Inga Saffron Article

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Changing Skyline | Don't bulldoze distinctive houses

New Orleans' historic districts survived. But what about the structures that give them flavor?

By Inga Saffron
Inquirer Architecture Critic

Posted on Sun, Sep. 11, 2005

Even people who aren't from New Orleans can imagine what it means to miss the French Quarter and the Garden District, two celebrated neighborhoods dripping with charm and magnolias. But mention Bywater, the Irish Channel, or the Lower Ninth Ward, where 16-foot-wide shotgun houses are permanently dressed for an architectural Mardi Gras, and you will almost certainly be met with blank stares.

Yet it is those modest neighborhoods of steamy, close-packed, wooden cottages that have long provided the aspic in which New Orleans' high-struttin' culture could jell. And, tragically, it is those neighborhoods that are now most likely to be sitting knee-deep in fetid water.

Those blocks of vernacular houses, which fuse the ordinary and the fantastical into the fabric and soul of this special city, must now gird themselves against forces more powerful than any Category 5 hurricane: big developers, insurance-company automatons, federal bureaucrats, bone-deep poverty, and the local disposition for inertia. The impulse will be to move in quickly with bulldozers, without much planning. But to do so would cost New Orleans its identity.

In the days since Katrina's strike, it has become clear that the areas best known to tourists remain largely intact. The French Quarter, the Garden District, the Canal Street business corridor, and the Warehouse Arts District were spared the worst of the deluge, thanks to their location along a ridge of high ground. New Orleans, like Philadelphia, is a generally flat city squeezed between two bodies of water, yet it has marked variations in terrain, just as it has marked variations in social conditions. The high-ground neighborhoods tend to be the affluent ones.

When I telephoned Delia LaBarre, a local preservationist, last week at her townhouse near Lafayette Square, a few blocks from an office district that resembles our Market Street, she answered as if it were just another day. "We have water. We have electricity. I really do not understand why they want us evacuated," she said. Fearful that city officials will want to raze great swaths of her beloved city, LaBarre is determined to be present when the ground war begins against the waterlogged structures in the less affluent, low-lying sections.

Without a doubt, New Orleans' historic sections will get by, as they have gotten by during the last 200 hurricane seasons. Flooding takes a costly toll on buildings by turning brick foundations into mushy clay, by causing wood pilings to rot, and by fouling rooms with sewage and chemicals. But given enough money and stubbornness, almost any building can be fixed.

Charleston, S.C., Mayor Joseph P. Riley, one of the nation's few preservationists elected to office, proved that after Hurricane Hugo in 1989 by intervening to stop wholesale tear-downs. Bricks were replaced. Poultices and bleach were deployed against mold and toxins.

New Orleans preservationists say it's not clear that their mayor, C. Ray Nagin, will show Riley's resolve. New Orleans' population has dropped over 20 percent, to 485,000, since 1960, yet the blocks of candy-colored Creole cottages seem to go on forever, much like the Philadelphia rowhouses that march north, south and west from Center City. What will happen to the one-story shotgun houses that lack the imprimatur of historic designation?

It is hard to conceive of New Orleans without its cottage neighborhoods. Unlike the magnificent brick townhouses of the downtown French Quarter, draped in lacy wrought iron, the 19th-century homes in places like Tremé and Mid-City tend to be shoe-box-shaped shotguns. Shotguns are to New Orleans what the trinity is to Philadelphia - in fact, a shotgun is a trinity flipped on its back. But unlike the flat-faced houses of Quaker-sober Philadelphia, shotgun facades are tarted up with columns and carvings, like miniature Italianate and Gothic palaces.

Incredibly, shotguns have no corridor. The rooms are laid out railroad-style. You either pick your way through someone's bedroom to get to the kitchen, or you slip outside into the alley to move from room to room. The twin version is called a double-barrel. A shotgun saddled with a second-story addition is a camelback.

Many believe the shotguns trace their roots to African village houses. They accommodate the New Orleans climate with tall windows to admit breezes and long shutters to block the sun.

Winston Churchill is famous for saying that "we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us." New Orleans proves his maxim. Its great musical, culinary and social gumbo is the product of its architecture. Driven from their shotguns on hot summer nights, people of various backgrounds came together in alleys and porches to make talk and music. In the moist, humid air, the notes hung in a way unlike anywhere else.

Will the value of these modest houses be understood at a moment when politicians are eager to show results? Will officials cull the damaged with care, or simply rampage through with bulldozers?

Some fear that large-scale clearance will attract out-of-town developers who will refashion New Orleans into a faux, Disneyfied version. To a certain extent, the French Quarter has already become a parody of itself. It is the shotgun neighborhoods that retain their indomitable, drama-queen eccentricity. Rather than Disneyfication, the danger to those neighborhoods, says S. Frederick Starr - a Bywater resident, Soviet scholar, jazz musician, and author of several books on New Orleans - is Houston-ification. They will be sanitized.

The nature of federal recovery programs is to take a one-size-fits-all approach to rebuilding. "Crises tend to produce people who want a clean slate," Starr observes. If the house foundation is weak and the floors are buckled, "are the insurance companies going to make it easy to demolish the houses?" Starr and several friends have started a nonprofit, the Fund For New Orleans, to help defend the city's architectural integrity. (e-mail: Fundforneworleans@msn.com.)

In a country where cities are becoming more generic and indistinguishable from one another, New Orleans, like Philadelphia, remains sui generis and original. I visited New Orleans the week before Katrina and was struck that the two places seemed to be alter egos, one licentious and outrageous, the other abstemious and modest - both equally precious.

And yet, those qualities haven't stopped politicians such as Dennis Hastert (R., Ill.), speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, from suggesting that New Orleans is expendable. Today, on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks against New York and the Pentagon, it is worth remembering that not everyone loves cities. They are chaotic places full of varied people with complicated lives, old homes, diverse habits. New Orleans is certainly one of the more complex and contradictory cities.

There are also hardheaded reasons to spend an estimated $100 billion rebuilding New Orleans. It sits in its marshy, hurricane-prone bowl because, as the gatekeeper port for America's most heavily trafficked river, that is the spot where it needs to be. Living in such a precarious environment has created a citizenry willing to take risks, and those risk-takers have paid back America handsomely. The influence of this little port city on American culture is all out of proportion to its size. New Orleans gave America its own indigenous style of music, cuisine and leisure.

The least we can do is provide the means to keep such a remarkable place intact.

Contact architecture critic Inga Saffron at 215-854-2213 or isaffron@phillynews.com.

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Last edited by Johanna Nyden.   Page last modified on September 12, 2005