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Article published Sep 11, 2005
Surviving Katrina's wrath
By John Hill
[email protected] NEW ORLEANS — The lesson to be learned from Katrina is that there's only one direction that matters for rebuilding New Orleans — up.
Far beyond the French Quarter and Garden District beloved by tourists, New Orleans' architecturally significant neighborhoods are intact, with little structural damage.
A team of experts — including three evacuees — explored the city with Gannett News last week and found housing intact from the Bywater district near the Industrial Canal on the city's east side to the Carrollton area on the far west.
"It's the older homes, built out of cypress or heart of pine, built up off the ground to withstand the flooding that are fine," said Jimmy Blanchard, a New Orleans architectural archivist, artist and rehabilitation designer.
"The old homes of the city look intact," said LSU architecture professor Michael Desmond, an urban planning expert. "But for the loss of life and inconvenience, it is exciting. The parts of the city that have architectural and historic value are intact."
Draw a line across New Orleans from the Industrial Canal on the east starting a block or two on the lakeside of St. Claude Avenue, taking in a tiny corner of the French Quarter on the lakeside, upriver corner of the French Quarter, then across to the Superdome and along four-five blocks on the lakeside of Canal Street to the Carrollton area near the Jefferson Parish line on the west.
Most of the neighborhoods from that line to the river are dry now, though the streets are blocked with branches, trees, telephone poles, power and cable lines, and there is no electricity. The water was turned on, but the pressure is too low for firefighters to protect the wooden tinderbox that is old New Orleans. Several properties already have burned, and there is great fire danger because gas lines are on to prevent water from coming in and ruining the system.
"We have mile after mile after mile of shotgun houses and Creole cottages that have over the decades withstood the storms, including this one," said Patty Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. The PRC is a private nonprofit organization that has, over the past three decades, renovated more than 1,000 homes and sold them to homeowners and assisted others with buying and renovating.
Though living temporarily in Franklin, Gay is already working with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington on asking the U.S. Congress and State Legislature for tax incentives to rebuild damaged homes and rehabilitate blighted housing.
"We need incentives because we want people to come back," Gay said. "We need all socioeconomic groups to come back."
The federal 20 percent tax credit for five years that applies to money spent rehabilitating rental property needs to be expanded to include homeowners, she said.
A state tax credit of up to $1 million a year for four years, due to go into effect Jan. 1, should be made immediately effective and allowed all at once.
Even in such neighborhoods as the Holy Cross Historic District in the Lower 9th Ward, where the raised old homes had a couple of feet of water in them this week, Gay said she is optimistic. "They are definitely salvageable," she said.
As the streets slope away from the river, and street flooding begins, even many of the older raised homes are intact, Gay said, standing at the water's edge on Esplanade Avenue at Marigny Street gazing as far toward the lake as she could see.
In the historic districts of Uptown, Central City, the Garden District, the Irish Channel, the Lower Garden District, the Central Business District, the Faubourg Marigny, the New Marigny, Bywater and Algier's Point, few homes have significant damage, even in the blighted areas.
And most homes in these areas have no visible damage from the street, though that can be deceiving, as Peter Raarup of Raarup Landscape Design learned when he opened the door to his home on Coliseum near Napoleon Avenue. Something — there were no nearby trees — had knocked a hole in his roof and the water had caused a 6-foot-by-8-foot piece of the plaster ceiling to fall, allowing sunshine to stream into the room. "But it is minor, not structural, and easily repaired," he said.
Throughout the old part of the city, built on the highest lands, the old homes built up on piers escaped any flooding. It was the newer neighborhoods, built from the 1950s to date, where flooding was severe — up to the eaves in Lake View and to 4-5 feet in the Canal Boulevard I-610 area.
"There ought to be a bumper sticker that reads, 'No slab houses,'" Raarup said.
Even the houses that have taken on seven feet of water may not have to be bulldozed, depending on whether they have older, heart-of-pine wood framing. They will have to be gutted to the structural timber, allowed to dry for months before it can be determined if they can be built out anew, Desmond said.
But many houses, even whole neighborhoods, will have to be removed in both Orleans and St. Bernard parishes.
Rebuilding will have to be done carefully so as not to interfere with New Orleans' architectural identification.
"New Orleans has the finest collection of wood frame houses anywhere in the world," Desmond said.
Building codes will have to be changed to require new homes built in the lower-lying areas of the city to be raised up so the first floor can flood harmlessly, such as used as a garage, bathroom or knock-away walls. That's required on Florida's coast and in flood-prone areas of St. Tammany Parish, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Medium-rise condos with floodable garages on the first or second floors are also possible solutions.
"I would like to see right away a design team put together to come up with recommendations for affordable housing that could be raised off the ground," Gay said.
Changing the method of building may not be an option, depending on what insurance companies decide to do.
"It's the old struggle of do you design with nature or do you design against nature," Raarup said.
The only rational future for rebuilding New Orleans is to go up both with the houses and with a system of ring levees isolating low-lying areas.
"If this were a rational process, yes," Desmond said. "But this is a political process."
Bob Mann, communications director for Gov. Kathleen Blanco, said the governor is committing to restoring.
"She doesn't want to see one single building demolished that doesn't need to be," Mann said. "We will be very soon developing a very comprehensive program dealing with housing needs and what to do with structures of historic significance."
Mann said the U.S. Congress and President Bush "appear to be resolved" to spend what's needed.
"It is very important to her that we don't lose the historic architectural character of New Orleans," Mann said.
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Interesting :nod: