cemeteries here (mapped in “Moves, Remains”) are cities of the dead that the living visit, especially on All Saints’ Day, November 1, when descendants decorate the graves of these relations and picnic with them. This is the place in the United States where African customs and practices forgotten or destroyed elsewhere survive into the present; memory is long; the past reaches into the present. Many who come here find a place of freedom and refuge, though it was a place of enslavement for many and is still a place of ferocious limits for some. For those of us from here, there’s no way to escape your past. More than most places, people conceive of themselves as members—of old or extended families, of Carnival krewes, of social aid and pleasure clubs, of Mardi Gras Indian tribes, of debutante society, of this school or that—and those entities have indefinite lives that can extend far beyond the length of one human life. Even a band may have members who arrive and depart, so that a group like the Rebirth Brass Band can lose some of its original members, but the spirit plays on. Rebirth indeed. The city is constantly reincarnated. Family and kinship networks make us feel immortal because our lineages continue. Telling our stories makes us immortal. Does immortality mean that nothing ever dies or that everything has an afterlife?
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The past is not even past here, but a lingering presence in custom and memory and maybe old wounds; and the present—the present is forever bubbling over. The culture of this place is ephemeral. There are cities whose principal culture is literary or visual or architectural, media that endure; but this is a city of music and dance, of art coming directly out of the body, of those things that invite audiences to become participants, that unfold in time. Before recording technologies, these arts were entirely of the moment. Music here is still live; people dance to bands more than to recorded music; they dance in the streets and in grand balls; old and young mingle and enjoy the same pleasures, unlike much of the generationally segregated United States; and that might be how the past is passed on, how everyone inherits memory and orientation. So much of the richness of this place is fleeting and forever being renewed: the pleasures of sociability, of festivals and Carnival, of dancing and music, of smiles and greetings and contact, of improvisations that sail out on the night air never to be recaptured but always to be renewed and succeeded. This is not the immortality of dry endless life but of continual regeneration and reincarnation. The measure of time here is not years or centuries, but the annual cycle that repeats: the old Catholic calendar with Jazzfest and some other secular occasions thrown in. Not just the Christian holidays celebrated elsewhere in the United States, but the older, richer, wilder calendar, in which Christmas leads to Twelfth Night, and Twelfth Night is the launch of the Carnival season, which runs for many weeks, up until Fat Tuesday—Mardi Gras. Then the forty days of Lent begin with Ash Wednesday, marching soberly along to Easter—except that few are sober on St. Patrick’s Day, and St. Joseph’s Day is pleasure galore, with Italians sharing altars of baked goods and Mardi Gras Indians donning their hand-sewn suits that night and one last time the following Sunday—Super Sunday—before they draw a sketch of next year’s outfits. The calendar also includes hurricane season, the season when the city’s mortality is on everyone’s mind. New Orleans has largely felt like a place of the past—nostalgic—and one of the oddest turns post-Katrina is how we suddenly feel futuristic, the “canary in the coal mine,” the post-industrial, post-catastrophe place where, like Detroit, we are “so far behind we’re ahead,” as a prophetic t-shirt reads. We are now the city that died and was reborn. New Orleanians have all had a crash course in urbanism and map reading. The ecologists, hydrologists, urbanists, and others from here and from afar produced map after map to debate the possibilities and limits, and New Orleanians became unusually proficient in map reading. Those maps proliferated like autumn leaves after the catastrophe, maps of where the city was vulnerable, of elevation and destruction, of a thousand plans for renewing and reinventing the city. Organizations like the Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association (NENA) had maps with pushpins marking returnees; later, in the same neighborhood, a less vernacular map was posted near the quirky, ecologically advanced, stilt-equipped Make It Right houses, showing what had been restored to habitability. Maybe all the maps were of mortality and strategies to outwit mortality, maps showing routes toward viable futures (and what threatened those futures). New Orleans is immortal, unlimited in space and time. Though the city is tiny, imperiled, and may disappear altogether, New Orleans reaches far beyond its city limits in imagination, memory, artifact, music, spirit—and how its culture has been absorbed around the world. Even if and when New Orleans is submerged, it will live on in Mongolia, Tunisia, Chile, and Canada, through musical rhythms, language, and image, and whatever joy and freedom those signals stir up.
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1
a city in time
Imagine that a city grows like a tree, putting on ring after ring at the periphery. This is how the old walled cities of Europe expanded, though with a new-world one like New Orleans, which was born at the natural boundary of the river, the rings are erratic. This map with its fourteen rings shows nearly three centuries of expansion, carefully charted by New Orleans’s preeminent geographer/cartographer, Richard Campanella. The map reminds us that when we speak of “New Orleans,” we mean many different cities of many sizes and shapes. Into the twentieth century, builders mostly kept to the high ground, but then hope and hubris sent them into the marshy land and the low places that were snatched from water and that water periodically snatches back. Never forget that the fourteen rings here are not the full history of the city: that is yet to be written by storm and erosion, by pumping stations and levees and sea level rise and whatever comes after in a century, in a millennium, in the unfathomable future. ca r to g r a p h y : r i c h a r d ca m pa n e ll a , s h i z u e s e i g e l
m a p a p p e a r s o n pag e s 14 –15.
how new orleans happened By R ichard Campanella There are no straight lines in nature. Nor are there any right angles. Rather, intricate tangles and irregular arcs merge and bifurcate recurrently. Look at any plant leaf, or spider web, or the veins of your arm for evidence. Nowhere is this sinuous geometry more apparent than in river deltas, where flowing waters, lacking the discipline that topography imposes, lazily meander in hairpin crescents, ever shifting, eroding, and depositing sediment—until they lunge into an adjacent channel and replicate the process nearby, all the while turning sea into land. So formed the Mississippi Delta, over the span of a mere seven thousand years, producing what Mark Twain called “the youthfulest batch of country that lies around there anywhere.” Dynamic, fluid, soft, warm, humid, tempestuous: flora and fauna flourish in such conditions, but humans resist them and endeavor to impose rigidity and rectitude upon them, so as to exploit the delta’s resources and nodalities. The urban developmental history of New Orleans is essentially the story of overlaying orderly orthogonality on unruly curvaceousness. Natives started the process, by shoring up middens, burning forest to tilt ecological cycles, and cultivating basic grains. Mostly, however, they adapted to fluidity by shifting their encampments to higher, drier ground when floodwaters came. Given technological limitations, they viewed deltas as conditions to which one conformed rather than as problems that demanded solving. Such a strategy does not, however, serve the aims of societies based on agriculture and resource extraction, seeking to expand territorial domains, subordinate natives, and elbow
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Club Atlantis
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Pop’s Place Sportsman’s Corner
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Club Ceasar’s
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Club Adidas Club James
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Housing developments Nightclubs Recording industry sites & stores
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John F. Kennedy High School
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Though many are gone from the city, the places that birthed New Orleans hip-hop live on in song
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Influential school marching bands
