Katrina: After the Flood (15 page)

The Wood pump made New Orleans East possible, but first came the interstate, which did nearly as much to reshape the geography of New Orleans. It would have been unthinkable to build an elevated highway above St. Charles Avenue or Magazine Street. Yet that’s what happened on the other side of town in the 1960s, when city fathers mapped the I-10 through the center of Tremé. “A white man’s highway through the black man’s bedroom,” said one critic on the losing end of that fight. The interstate was built directly over Claiborne Avenue, the commercial center of black New Orleans. In its day, Claiborne was a handsome boulevard of large oak trees, lined with businesses, most of them black owned. By the time of Katrina, it was a strip of vacant storefronts under a thick slab of elevated concrete thrumming with traffic. Lewis judged it as nothing short of “murder.”

Lewis was still researching his book when billboards sprang up on the I-10 advertising the newly christened New Orleans East. Speculators were homesteading large stretches of cypress swamp on either side of the interstate just past the new High Rise Bridge that carried people over the Industrial Canal, heading east toward the Gulf Coast. The pitch was simple: a small patch of suburban paradise inside the city limits and only a twenty-minute drive from downtown. Yet the geographer read in horror the promotional materials used to sell this large swath sandwiched between two giant bodies of water—Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain. On twenty square miles of spongy, low-lying, flood-prone land, developers imagined a community of 250,000 people. Advertisements played up the golf courses and nearby marinas “but remain strangely quiet about hurricanes,” Lewis wrote. The East had been inundated with water after Hurricane Betsy in 1965. It had flooded again four years later after Hurricane Camille. Yet both those storms had supposedly delivered only glancing blows to the city.

Coastal erosion added to Lewis’s worries about a city he judged as having “deficient land controls.” The marshy wetlands of the Louisiana coast were a natural buffer against storm surge—the tidal wave of water that accompanies a strong hurricane.
^I
Yet the wetlands were disappearing at a rate of twenty-five to thirty square miles per year. The US Army Corps of Engineers was partly to blame, starting with the choices it had made decades earlier when it first designed the area’s flood-protection system. The same levee system that protects New Orleans from the Mississippi River also prevents the wetlands from replenishing themselves. The sediment the river would otherwise be depositing at the mouth of the Mississippi was now ending up on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The Corps also built the MR. GO shipping channel, which caused more deterioration. Another culprit were the navigation lanes the oil and gas interests carved through coastal Louisiana to construct pipelines and move their heavy machinery to and from the area. These man-made canals caused salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to spill into the freshwater wetlands, killing freshwater plants that held the soil in place, causing more erosion. No longer were a hurricane’s high winds the greatest threat, Lewis concluded, but the “murderous tidal wave” that one of these blasts off the Gulf Coast could provoke.

When Lewis returned to New Orleans in the early 2000s to work on a sequel to
New Orleans
, he was disheartened. Everywhere he looked, the geographer saw a long list of afflictions: crime, declining schools, a “grinding poverty, especially among black citizens.” He found a city even more segregated and more intolerant than when he’d left it. “As in most other big American cities,” Lewis wrote, “New Orleans’s main malady is racial.”

Yet physical threats to the city were the ones that most alarmed Lewis. He had left New Orleans in the mid-1970s hoping that more rational voices would defeat what he called the “unrestrained greed by land sellers and house builders,” but by the start of the new century,
nearly a hundred thousand people lived in New Orleans East. To drive home his point about the vulnerability of those living in the East and other low-lying areas, he cited an article appearing in
Scientific American
near the end of 2001, “Drowning New Orleans.” “New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen,” its author, Mark Fischetti, wrote. “If a big slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water.”

MIDDLE-CLASS WHITES WERE THE
first to settle into the early subdivisions being built in New Orleans East. A couple could purchase a four-bedroom, three-bath home with a nice expanse of backyard for less than half of what it would cost Uptown. Lakeview was closer to the center of town, but the homes there were more expensive and generally smaller.

Inevitably, blacks with money visited those model homes developers had built for prospective home buyers. The passage of fair-housing laws in the 1960s reduced aggressive discrimination, and mortgages—in part because of Liberty and the two small black-owned competitors that followed—were becoming easier for African Americans to secure. “Black people were testing the rules, testing the market,” Alden McDonald said. “First it’d be one house in a community, then a second, then a third.” The McDonalds moved to New Orleans East right after they were married, in 1974.

New Orleans East in the late 1970s was a kind of racial nirvana. There the middle class and upper-middle class, black and white, lived side by side and seemed to want more or less the same thing. “It was like suburbia on steroids,” said Beverly McKenna, a black woman who moved to a subdivision called Lake Willow Estates in 1977. “You could fish in the lake. There was a beautiful shopping center. Everyone not black. Everyone not white. Life.” A graduate of Indiana University, McKenna had taught high school English before quitting to raise a family. Her husband, Dwight, was a surgeon. Their neighbors, whatever their race, were lawyers and accountants and junior executives commuting each morning to a downtown office tower. “That’s what makes me so sad and angry,” McKenna said. “It was such a beautiful little community.”

McKenna and her husband started noticing the
FOR SALE
signs shortly after they moved in. The tipping point, McKenna eventually figured out, was when nearly as many black families lived in a subdivision as white ones. Alden McDonald called it a “round two of white flight”—the transformation of New Orleans East into an almost all-black community.

“We were people moving in who had as much money as they did,” said McKenna, who within the decade would revive the
New Orleans Tribune
as a monthly newspaper. “We were as well educated. We spoke the same English. We drove the same cars. But these people were moving because of us.” She thought of a neighbor, a white man, who lived in a large, white antebellum home that made McKenna, a northerner, think of a southern plantation. A good-natured man, he stayed longer than most, but that only meant she had more time to eye him mistrustfully. “I barely said hello to him,” McKenna said. “It was a defense mechanism. I didn’t feel very welcome and so I wasn’t very welcoming myself.”

Yet a new and more modern New Orleans was the animating idea that gave life to the East, not integration. The area was “still a magnet for strivers and achievers,” according to J. B. Borders, who after Katrina wrote a long feature about the East for the
New Orleans Tribune
. “The outlines of an Afropolitan utopia could be glimpsed.” There was an ice-skating rink where Beverly McKenna and the other moms would bring their children. There were upscale restaurants and “whatever you wanted to buy, you could find out in the East,” McKenna said. The former teacher praised the local schools. The city’s successful black entrepreneurs and some of its ballplayers and even a televangelist moved into Eastover, a gated community of McMansions boasting its own golf course. Meanwhile, the city’s postal workers and clerks and truck drivers bought in Little Woods and Pines Village, where the homes tended to be small, tidy cottages. They were the children of the hotel and restaurant workers who made the city run, the offspring of its elevator operators and custodians. The East, Alden McDonald said, meant that for “the first time in New Orleans history, the African-American community had seen significant wealth creation that they could hand down to the next generation.”

Yet other changes came to the neighborhood once its population
shifted from white to black. Landlords who once only rented to aspiring young professionals were now happy to accept the government’s Section 8 vouchers and house lower-income residents. Eventually so many poor people were living in the apartment buildings along the service roads and main arteries that, at the time of Katrina, according to one community group, 40 percent of the city’s government-subsidized housing was located in New Orleans East. The retail face of the community also changed. Pawnbrokers and check cashers and payday lenders opened storefronts at the bottom of the off-ramps. So, too, did Dollar General, Family Dollar, and the Dollar Tree. The East had a Maison Blanche and a D. H. Holmes, two of the area’s frillier department stores, but both shut their doors. A Sears closed down, and so, too, did a Dillard’s. Lake Forest Plaza was open when Katrina hit but was already dying before it was drowned under eight feet of water.

McDonald was part of a group that organized to fight for the East in the early 2000s. On Wednesday nights, people would meet in a conference room at Liberty Bank, trying out their ideas for bringing higher-quality restaurants, better stores, and amenities to the East. Liberty funded a study to document the great sums of discretionary income sloshing around New Orleans East. A second one showed how the East had become a dumping ground for the city’s problems. McDonald, who often pitched the businesses they were trying to lure to the East, had even put up some of his own money to open a twelve-screen movie theater on the site of the old Sears parking lot. The city put up several million dollars in federal redevelopment money as well in what McDonald characterized as a “risky venture” to prove that New Orleans East was a community worth investing in. “We were very close to getting some national restaurants out here,” McDonald said. “We were getting close on some big retail. And then Katrina hit.”

CASSANDRA WALL WAS AS
shocked as anyone else that she bought in New Orleans East. Wall had always seen herself as an Uptown girl even if technically she grew up in Central City, on the woolly fringes of the Garden District. Central City suggested black and low income, but though there was no denying her skin color, she had not grown up poor.
Her father was a contractor who made good money buying and restoring dilapidated properties, her mother an English teacher who taught all her girls to enunciate and drilled them in good grammar. Wall grew up a few blocks from St. Charles and attended the Xavier University Preparatory School, a fancy Catholic girls’ high school on Magazine Street. Even the grand, two-story Victorian home they grew up in set the Walls apart from most of their Central City neighbors. This 150-year-old jewel had been restored by their father, who had kept the original chandeliers, the flocked wallpaper, and the crown moldings. Like any good Uptown family, they ate on china and drank from crystal during formal meals.

“I’ve always appreciated the finer things in life,” Cassandra said. “We’re all that way.” Yet she was a public school teacher who earned extra money teaching composition and literature at Xavier and the University of New Orleans. She had married a hospital technician. The finer things in life would mean a two-story, three-bedroom, two-bath home in New Orleans East for under $200,000.

Cassandra Wall was the oldest of four girls—or five if you included her cousin Robyn Braggs, whom they all referred to as a fifth sister. Growing up, Cassandra was the child in the corner reading a book, the rule-follower who never got into trouble. All the girls heard it growing up: Why can’t you be more like Cassandra?

“The perfect pill,” cousin Robyn said of Cassandra.

Cassandra attended Xavier University, a ten-minute drive from their house, and then moved West when offered a fellowship to the University of Oregon. There she earned a master’s in English literature and secured teaching jobs at Portland State and a local community college. Cassandra moved back to New Orleans in the 1980s after an eight-year stint on the West Coast that included a first marriage that ended in divorce.

Cassandra’s sister Tangeyon—Tangee—was the first Wall sister to move to New Orleans East. In 1982 Tangee and her then husband, both still in their twenties, bought a three-bedroom, two-bath, in Little Woods. A decade later, they traded up to Eastover—a gated community where for $400,000 or $500,000 you could buy the same-size house that would cost $2 million Uptown. The black aristocracy lived in Eastover.

Cassandra followed Tangee to the East in 1990. She lived briefly in a three-bedroom, two-bath house she bought for $65,000 before remarrying and moving to Tamaron Estates, a more upscale subdivision that ranked somewhere between Little Woods and Eastover economically. Her youngest sister, Talmadge, whom they called Petie, followed her sisters when a year later she and her husband bought a home near Cassandra’s. The final Wall sister, Contesse, bought in the East a year after that. Robyn followed a few years later when she bought around the corner from Petie.

Petie, the baby, was more of a party girl. “She could’ve excelled if she pushed herself a little harder,” Cassandra tsk-tsked. The sisters had the usual assortment of resentments, tensions, and buried feelings that form among any group of siblings. The others loved Contesse, but she could also be exhausting. “It’s always been Contesse against the world,” Petie said. Tangee, the second born, had always been the intrepid one. She was the leader who had the others following her even when they were small. That was also the role Contesse sought for herself. “Contesse wants to be in charge,” Robyn said. Corrected Petie, “She
thinks
she’s in charge.”

Yet it would be challenging to find a group of five women any closer or more similar in their likes and habits. New Orleans East stretched along a half dozen highway exits, yet the five sisters all chose homes off the same one. None lived more than a few minutes’ drive from the others. All of them lived what Petie called “the Big Easy lifestyle: if you have the money, you spend it and enjoy it.” You saw it in the $400 shoes they sometimes bought or the cars they drove (“We only act like we’re rich,” said Robyn). Sunday nights meant dinner back in Central City, where their mother always used the good china and the heavy silverware. They had their standing Thursday-night dinners, and after Cassandra remarried, Petie’s three kids had a younger cousin. Almost every day, or so it seemed, some combination of them were coming together. The husbands got along, and the sisters and their cousin also had entanglements through a variety of partnerships they’d formed. Cassandra helped Tangee with an art business she ran on the side, which required the occasional trip to Europe together. Petie illustrated a children’s book Contesse wrote and self-published through a company she named Four Walls of Success. And it seemed practically every week that at least
several of them would get together for one of their epic shopping expeditions. “That’s when we really had fun,” Petie said.