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.

My Soggy New Home

New Orleans is a sinking island. The Mississippi River hugs one side of the city, Lake Pontchartrain the other, while the city itself sits on top of more water.
Historically, New Orleanians have learned to avoid this seemingly inescapable part of nature. The first settlers built on higher ground in the city so as to lower the risk of flooding. Most houses, including the one in which I live, sit on top of brick piers designed to let the water in, and then let it out just as easily. The development of a levee system allowed for more of this water to disappear and was successful in blocking the sight of water, if nothing else.
Water has become the proverbial elephant sitting in the corner of the room. Every time I lift my eyes from my aerial view map (which I thought showed a lot of blue…) and my eyes focus on the lack of visible water, I feel like I have walked into the middle of an ongoing argument between New Orleans and Water, and New Orleans is trying to put on a dry outward appearance.
For a city whose existence is interwoven with the water that surrounds it, I'll admit I felt a little bit cheated when I first moved here. I grew up in a town nestled next to the Ohio River. The river has always been an unfaltering reference point to where I am, always visible despite the system of flood walls and flood gates because of the hilly terrain. Unlike the Ohio River that rushes past my hometown, the Mississippi River is not terrifically impressive as it flows past downtown New Orleans. For the Mississippi, it is actually pretty narrow between the French Quarter and Algiers Point, a historic part of the city connected by ferry and bridge. The Lake is beautiful, but off the beaten path. The only water I really see on a daily basis is the rain. And it does rain consistently.
The humidity in the air should have given me an idea of just how much water this thick air can hold. New Orleanians have grown accustomed to the quite literal ebb and flow of these bucketing downpours. I, however, have not. When it rains, the street flooding is like the city’s reminder that yes, there is a lot of water lurking around here. Hard rains tend to provoke water out of its hiding places to create flashfloods like I have never seen before.
Earlier this month on a rainy afternoon, I decided to go see a movie at the IMAX theater on Canal Street. I left the side street where I live and headed to St. Charles. Like crossing over an invisible line, I was suddenly driving in several inches of water. The steady afternoon rain had transformed St. Charles into a river bounded by the concrete curb of the neutral ground and banquette. I was amazed. How could this have happened? The only flash floods that I have encountered have been along the rural roads adjacent to the Ohio River, never on a street in the middle of a city. I looked at the cars parked alongside the still flowing traffic and water was approaching the tops of the wheels. Why was everyone still driving forward? Was I the only one who had heard countless times not to drive through water covered roadways?
There was a car from out of state pulled up onto the neutral ground, the driver and passenger leaning out of their rolled-down windows at the new river that had formed around them in awe. Yet, the New Orleanians drove on like seasoned veterans. They knew that this water would recede just as quickly as it had appeared, and that they could wait it out or keep driving. I, on the other hand, felt like someone from the Deep South must feel like driving through a winter snowstorm - complete inexperience.
I pulled what little history I knew about New Orleans from my mind, and figured that since I was heading toward the French Quarter, and that pocket of the city had been settled on higher ground for this specific reason, I would eventually be able to turn onto a dry street. As I got closer and closer to this historic safe haven, the water level changed from river to stream to puddle. And after crossing over the invisible line that ended this street flood the same as it had started, the water of this city became just as invisible until the next time it feels it has been
forgotten.

Be A New Orleanian. wherever you are.

People have a tendency to associate their own mental images and ideas with different places. It’s a way to give yourself a definition of an unknown or to create a snapshot of a memory so you can visit it time and again.
This type of word and image association comes naturally when you think about a city as unique as New Orleans. People all over America, all over the world, have a vivid idea of what this city looks like and feels like even if it is a place unvisited thousands of miles away. Maybe it comes from being a city steeped in cultures and traditions so foreign to the rest of the country. The food, the music, the architecture…Mardi Gras…are all so symbolic of this place and so unlike Anywhere, USA. The after effects of Hurricane Katrina introduced a whole new set of associations to New Orleans. Images of devastation and rebuilding have added to the long list of definitions of what New Orleans is.
Being from a small town hundreds of miles from New Orleans, my own associations of “place” with New Orleans were based on hearsay and pictures. I immediately of Mardi Gras and the wild times I had heard of. I pulled images from my mind from media coverage after the levees broke and the city was under water. I thought of the taste of Jambalaya and the sounds of Jazz music.
Arriving in New Orleans I was confronted with all of these preconceived notions about what makes this city “who” it is and what makes someone a true New Orleanian. The blight and disrepair I expected was confirmed as was the sense of abandonment. Fresh coats of paint and new roofs became symbols of hope for the future. However, I soon realized that buildings and landscape were not the only things that made up my definition of New Orleans. Sometimes a person can embody all that is New Orleans as well.
On the night of August 29, (a date that will forever be associated with this city) in Tipitina’s, (a place that symbolizes the past and present of this city’s culture and spirit), there was a New Orleanian I think of as The Tambourine Lady. She has created a new association for this city for me, one of the spirit of the New Orleanian. My previous ideas of what makes this city weren’t tossed aside, but sewn together and brought to life.
In her “No Evacuee Left Behind” t-shirt, tambourine in hand and clapping, she danced to the jazz music through the crowded audience. Completely at home, the Tambourine Lady was like a wave of energy through the crowd. Her spirit was contagious to everyone that she paused by to share her music. In this hot, crowded space somehow she never broke a sweat; never let her bright smile fade from her face. As the night wore on and people grew tired and the atmosphere lulled, her liveliness remained a constant. The rhythm of the music mixed with the beat of her tambourine made me feel like I was catching a glimpse of what New Orleans is all about, who a New Orleanian really is, and the spirit of this city.