On my way to studio

“But the boundaries of a real neighborhood are well known to the residents, even if they are not obvious to the casual passerby.”
-Greenbie


New Orleans is like a favorite old quilt; well-worn and faded, patched and mended. Each piece of the quilt tells a story about the past, a certain history that has been brought into the present. The quilt pieces all fit together, the mismatched swatches of cloth together form a beautiful whole. The seams of adjacencies are sometimes precise and rigid, other times it takes a second glance to see where one piece ends and the other begins. The neighborhoods in this city are like these patterned pieces. Each piece of this quilt has its own pattern, and this pattern is the architectural cues of each neighborhood.
My route from home to studio is like a drive across this pieced together quilt of New Orleans. Houses are the most prevalent building type along my route and each neighborhood has a certain type of house that starts to define the boundaries in a far more visible sense than the lines of streets on a map. The architectural cues that signal the transition of neighborhood begin with the houses. Because the historic neighborhoods all share common characteristics, the style, size, elements, and even color signify this threshold between neighborhoods as they change from one thing to something else.
Beginning Uptown, I make my way towards I-10 on Lousiana. I bypass the Central Business District and the French Quarter in terms of architectural engagement, travel through Marigny and end in Bywater. Almost at every turn, I cross over critical thresholds where the formal and informal edges of neighborhood are very tangible and yet informal. The architectural cues guide me to define their urban identities. It becomes less about looking at the boundaries of each neighborhood on a map and more about the inclusive feel that each neighborhood has as a built context.
Uptown begins upriver at the Garden District and formally stretches itself to Broadway. On my way towards Louisiana I pass well-kept shotgun and frame houses that are very consistent as a basic house type, yet create a distinctive communal style of architecture through their vernacular form. Even in the days of vinyl siding and Dryvit, these renovated houses have escaped the renovation trends of Middle American and kept their clapboard siding and old wooden front doors. For the most part, the paint is fresh and the small lawns tidy. The mostly one-story cottages create a low datum line while the Oak trees that line the streets create another datum line just above the first. The houses set back from the street behind several layers of space transitions from public to private conditions. First there is the street, then cars parked parallel to the street, followed by sidewalk, then sometimes a fence, then lawn, front porch, and finally the house.
When I turn onto Louisiana Avenue I leave behind the nostalgic charm of an urban neighborhood that has changed very little as it moved into the 21st century and cross over the first threshold of neighborhood divide. The narrow cross street widens to a two way street separated by a neutral ground and the mix of new and old residential and commercial buildings leaves the datum line created by the houses in Uptown behind. For the purposes of this analysis, I am defining this part of my route as the second of three parts. From my transition to Louisiana Avenue, even though I do technically pass through several neighborhoods if you were to look at a map, the architectural cues along Louisiana and Claiborne do not delineate change in perception of place.
Because this stretch of my route is a mix of houses and businesses, the scale of building is not consistent. The small shotgun houses are run-down with asphalt siding peeling from the wood frame and sagging front porches. They are arranged in small pockets, several in a row tucked between newer commercial buildings ranging from corner stores, to gas stations, to restaurants. Even though these streets are much larger and more heavily traveled the progression from public space to private space muddies together from porch to street with little transition.
Not only does scale shift during this section of my route, but the density changes as well. The unbroken rhythm of density that is highly visible in Uptown and then in Bywater is forgotten and clusters of buildings are followed by irregular stretches of emptiness. Perhaps these streets once had their own sets of architectural cues that created a consistent sense of place with its own boundaries and edges, but for now it seems like the thresholds exist as a way to designate the edge of something more defined. As I drive I feel like I am in some sort of nameless middle ground from one distinguishable neighborhood to the next.
The turn from Elysian Fields into the Bywater neighborhood is the third threshold of neighborhood in terms of architectural cues. The scale of buildings shifts back to being smaller and it creates an immediate sense of close community. The houses are close together and similar in size and shape; the local vernacular is more of a Creole cottage, symmetrical with shuttered windows and doors rather than the shotgun seen along the rest of my route. Many have elaborate color schemes that trickle down to the smallest details that remind me of the many artists that live here. The self-contained urban feel of coffee shops and markets silently intermingle with the houses, the houses and shops sharing the same street façade in height and setback from the street. There is an absence of the fences proclaim ownership that is seen Uptown and the steps leading to the front door lead directly to the sidewalk, porches and yard generally absent. This small difference of transition makes the community seem like it is a seamless whole, instead of plotted out sections defined by the fence created boundary lines.
New Orleans is a large city of small-town neighborhoods; each unique to one another while carrying the eclectic feel of old and new that makes the city what it is. As each neighborhood was settled by different groups of people, their own values and their own sense of what “home” was supposed to look like clearly came through into the architecture. Unlike the rest of America, these neighborhoods have retained the same architectural cues of style, size, and density through the changing times.