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If you’ve got a spare fifteen or twenty minutes, and you can stomach it, take the time to remind yourself that New Orleans’s fate still hangs in the balance. Look at these gut-wrenching videos documenting the rebuilding effort in six of the city’s neighborhoods: Broadmoor, Gentilly, Lakeview, the Lower 9th Ward, Mid City, and St. Bernard Parish. I’m not a huge fan of disaster voyeurism, but these films are, I think, very well done. A couple of them are even pretty upbeat.
2 comments
March 25, 2008 at 1:01 pm
shadowcook
I’m in New Orleans at the moment. This is my third annual trip here and each time I visit I notice the population has increased, more stores are opened, more public services operate, more restaurants have reopened, and the traffic on certain streets makes it harder and harder to jaywalk. It never used to be so hard to cross Magazine around Jefferson. But my range of operations covers relatively little ground: uptown, the quarter, and up Poydras to a little beyond Rampart. When I stop someone for directions, I’m sent the long way around to avoid pockets of perceived danger. Where I walk, you don’t see anything like the conditions you see in the videos Ari posted a link to. If my landlady hadn’t taken me on my annual tour, I wouldn’t have known how much of the city still looked like a bombed city.
The best news about the place doesn’t get much play in the national press. First, the Clinton Bush Foundation and the Gates Foundation are pouring money into the city to build new library buildings over the next few years. They’re planning a new institution for the city’s musical history. Material relating to music in New Orleans from all the city’s archives and libraries will be gathered housed in one spot. Another one for the city’s culinary history is in the works.
Young people from all over the country are flying in during their spring breaks to work for Habitat for Humanity. Just the other day, 240 students from UMass Amherst alone left after spending a week helping to rebuild houses, including one once rented by an elderly woman and now owned by her in the lower Ninth Ward. When I arrived at the airport on Easter Sunday, I saw groups of college students all over the terminal and wondered who they were and what they were doing there. Now I know.
April 7, 2008 at 5:39 am
The Edge of the American West:
[…] recently “found” James Baldwin on the You Tubes and these short films on the still unreconstructed post-Katrina New Orleans are a “must see.” Furthermore, if […]