Words fail me
Monday after work, DH, Little Boy, and In-Laws and I drove into the city. I have been to New Orleans twice since we returned, but both times have been at night. This was my first visit to the city in the daytime.
We drove through Chalmette. 12,321 houses, destroyed.
Chalmette was a middle-income, mostly white suburb in St. Bernard Parish. I use the past tense deliberately. Chalmette is gone. Eight square miles of destruction. It's like somebody came in with wrecking balls and bulldozers. We drove through a fairly upscale neighborhood of 2000+ sf houses and they were uniformly demolished. No windows - they're all smashed. Garage doors broken in. Roofs collapsed. Brick walls shoved aside like Legos.
I have never seen anything like it. I saw it with my own eyes and I still can't believe it.
The main drag through Chalmette, Judge Perez Drive, becomes Claiborne when you cross the parish line. This is the famous Lower Ninth Ward. If anything, Lower 9 was worse than Chalmette, because the houses are closer together, smaller, and made of wood. The destruction was more complete - the houses were crushed into smaller piles, more difficult to recognize as places where people lived and worked and played and raised families and had roots.
Every house we saw in the Lower 9 had the symbols of last year's house-to-house searches. I don't know what the symbols meant. Numbers with circles and crosses. One house had sprayed on in green paint, "Dog Underneath."
Driving northwest on Claiborne, we crossed the Industrial Canal - one of the canals that was breached. On the other side of the canal, the landscape changed. The houses weren't demolished. I saw multiple waterlines on the raised foundations, but the houses were still standing. A gas station and a grocery store were open. A tent city made of bright blue FEMA tarps was set up in a vacant lot next to an aid center.
Miles away is the Sliver by the River. Uptown, the Garden District, the CBD and the Quarter: the high ground. Endymion rolled. Happy costumed people threw beads, while other happy costumed people caught them.
I understand the need for Mardi Gras. New Orleanians need to celebrate what makes the city unique. For all the folderol about "Royalty," Rex and his Queen, what dresses the members of the court will wear, and who is related to whom among the Upper Crust, Mardi Gras is really about The People. Without Mardi Gras, without crawfish boils and roast beef po boys and king cakes and Bacchus and Zulu and jazz and the blues, the people who make New Orleans work as a city have no reason to be here. Mardi Gras binds us, and brings them home, even if only for a day.
Today is Ash Wednesday, and the party is over.
We drove through Chalmette. 12,321 houses, destroyed.
Chalmette was a middle-income, mostly white suburb in St. Bernard Parish. I use the past tense deliberately. Chalmette is gone. Eight square miles of destruction. It's like somebody came in with wrecking balls and bulldozers. We drove through a fairly upscale neighborhood of 2000+ sf houses and they were uniformly demolished. No windows - they're all smashed. Garage doors broken in. Roofs collapsed. Brick walls shoved aside like Legos.
I have never seen anything like it. I saw it with my own eyes and I still can't believe it.
The main drag through Chalmette, Judge Perez Drive, becomes Claiborne when you cross the parish line. This is the famous Lower Ninth Ward. If anything, Lower 9 was worse than Chalmette, because the houses are closer together, smaller, and made of wood. The destruction was more complete - the houses were crushed into smaller piles, more difficult to recognize as places where people lived and worked and played and raised families and had roots.
Every house we saw in the Lower 9 had the symbols of last year's house-to-house searches. I don't know what the symbols meant. Numbers with circles and crosses. One house had sprayed on in green paint, "Dog Underneath."
Driving northwest on Claiborne, we crossed the Industrial Canal - one of the canals that was breached. On the other side of the canal, the landscape changed. The houses weren't demolished. I saw multiple waterlines on the raised foundations, but the houses were still standing. A gas station and a grocery store were open. A tent city made of bright blue FEMA tarps was set up in a vacant lot next to an aid center.
Miles away is the Sliver by the River. Uptown, the Garden District, the CBD and the Quarter: the high ground. Endymion rolled. Happy costumed people threw beads, while other happy costumed people caught them.
I understand the need for Mardi Gras. New Orleanians need to celebrate what makes the city unique. For all the folderol about "Royalty," Rex and his Queen, what dresses the members of the court will wear, and who is related to whom among the Upper Crust, Mardi Gras is really about The People. Without Mardi Gras, without crawfish boils and roast beef po boys and king cakes and Bacchus and Zulu and jazz and the blues, the people who make New Orleans work as a city have no reason to be here. Mardi Gras binds us, and brings them home, even if only for a day.
Today is Ash Wednesday, and the party is over.
2 Comments:
I thought it was oyster po boys.
But the destruction - if it was just water rising how did everything get crushed and moved? Was the water flowing through that fast?
The part of the Lower 9th Ward Ann refers to had water rushing in from levee breaches to the north (along the "Mr. Go" canal) and to the west (along the Industrial Canal). Chalmette had water rushing in from multiple breaches along Mr. Go, to the north of town. Farther away from the breaches (and closer to the river), the destruction isn't as complete, as it was due to rising water. It only took a few hours for the water to reach the gutters. The area right up against the breach on the 17th Street Canal, in wealthy, lily white Lakeview, had similar devastation.
A good many of the "Chalmatians" will return home. They're a tough, blue-collar bunch down there in da Parish, and they like where they live. They get made fun of by the white-collar white people in the rest of the area, something I've never really bought into. However, a good many of those folks likely will remain in St. Tammany Parish, where Ann and I reside. Maybe we'll even get our own Rocky and Carlos.
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