Parts of a Whole

The New Orleans culture is hard to define in single words. To an outsider the culture is limited to the food, the drinks, and the party. So much of the true identity of New Orleans is masked behind tourism and what tourists expect their experience to be in The Big Easy. Culinary traditions can give you a taste for the city, the sound of jazz can give you a voice to the city, the odor of Bourbon Street can give you an associative smell - but part of what defines New Orleans culture is captured only in the day to day and permeates through everything else. The houses, the neighborhoods, and the easy-going way of life is the heart of New Orleans.
After living here and seeing this city from the eyes of a local (albeit transient) rather than the eyes of a tourist, I realize how unique and unreplicable, how precious this
Place and its culture is. New Orleans is still shaking off the devastating effects of flood damage and struggling with luring the people back; not only just tourists but displaced residents. The people of New Orleans not only lost their house, they lost their home. The rebuilding of this city is not limited to the tourist experience of the French Quarter; if this was the case then Disney would have rebuilt New Orleans in their take on the city. The many neighborhoods that give this large city a small town feel and the people that live here are the parts of New Orleans culture that is most vulnerable to the effects of Katrina and the water that came with it.
With the loss of housing in New Orleans, there was a loss of a piece of the complex culture that will not be restored by reinhabiting its neighborhoods alone. When you see the damaged and abandoned houses, you can still see a glimpse of what they were like before. It is easy to give each house a story about who may have lived there and what their life was like, to wonder about how this house as a structure fit together with its neighbors to create a community unique to itself.
After a previous post on the architectural cues of neighborhoods as I drove from one point in the city to another, I began to think about what it was historically that gave each neighborhood its own rhythm, its own spatial indicators of place. Why were these neighborhoods built as they were and who were they built for? What role has the evolution of New Orleans as a large US city played on determining what these neighborhoods are like today? My initial observations made it impossible for me to ignore the missing pieces of what I didn’t know about these places and how each neighborhood is an essential piece to the city.