Posted on 10/18/2005 12:26:07 PM PDT by CedarDave
Around New Orleans, the Ninth Ward has always been the butt of jokes. "Oh, you're from the Ninth Ward. Sorry about that."
If you lived in the Ninth Ward, you were considered a little less intelligent, a little less sophisticated, a little less likely to succeed. You were no match for the folks in Mid City or Uptown or Gentilly or Lakeview. Your speech lingered on the inexact and immediately gave you away. Your blue-collar family probably existed just a step or two above poverty.
Well, I was born in the Ninth Ward. Raised there. Graduated from Catholic elementary and high schools.
Since Katrina ruined much of New Orleans, especially the Ninth Ward, I have been torn about the future of my old neighborhood. Should they bulldoze the Ninth Ward and start all over? Should they rebuild those thousands of shotgun houses with an uninterrupted view in the front door and out the back door? Some people consider those shotguns historic and architecturally unique. To me, they're marginal.
The Ninth Ward is probably the city's largest political subdivision. It begins just a few blocks south of the French Quarter and extends to St. Bernard Parish and a community named Arabi. The Mississippi River borders the ward on the west and the Industrial Canal, also called the Intracoastal Canal, a major shipping route between the river and the Gulf of Mexico, slices the ward approximately in half. The levees of the river and the canal tower above the ward's homes and businesses.
During World War II, when I was growing up, I used to sit on my front porch on Franklin Avenue and watch German prisoners of war being trucked to Camp Leroy Johnson on Lake Pontchartrain about four miles away (it's the present day site of the University of New Orleans).
In high school, I frequently jogged on the Mississippi River and Industrial Canal levees. (One of them gave way during Katrina's fury; the storm severely damaged my old high school and buried in sewage-laden water the shotgun house where I had lived. The nursing home where 30 elderly people died after being abandoned by the staff and owners was a short distance from my former home.)
Throughout the Ninth Ward back then, before the Civil Rights movement, blacks and whites frequently lived next door to each other. I had a Times Picayune morning paper route in a solidly black Lower Ward neighborhood, collected the bills mostly in cash every Saturday and never had a problem. But in high school at Holy Cross, I was beaten by a group of black guys during a Mardi Gras night parade on the edge of the French Quarter. I still carry a scar on the back of my head from that encounter.
After three years service in the paratroops, I joined the New Orleans police department - both were expected and honorable pursuits for young men in the Ninth Ward back then. I don't know what the crime rate, poverty rate, school dropout rate and other social measurements for New Orleans were back then. But I learned quickly that the city had several extremely bad neighborhoods. There was the white Irish Channel, the white St. Thomas housing project on the other side of the French Quarter from the Ninth Ward, and the Ninth Ward's own white and black Desire housing projects, separated by an open drainage canal.
As a cop, I was stationed outside the first school to be integrated in New Orleans; white people from the projects spit on us and cursed us.
As a member of a tactical unit and as a canine cop (I had a black German Shepherd named Jet), I became very familiar with every city neighborhood, including the French Quarter and the Garden District. I knew where I could corner men with illegal guns and hidden stolen property. I knew where there was violence.
Since those years, New Orleans has steadily slid downward. Incompetence overtook the public schools. Poverty dominated many of the city's neighborhoods. The city's politicians earned the dishonor of being inept. More and more cops became the bad guys.
The crime rate, particularly drug dealing and violent offenses such as rape and murder, have taken on amazing proportions. Tourists, protected in the Garden District by an abundance of cops, risked their lives if they wandered just a block or two too far.
Since Katrina, reporters and columnists have described New Orleans as a fantasy land, as if the entire city is the French Quarter and the Garden District. They talked of the wonderful jazz and the bawdiness in the Quarter. There is a little jazz, particularly at the famed Preservation Hall, but much of Bourbon Street is T-shirt shops and second-class restaurants offering poor food at exorbitant prices. The only bawdiness comes from young tourists who leave their social restraints at home and feel free to expose their breasts. New Orleans citizens rarely, if ever, go on Bourbon Street.
So what should they do with the neighborhoods, especially the Ninth Ward, left uninhabitable by Katrina?
A few neighborhoods that are not so sodden with crime and poverty maybe should be rebuilt as they were. What I believe should be done with the Ninth Ward will never happen politically: they should plow under the neighborhood, truck out the debris and drastically redesign the ward and its culture.
Took your link (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1504707/posts?page=15#15) and posted a thread on it here. Thanks.
ping
NOLA..here's your next police chief..
To rebuild the Ninth Ward would be to rebuild a ghetto. Is that what they (the 'Rats) want?
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this ward!
Here's hoping the new Ninth Ward is a drastic improvement over the old one.
I would put this guy pretty high on my "don't f**k with this man" list.
There are [or were] two uniquely fabulous houses in the Lower Ninth Ward ... the Doulot "Steamboat" houses. They nestle up right against the Mississippi River levee. They should, and must, be saved.
Having grown-up in the 7th ward and 9th ward, this is as unbiased and accurate as I've read in my life. I don't think anyone could have written it better. Great post and excellent read!
New Orleans is the northernmost city in the Carribean. For all the local color and the great nabes (Faubourg Marigny and Bywater aren't mentioned here I notice) there is a sh-tload of poverty, crime and corruption. I love the place, but it has been quite dicey for some time.
Out of curiosity, where did the Italians live in the city?
This has to be explained. Holy Cross was a predominately white Catholic High School where the students had to wear uniforms, which was always the case in ALL New Orleans Catholic schools. The public school kids NEVER wore uniforms. They would target the Catholic school kids, especially blacks, and beat 'em up. It was payback, I guess, for being better then them. In New Orleans, one would call it the black “crabs in a barrel” syndrome.
Faubourg Marigny is separated from the French Quarter by Esplanade and has been relatively gentrified in the past 30 years or so.
In the early 20th Century, the Industrial Canal was cut from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, bisecting the 9th Ward. "Bywater" is a gentrified euphemism for the UPPER 9th Ward [the portion west of the Industrial Canal]. The LOWER 9th Ward is east of the Industrial Canal.
The question is not whether New Orleans should be "drastically redesigned" or not - the water has assured that. The question is how politics will affect the rebuilding, and whether the result will be government funded "project" housing or whether people will spend their own money for the real estate, and develop it in economically and socially viable ways.
I think mostly uptown, near the Irish channel. And remember, the Irish (and some Italians) were historically used to drain the swamps due to the high mortality rate amongst slaves.
I know. I was literally thrown out of a bar on Frenchman Street once.
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