Ghosts of the Footprint

Recently, I went to hear a friend's band at Banks Street Bar, back behind Jesuit in Mid-City.

As I walked into the dim ramshackle establishment that I evening, I felt, in a strange way, like I was back in the VA Footprint in Outer Banks Bar.

There, standing next to a pole, was James, the loyal Outer Banks patron, the wall boards leaning behind him.

Across the way, seated at a table near the neon glow by the door was another Outer Banks regular-in-exile, Bryan.  He sat there with his hat, white pants, shades, and grin looking like Burma Jones exiled from the Night of Joy.

Still, it wasn't quite the same.

Down what was left of Banks Street, down a ways under the dark of the remaining oak boughs, a great expanse of dirt stretched out under the night sky.

Palmyra Street, Six Years After Katrina

To paraphrase Tacitus:

To ravage...to usurp under false titles without funds, they call progress; and where they make a desert, they call it development.

Today, instead of a functioning University Medical Center humming along in the sturdy shell of the former Charity Hospital building, there still isn't even a business plan for the UMC proposed for Lower Mid-City.  Nor is there adequate financing in place to build the first phase of the hospital.

There is, however, a largely destroyed swath of the city standing increasingly vacant between Canal, Tulane, S. Galvez, and Claiborne.

If the State of Louisiana, LSU, UMC, City of New Orleans and various federal agencies had pursued the retrofit of Charity three years ago, we could have had a state-of-the-art hospital in place today - and it would have been less expensive (the state has the money onhand to realize the Charity option at present).

Instead, there are no signs that the UMC Board has even considered the Charity option, and is instead bulling forward with the disastrous Lower Mid-City site out of embarrassment.  

Howl

...for it is laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in...

The UMC and VA Hospital footprints in New Orleans on August 1, 2011, looking lakeward from the CBD.  Note the number of structures that remain in the UMC site in the midground.  Note, too, the stark vacancy of the VA site compared to the dense neighborhood around it - the same urban fabric that existed there one year ago.

"176 parcels have been cleared, with 58 more slated for demolition"

What are the roots that clutch, 
what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?

The silhouettes of historic McDonogh No. 11 School and Dixie Brewery were visible Friday beneath the branch of a downed tree near S. Roman Street...across a devastated landscape in the LSU Footprint.

"Entreat me not to leave thee"

Ruth's former house now stands alone, the last one on the entire block, a block which once sported over 20 structures.

From what I can tell, the Brown-Cassine family on Cleveland Avenue may be the last people living in the VA Footprint as of today.  Outer Banks continues to cling on - I was initially turned away from the road there this afternoon by a police officer, but later told that it was possible to walk in to the bar. 

Otherwise, except for the possibility of the small purple house on Cleveland and the gray house on S. Tonti where one would hear a dog barking, there's no one left of the hundreds of people who once called the neighborhood home.