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Historic ward with grim future

New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward remains a lost neighborhood after Katrina for many who can least afford it

BY JOHN RILEY | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

October 11, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - It's an unholy mess inside Chester Lastie's mechanic's garage off North Robertson Avenue in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. No doubt about that.

A thick layer of foul-smelling muck coats the floor. Equipment is waterlogged. And even on a top shelf 10 feet high, prized records he saved from the younger days when he ran the Black Magic record shop on a nearby corner - B.B. King, Aretha, Lightnin' Hopkins, and resident Ninth Ward legend Fats Domino - are sodden, dirty, ruined.

So hopeless, he's dropped some in the mud.

"I always put one copy on the side to remember the good times," said Lastie, 63, a big, grizzled man, looking up from his work on a balky power washer with a wistful, hurt smile that reveals two missing front teeth. "Now, that's gone. Gone but not forgotten."

He has heard the talk that his beloved neighborhood, the "Lower 9," submerged by Hurricane Katrina, flooded again by Rita, still pooled with water a few blocks north, is gone too, just like the records. That the bulldozers will come and clear away huge chunks of the place where the poor blacks lived - the mud, the debris, the blocks of pancaked houses, abandoned cars, upside-down boats, and the memories, turning it into a park or a runoff basin.

It's something he can't imagine. "They'll be in trouble, a world of trouble, if they try to do that," he warns. "People would not move. The levee was busted. Why is that our fault?"

Race and class fault lines

Six weeks after the storm, no neighborhood in this ravaged city faces longer odds than the financially impoverished but culturally rich Lower Ninth - and none better reflects the fault lines of race and class, nature and economics tangled together in the debate over New Orleans' future.

Located on the east side of the breached Industrial Canal, it is one of the lowest-lying areas in the city - essentially, an old cypress swamp. It has flooded before, in 1965, during Hurricane Betsy, which took 81 lives. It is hemmed in by waterways and canals. Some scientists consider its topography hopeless, and warn that any attempts to raise it with fill would be equally hopeless because the underlying marsh would sink under the weight.

Hundreds of structures where its roughly 14,000 inhabitants lived have already been identified by the city as hazardous, and many more are overgrowing with mold. Scientists worry that it may have been inundated with toxic pollutants. More than 36 percent of its erstwhile residents live below the poverty line, leaving them with fewer resources to return and rebuild, and less leverage to hold out when insurers make settlement offers.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin has promised that any mass demolitions will follow consultations and development of a compensation formula, but he hasn't been encouraging about the future. Unlike the rest of the city, he still hasn't officially opened the Lower Ninth up for residents to come back, citing health and levee concerns.

"I don't think it can ever be what it was, because it's the lowest-lying area," Nagin warned last week.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson has been more direct. Predicting that New Orleans, which was 67 percent African-American before Katrina, will never again be as "black" as it was, Jackson told the Houston Chronicle after a recent meeting with Nagin, "I told him I think it would be a mistake to rebuild the Ninth Ward ... I'm not sure what we do with it."

Against the backdrop of a history of neglect, comments like that - and the delay in permitting re-entry - have triggered a sense of paranoia among those who lived there. Some speak darkly of long-standing efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers to take part of the neighborhood for an expansion of the Industrial Canal's navigation locks. Others complain that there has been little talk of demolition and abandonment of similarly low-lying areas laid waste by Katrina - neighborhoods like Lakeview or Gentilly, that are whiter or better off.

Demolition 'not an option'

And the few returnees like Lastie who have wangled a way back in see a message in the lack of clean-up activity to date. "Thirty days have passed, and nothing's been done," said Lastie's son Darrin, gesturing at the desolate streets around his father's compound. "I don't know why. ... If we can clean up Iraq, why can't we clean up the Ninth Ward?"

Representatives of the neighborhood say many houses can be rebuilt, and they won't give up without a fight. "Demolition is just not an option and I wish people would stop talking about it," said state Rep. Charmaine Marchand. "I don't want to hear that anymore. Our lives and our homes are priceless to us, just like everyone else. We're going to fight together."

For all of its geographic and social difficulties, the Ninth Ward in many ways defies stereotypes. It was poor and crime-and-drug ridden, but it had a higher rate of owner-occupied housing than the rest of the city - a product of intergenerational transfers dating back to the time of its settlement by recently freed slaves in the last half of the 19th century.

That, residents say, provided a sense of cohesion missing in other urban ghettos. "It's a close-knit neighborhood," said Tyrone Harrell, a steward at the Bethel AME Church on Caffin Avenue who drove in to take pictures of the damaged building last week. "Everyone ate at everyone else's house, you'd have gumbo and jambalaya and fried chicken."

Poor and rundown as it may have been in parts, others say, it played a critical role. It provided the housekeepers and busboys that a tourism-based economy needs. It produced artists and entertainers. And its rhythms had a profound cultural influence on the wider city that leave New Orleans as a kind of gentrified theme park if it disappears.

"What gave New Orleans its culture, its distinct character, are the people and the institutions in that community," said Dr. Silas Lee, a New Orleans pollster, political consultant and urban-studies expert. "That's what made it exotic."

In a sense, some believe, the debate over the Ninth Ward reflects a central dilemma for the city. In practical terms, it needs the people who lived in the Ninth Ward to work as laborers and fill low-wage jobs as it rebuilds around tourism. But, although some like Lastie may be ready to return, many others have settled elsewhere, and lack the funds to return or may hesitate to reinvest precious dollars in a neighborhood with an uncertain future, vulnerable to the next hurricane.

The option to relocate

So, ironically, to get the people back, some experts say, their neighborhood may have to be rethought, if not eliminated. Smaller flood-prone communities along the Mississippi River have been relocated before, said Jim Schwab of the American Planning Association, but never anything on the scale of the Ninth Ward, or with its distinctive racial and income characteristics.

"It's an option that has to be considered, but it's going to be a delicate operation," Schwab said.

Nagin has said the city will look at alternatives such as requiring buildings on stilts, or replacing low-lying housing with high-rises that have parking on the first several floors. Others would like to see an end to the concentration of poverty in the Ninth Ward, and favor scattering affordable housing around the city, in better neighborhoods on higher ground.

"The Ninth Ward is just an unsafe place to live, and we cannot make it safe and secure," said Russell Henderson, a long-time community activist in New Orleans who has formed a group called the Coalition to Rebuild Louisiana. "For me the culture of New Orleans is what we are, and it is going to die without the people of New Orleans. The only way we can preserve it is to move them to higher ground."