fleur de lis
While city hall frets about politics, though, a new map of New Orleans is already being drawn.

In a sense, it's an old map. The wealthy strip of high ground alongside the Mississippi River that didn't flood -- the French Quarter, the central business district, the Garden District, Uptown -- resembles the footprint of the city circa 1850. They call this strip the Island, and while life there hasn't quite returned to normal, it's close enough for people to spend time devising new post-disaster routes for the upcoming Mardi Gras parades.

Out in what was marshland in 1850, much of the Lower Ninth is ruined. Some houses were swept off their foundations into the streets; others were simply pulverized into jagged piles of debris. Politics or no politics, whatever happens there will have to start with bulldozers.

The real problem lies in the endless city blocks, mile after mile after mile, that were flooded but not erased. You can start on the Island and drive north, toward Lake Pontchartrain, and soon you are in a silent, empty wasteland where all the houses have a visible waterline, sometimes at the windowsills, sometimes all the way up to the eaves. These vast neighborhoods aren't destroyed, but they aren't habitable, either.

- bill 1-10-2006 6:07 pm

But in that empty wasteland where all the houses have a visible water line (which are actually getting fainter and fainter as time passes)...many of the houses ARE habitable, right alongside the ones that aren't.
- jimlouis 1-12-2006 5:57 pm [add a comment]


right. this talk of bull dozing neighborhoods sounds indescriminant.
- bill 1-12-2006 6:38 pm [add a comment]


There is yet a new map, I think you may have referenced it somewhere else, drawn up by the Urban Land Institute, and the Rocheblave house, and the Dumaine house too, I think, is inside a red circle which I believe is implying some sort of major redevelopment, with this Catch 22 timeline for residents to come back and prove the viablility of their neighborhoods, but of course the residents can't come back because there are no services in their neighborhoods. So the way I'm figuring it, the city may never turn my power back on, because they got at least the idea of a master plan brewing, and that plan, while not discluding me in the long run, is definitely not including me for the here and now.
- jimlouis 1-13-2006 4:36 pm [add a comment]





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