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The pumps at Station No. 1 are arranged in a neat row, their suction pipes reaching down under the building to connect to the city's vast network of drainage canals. The 12-foot 1913 pumps, designed by the engineer Albert Baldwin Wood, are still here, as are four more he designed in 1928. The last two, the biggest and most powerful, were built in the mid-90's.

The night of the storm, Mr. Martin said, "the two new pumps went out right away. They're the most powerful. They sound like freight trains. Four of the old ones kept going all night. The original two pumps, those are the most reliable. I'd use those two before I'd use any of the others."

He walked to the back of the shed, where two towering wood doors are held in place by heavy braces. As the storm picked up speed that night, 100-mile-per-hour winds pounded the doors, threatening to tear them from their frames. If the storm waters flowed past them, he knew, the station would stop functioning. So he threw himself against the doors, struggling to hold them back while screaming for help over the roar of the machines. The other men came running to help, jamming the wood braces between the doors and the machines. That night, the pump stations kept the city from flooding.

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I also knew, or thought I knew, that right up to Thursday night, there had been just two houses in Uptown New Orleans with people inside them. In one, a couple of old coots had barricaded themselves behind plywood signs that said things like "Looters Will Be Shot" and "Enter and Die." The other, a fortlike house equipped with a massive power generator, was owned by Jim Huger - who happened to grow up in the house next door to my parents. (When I heard that he had the only air-conditioning in town and I called to ask if I could borrow a bed, he said, "I'm that little kid you used to beat on with a Wiffle Ball bat, and I gotta save your ass now?") In Jim Huger's house, until the night before, several other young men had holed up, collecting weapons and stories. Most of these stories entered the house by way of a reserve officer in the New Orleans Police Department, a friend of Jim's, who had gone out in full uniform each day and come back with news directly from other cops. From Tuesday until Thursday, the stories had grown increasingly terrifying. On Thursday, a police sergeant told him: "If I were you, I'd get the hell out of here. Tonight they gonna waste white guys, and they don't care which ones." This reserve cop had looked around and seen an amazing sight, full-time New Orleans police officers, en masse, fleeing New Orleans. "All these cops were going to Baton Rouge to sleep because they thought it wasn't safe to sleep in New Orleans," he told me. He had heard that by the time it was dark "there wouldn't be a single cop in the city."

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Jean Prouvé: Three Nomadic Structures

MOCA
Pacific Design Center
Los Angeles, California

"He combines the soul of an engineer with that of an architect.”
--Le Corbusier

Prouvé (1901–84) sought to create furniture and simple lightweight metal building systems whose constructive logic permitted easy fabrication and use. His major preoccupation was with prefabrication technology for architecture, and all his work, from cafeteria chairs to public buildings to new solutions for temporary housing, adheres to the dictum "Never design anything that cannot be made.

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