We were supposed to have a garage sale on Sunday, August 28, 2005. We had recently moved into a house we bought in Central City and had cleaned out our old Broadmoor apartment and planned to sell the odds and ends that didn’t make it to our new home. It was to be the final hurrah of our move. Suffice to say we evacuated the night before and the garage sale never happened. I didn’t get back into town for another three weeks, but there on the second floor of our old apartment’s stoop was our last Times-Picayune, still in the plastic and dry. I tossed the paper in the car and drove back to Houston. I finally pulled that newspaper out of its plastic bag this weekend.
Today’s Times-Picayune has a Jobs section that is 4 pages long, while the Jobs section in the 2005 Times-Pic was 14 pages long. Here’s what I assume is Charity Hospital’s last display ad:
A 16 year old girl who attended Chalmette High School died in a car accident on August 21, 2005.
On August 26, 2005 a man was shot to death in the Ninth Ward. The Times-Pic reported:
His body was found on the north side of the street between a gray car and the sidewalk in front of Off Da Hook, a barber-beauty shop and music studio, and across from a neutral ground crowded with cars apparently parked by people seeking higher ground in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina.
Layers of misery …
Then, regrettably, there’s Sheila Stroup with a B-1 column called “Cat got what he wanted at church” : “This is the story of Grayson, a cat who went to church. He was an Episcopalian, and a loyal one.” Last 2 graphs: “Even now, after a month and an outpouring of sympathy, it’s difficult for Patty to go to church, because there’s no gray cat sitting in the foyer, no shadow to follow her home when Mass is over.” The cat died.
An editorial pushed the Orleans Parish School Board to approve the charter application for Lusher Alternative Elementary School. A couple letters to the editor and a Stephanie Grace column raked over the details of a recent scandal involving an audit of the Orleans Parish School Board that found questionable expenditures on overtime and stipends.
And here’s a couple of news nuggets from 2005:
Greenspan says Fed will survive departure
JACKSON HOLE, WYO — Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan expressed confidence Saturday that the central bank will meet the challenges that lie ahead after he steps down next year from the institution he has led for nearly two decades.’I have little doubt that my successors, and theirs, will continue to sustain the leadership of the American financial system in an ever-widening global economy,’ Greenspan said.
World record attempt kills Iranian daredevil
TEHRAN, IRAN — An Iranian daredevil died while attempting to break the world record for jumping over buses on a motorcycle, state television reported Saturday. Javad Palizbanian, 44, was trying to leap over 22 buses parked side-by-side when his motorbike came down on the 13th bus, the report said… Minutes beforehand, Palizbanian had told an audience of hundreds: “I am going to break the world record and do something for my country to be proud.”
The Times-Picayune neglected to run our garage sale ad.
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Yesterday as the sun was going down I took our dog for a walk in our Central City neighborhood. It had rained all day but in the west a blue window of sky opened. As I walked stunned by the blues, oranges, and grays of the clouds and sky I berated myself for not bringing a camera (I bring a camera with me on roughly half of these evening walks). I could only gawk and gawk I did. I turned up certain blocks just to keep my eye on that blue window as long as I could. I passed a guy sitting in the passenger seat of a car with the door open. “How about that sky?” I said. He looked up. “Beautiful! Just beautiful …” I turned the corner and saw an old woman on her porch. “How about that sky?” I said. She smiled and shook her head in awe. “Who could make something like that?” she said and entered into extended praise of god. To another old woman on another porch, “Isn’t that sky beautiful?” “Yes it is.” On the next block my eyes moistened. I ducked down a darkened block fearing I was about to lose it. I get why most of us try to edit sentimentality out of experience. It can be a little embarrassing. But it can be earned, too.
Billy Sothern from his Salon review of Spike Lee’s new documentary about N.O.:
The claim that it is “not easy” to live in New Orleans turns out to be one of the very few understatements in the documentary, which dwells at length on the many things that create this dis-ease — separate and aside from the storm that drew the country’s attention and the oil spill that refocused it. The viewer is led through policy debates and critiques and personal stories highlighting the demolition of New Orleans’ public housing projects and consequent housing crisis; the collapsed healthcare system (New Orleans’ public hospital remains shuttered because of political wrangling about the future of healthcare); the mental health crisis that has been responsible for murders, suicides and less-than-joyous substance abuse and drinking since the storm; the incompetence of FEMA in providing post-storm assistance to the city and the agency’s mismanagement of its emergency housing plan; the civil engineering missteps by the Army Corps of Engineers that made the city vulnerable to flooding and that have degraded our wetlands; the shattered education system; the out-of-control crime and violence that have plagued the city; the police corruption and history of police violence that have led to numerous federal murder and conspiracy indictments for officers involved in several, separate incidents; and deregulation that provided the opportunity for corporate greed’s fouling of the Gulf.
Now a street scavenger’s lust for scrap metal is sending the sculpture away. The eyes will beam their light across Camp Street until after Labor Day, which falls just eight days after the fifth anniversary of the devastating storm and flood they helped us see past.
Posted 4 weeks, 1 day ago at 12:58 pm. Add a comment
Now that we have a dog and I walk him everyday I’ve come to think that having a dog is good for community building. I know the streets of our neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods far better and I’ve met many fellow citizens I probably would have never met. It’s a good check against my tendency toward alienation.
I’ve started to pay much more attention to scribbles in the sidwalk. Sometimes the markings people leave behind are ephemeral:
And there’s plenty of “I was here” messaging:
And sometimes it gets a little weird:
My favorite is when kids are clearly involved:
In fact, I think it’d be cool if when new sidewalks are poured city workers encourage neighborhood children to scribble on select sidewalk tiles. So long as nobody uses profanity or scribbles hateful messages, it can only enhance the feeling of community.
Posted 1 month, 1 week ago at 9:37 am. Add a comment
GOOD has a nice article about the role of bloggers in post-federal flood New Orleans, but I thought its article about New Orleans public schools was weak. First there’s the false framing:
The school buildings going up in New Orleans are part of the largest federal investment in school construction since the Civil War. But physical structures aren’t the only things being radically upended. New Orleans is now the only U.S. city in which a majority of students attend a charter school. As both projects move forward, we may soon find out if a city can be remade through its schools.
As if spinning off most public schools into charters is the only way for a city to determine “if [it] can be remade through its schools.” The article’s author takes at face value that charters = educational reform.
Then there’s this:
New Orleans is in the midst of the most ambitious system-wide reform in U.S. education history. So far, the laboratory is yielding impressive results—in four years, the percentage of failing schools has been reduced by half—but there is still, by all accounts, a long way to go.
The metrics here being used to determine success are accepted apparently without a second thought. I’m willing to bet in years to come the assessment data will be shown to be seriously flawed.
Posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago at 11:10 am. Add a comment
There’s been talk for some time about Detroit shrinking its footprint, just as there was a lot of talk about the same with New Orleans after our federal levees breached. I like Matthew Yglesias’ non-starter of a solution:
There are clearly insurmountable logistical, legal, practical, constitutional, and political obstacles to doing this but I can’t help but think that with 165 million people around the world telling Gallup they’d like to permanently relocate to the United States that it would be possible to find 1.3 million people who’d be interested in permanently relocating to Detroit and bringing the city back up to its peak population level.
I believe he’s right when he says the obstacles to such an approach are “insurmountable.” However, what if we found a bunch of Americans to bring to Detroit? What if we had a reciprocal relationship with the good City of Detroit whereby we spent our summers up there and they spent their winters down here in New Orleans? We love their music; surely they love our music. We could escape the heat, they could escape the cold. See where I’m going?
During the down months the respective cities could simply rollback services from the areas where the populations have receded. Over time, we would fix dilapidated housing stock in Detroit and Detroiters would do the same here.
After all, it’s always easier to fix someone else’s problems than it is to fix one’s own.
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 2:16 pm. Add a comment
Update: And to think that back during the Civil War a member of the military was convicted of “contemptuous speech” against the president (Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice) for saying:
Jeff Davis was as good a man as Abraham Lincoln
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 8:58 pm. Add a comment
That’s Cairo trying to keep a Hubig’s wrapper he found alongside St. Charles Avenue. Since I started taking Cairo for walks I’ve tended to walk the Garden District side instead of the Central City side. Cairo snags all the trash he can–he keeps his nose at ground level, forever sniffing, forever nabbing detritus–and there’s far more of it, in much greater variety, on the Central City side. Until I personally clean the streets and sidewalks of Central City, you won’t hear me complaining. Instead, I just make like I’m a tourist. I grab my point and shoot camera and go to the streets with all of the historical plaques and exquisitely landscaped yards. Oh that’s the house Sandra Bullock bought! I’m an Illinoisan all over again. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is the array of home security companies providing services in the Garden District. It’s almost like there’s a different security outfit for each house. (More here.)
Another thing I’ve tried to pay more attention to is how people build with trees in mind–or don’t object when trees take over. The first example, incidentally, is from the Central City side of St. Charles:
