Category: Urban issues

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C’est Levee, or Once More Unto the Breach

It’s the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s whomping of the Gulf Coast. I’ve been down to New Orleans four times since then. I’ve tried to chronicle a little bit of the reconstruction, or at least my viewpoint on the progress.

My perspective is limited, of course. Amy’s family lives about 25 miles from the city, so the people I see the most down there talk more about the after-effects, not their own property loss. We’ve made trips into the city each visit, but mainly in the central business district and the French Quarter. I haven’t gone through the lower Ninth Ward in any of my visits, but I also don’t visit the South Bronx when I go to New York.

Or does the WTC site serve as a better analogy? Ray Nagin seemed to think so, when he contrasted NOLA’s rebuilding pace with the five-year span since the Twin Towers were knocked down: “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

It was a cheap shot, but Nagin’s a mentally unstable grandstander, so that needs to be factored in.

How does the city get rebuilt? Darned if I know. I wouldn’t exactly trust a “master plan” developed by the crooked politicos of Louisiana in concert with the ass-clowns in Washington, and the Army Corps of Engineers is already covering its ass about the possibility of the current levees being unable to handle another major storm. I’m having enough trouble just trying to settle on a color for my home office, since the official VM wife objects pretty violently to the deep green currently in place.

(Witold Rybczynski in Slate has a neat piece about how a new-urbanist project in Denver provides an example of how to start putting together neighborhoods, but it all presupposes that the neighborhoods aren’t built in a locale that’s existentially flood-prone.)

I’m having trouble coming up with anything to say that I haven’t gotten at already, so why don’t you, my dear readers, tell me what you make of New Orleans? A bunch of you came to visit in March for my wedding, but I want to hear from those of you who haven’t seen it, too. Tell me what you remember of the city, if you’ve been there before, what you thought if you’ve been there post-Katrina, and what you think of the ways and means of rebuilding a city that wasn’t in great shape before it’s cataclysm.

(Update: I know it’s hard to believe, but Ray Nagin has more to say!)

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Bush Saves New Orleans

Last night, we had CMT’s Hee Haw Weekend Marathon on while Amy worked up a dose of Emeril’s spicy tomato glaze. My parents didn’t watch Hee Haw much when I was a kid, although my dad developed an unhealthy attachment to Willie Nelson in the 1980s (unhealthy inasmuch as he really loved that duet with Julio Iglesias). My in-laws asked if I listened to Buck Owens. I told them I never did, but that Amy was pretty broken up when Owens died this year.

I made my first visit to a Wal-Mart yesterday. Where I live (northern NJ) it’s not a huge feat to avoid them; my grocery needs aren’t extensive and the only store I know of nearby is up in Western Samaria (aka Rt. 59 in NY state). Down here, it’s more of a necessity, especially post-Katrina. I took one step inside and Got It: huge, well-lit venue, cleaner than any of the local markets, good selection of food products. And then there’s all the other stuff: a family passed us with a shopping cart filled with food, back-to-school clothing, and a color inkjet printer. Wal-Mart doesn’t carry everything, of course.

In the “efnic food” aisle, we bumped into Amy’s cousin Wade, whom I last saw during his visit to NYC with his wife. He pines to retun to the city.

I always wonder about how different regions see each other. It reminds me of that scene in Annie Hall, when Woody Allen tells Tony Roberts, “Don’t you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, Communist, Jewish, homosexual, pornographers. I think of us that way, sometimes, and I live here!” But Wade really liked visiting, and no one down here’s given me any crap for, um, being who I am. Even if the housepet is a little judgemental.

The news here is focused on yesterday’s six murders — the murder rate is skyrocketing this year — but the top story is that Reggie Bush signed his rookie contract with the Saints. In the Times-Pic, it takes top billling over a misguided idea to build a “Jazz Park” to replicate Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Tonight, we’re staying in New Orleans at the same hotel we stayed in leading up to our wedding. I’m flooded with memories of last March, and so is Amy. We had a little snack (if that’s possible) at Café Du Monde, and reminisced about the end of our wedding evening. I love being in this city, but I have a hard time imagining how it’s going to recover from the disaster last year. I’m glad we did what we could to boost the economy via our friends’ alcohol consumption.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in mid-summer, so it’s kind of dead outside. I was hoping to get some good pictures, but there really isn’t much to see that I haven’t snapped in past trips. We’ll be dining at NOLA tonight, then getting up earlyish to fly home. If I do manage any good pix tonight, you’ll be the first to know.

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Highways, Byways, etc.

On Sunday, George Will offered a tribute to the Interstate Highway System, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this summer:

Eisenhower’s message to Congress advocating the interstate system began, “Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods.”

No legislator more ardently supported the IHS than the Tennessee Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Public Works subcommittee on roads. His state had benefited handsomely from the greatest federal public works project of the prewar period, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which, by bringing electrification to a large swath of the South, accelerated the closing of the regional development gap that had stubbornly persisted since the Civil War. This senator who did so much to put postwar America on roads suitable to bigger, more powerful cars was Al Gore Sr. His son may consider this marriage of concrete and the internal combustion engine sinful, but Tennessee’s per capita income, which was just 70 percent of the national average in 1956, today is 90 percent.

Meanwhile, a 3-ton slab of concrete fell inside Boston’s Big Dig tunnel, killing a passenger in a car. Evidently, this is not connected to the Big Dig concrete fraud case. But after going $12 billion over budget, you can imagine that corners had to be cut somewhere, right?

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Mile Low?

Witold Rybczynski has a new slideshow up at Slate, examining the architecture of Denver’s art museum, on the occasion of Liebeskind’s new addition, to be completed in September.

Whether you like this sort of mannered architecture is a matter of taste. Frank Gehry’s swirlings and churnings have always seemed lighthearted and whimsical, buoyed by an endearing take-it-or-leave-it quality. Libeskind’s forms strike me as aggressive. Standing in front of his building is like being buttonholed by someone shouting insistently in your face: And this! And this! And this!

I hope my “Denver correspondent” (that means you, Craig) will provide some comments on this.

(I really need to get around to reading his City Life sometime this summer, but it’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril for me right now, followed by Gilead.)

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Question of the Week

Since finishing that Robert Moses book last week, it’s been kinda tough for me to start another book. It’s as if I’m caught in its wake. I spent the last few days catching up on some long-form comics, like Eddie Campbell’s The Fate of the Artist, which I’m afraid left me flat. Compared to his most recent collection, After the Snooter, it was a distinct let-down.

I’ve also been catching up on magazines. Amy & I went on a subscription binge a few months ago, and now I’ve got the Virginia Quarterly Review and Foreign Affairs to beat me into submission.

Yesterday, unable to settle on a new book to read, I decided to go back and reread one of my favorites, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. (If you’re interested, there’s a neat piece in the Guardian about Stoppard’s new play, Rock ‘n’ Roll. It sounds pretty neat to me.)

What brought me back to Arcadia was the weird realization that, if you asked me what my favorite novel is, I would have no answer for you. Arcadia was a fave of mine upon a time, and it still resonates for me. In fact, if I had been immensely talented, it’s probably the piece I would have tried to write, given my interest in its subjects (chaos mathematics, the mistakes of history, English letters).

I can tell you what my favorite movie, my favorite comic, and my favorite record are (Miller’s Crossing, Little Italy and Stop Making Sense), but I’d have a devil of a time deciding on a favorite novel.

It’s not for lack of trying (here’s that list of all the books I’ve finished since 1989, when I started college). But there’ve been so many phases, and so many directions I’ve taken, that it’s really difficult for me to settle on a single novel. When I think of what I might have answered in years past (Gravity’s Rainbow, Tropic of Cancer, The Recognitions, Pale Fire, Invisible Cities, Going Native, Anna, Portnoy, Gatsby, Lolita, “Marcel”) I wonder what each answer tells me, and what changed that struck them from the top rank. (Fortunately, the “novel” requirement knocks out the Athenians, Homer, and Shakespeare, and that Arcadia. And if I have to pick a non-fiction book, it’d either be Ron Rosenbaum’s essays or that book on Robert Moses.)

For a moment, I tried to convince myself that it was somehow a universal problem afflicting our age, but I’m pretty sure it’s just me. Maybe I’ve oversatured myself with these books. Maybe I’ve simply become too fluid, or disconnected from the influences I thought I had. Maybe I need to — or already have — circumscribed my life in ways that keep some books from mattering so much to me.

Nowadays, I’m wondering if All the King’s Men is the book that speaks to me the most, or if it’s Gould’s Book of Fish. I’d better keep looking.

You, meanwhile, need to tell me what your favorite novel is, and what it means to you.