New Orleans: Restoration Of Body And Soul

René Franzen’s hip boots were not tall enough as he waded through the filthy post-Katrina flood waters toward his office. Later that night, his soaked body was inflamed and his skin had peeled away due to the deathly water that contained not only human sewage, rats and snakes, but the battery acid that leaked from thousands of flooded cars.

City Park Director Paul Sonia was not allowed back into New Orleans and his beloved City Park for three weeks after the disaster. Finally, being one of the first to return, he found that a prized 200-year-old magnolia had been dragged by the National Guard to the gates of the Louisiana Museum in order to prevent looting.

Debbie Patrick had been meticulously restoring Hurst House, a historical classical Greek revival plantation home close to the levee, which contained the largest and most important collection of Louisiana antiques and paintings extant outside the museum. During Katrina, it was completely swamped. But she and her husband managed to get a barge docked next to the house to unload and dry out its venerable contents.

Countless deaths, months of no electricity, no running water and no transportation, followed by a hot and humid drought, brought desperation, disease and rot. The “Big Easy,” with its history for casual debauchery, facile corruption and inebriated inattention to dissolute poverty was not only brought to its knees, it was tackled headlong and lay prostrate.

Yet so many quietly informed me during a trip in early April—as I toured houses, gardens, parks and schools with the Garden Conservancy Fellows Tour—that it took this kind of appalling calamity to expose and completely reverse this city’s rotten-to-the-core ethos.

A city that used to shrug off corruption now has a galvanized citizenry who will no longer stand for it. A crumbling infrastructure, once allowed to sustain itself through graft and cronyism, is being forcefully addressed. The direction of this city has made a dramatic about-face and is now a remarkably altered environment from the New Orleans I visited 10 years ago.

The city has been literally cleaned up. Even Bourbon Street, with its “sin city” reputation, seems more benign. Running in the early morning, I did notice bleach-sprinkling trucks washing the spewed remnants of the night’s merriment and the absence of the magnolia trees and moss, due to the deathly days of standing water. But the live oaks still stand ancient, muscular and strong.

It seems as though the city has just received a fresh coat of paint. And it has through the infusion of federal and charitable funds.

The Ninth Ward is still a humbling sight. Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, whose mission is to rebuild playgrounds, schools and homes that are “aesthetically advanced, affordable, green and durable” has been enormously successful. Sadly, so many of the refugees from the Ninth Ward cannot be found to return to claim their lands—1,000 of the 1,800 who died in New Orleans were from the Ninth Ward.

Pre-Katrina, New Orleans had the worst public school education system in the country and the largest percentage of illiteracy in any American city. The families that have returned have discovered a renewed vitalization of the system. For instance, the Samuel J. Green Charter School founded the Edible Schoolyard, which integrates hands-on organic gardening and seasonal cooking into the curriculum, “cultivating a school environment that promotes a sense of pride and responsibility for our land and natural resources.” The program also involves parents and entire families in the process.

From a designer’s perspective, this city still offers up one of the largest still intact, historically important collections of magnificent architecture in the United States. This was always an enormously wealthy city, with the sophisticated layer of French taste, the unabashed ornamentation of the Spanish and the eccentric, yet practical, accents of the colonial West Indies. Many great houses were built. Many great neighborhoods were built. And due to the stifling climate—doors, windows and ceilings were built tall, attenuated and elegant.

Unafraid to adorn with classical ornament, New Orleans is almost the opposite of the restrained New England sensibility. A lavish sensuality suffuses these painted clapboard homes and the decorating celebrates a traditional sensibility with southern comfort and a huge dash of silk, damask and fringe.

Because the air can also be replete with the smells of rot, the southerners have always treasured their sweet smelling plants. Jasmine, magnolia and gardenia cloud the stench-filled air with perfume. And small fountains tucked away in each city garden (always harboring some sentimental statue) are a must. These fountains help to muffle the city’s noisy din.

Not since the 1980s have I seen such liberal use of swags, jabots and crystal chandeliers. But when you are talking about an Italianate mansion—completed in 1859 by Colonel Robert Short with 16-foot ceilings, 18-inch-deep plaster moldings and the famous cornstalk cast iron fence surrounding it—a 42-inch-diameter Irish chandelier seems appropriate. The appropriately named Garden District is filled with such homes. These owners view their lifestyle as stewardships, not ownership. They are but the most recent caretakers of previous generations of the “fine” ancestral (and often scandalous) families.

As Mimi Read, much published author for the New York Times told me, “We in New Orleans have a different world than the rest of the nation. We have our music, our food and our houses. This is our heritage. We treasure it and we endeavor to preserve it.”

Perhaps the most intact personal house museum in the country is Longue Vue House and Gardens, the former home of Edgar and Edith Stern, power brokers and policy makers of the 20th century. Down to the shoes in the closet, this magnificent Colonial revival plantation-style home—with the restored gardens of legendary landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman—is as complete a vision of the life well lived in the mid-20th century as one could possibly research. After Katrina, The Garden Conservancy sent funds and a dream team (including Marco Polo Stefano) of gardeners to help clear the historic garden of massive debris, then replant and support the almost defeated spirit. It is now completely restored.

New Orleans has experienced more than 18 hurricanes, category three or greater, and numerous huge tornadoes. But clearly, Katrina, with the breach of levees, was the worst of these catastrophes.

This lunar landscape with no leaves on the trees, and as Jonathan Franzen put it, “a layer of gray stinking mud that smothered the city for months on end,” spawned deep wounds. For sale signs and plywood-covered windows were the only things more numerous than the “house tattoos”—a circle with a cross inside of it—spray painted on by the National Guard, indicating how many dead corpses there were in each house.

Perhaps one of the more poignant quotes I heard was a resident who said, “We had no water, no electricity, no forms of communication for months—we thought we were alone in this.” Anyone who remembers living through 9/11 in New York City during those first few days can understand this sense of isolation. But imagine this feeling for months.

Little did they realize that the nation’s eyes were not only on them, but the nation’s hearts were with them and their tears shed alongside them.

For those of us lucky enough to live on the East End, these thoughts from New Orleans-based artist Wayne Amedee will ring true.

“Through this catastrophe we were all in dire need of some type of cleansing, a way to refresh ourselves, clear our minds, take in the situation and make intelligent decisions about how to continue. By using the beautiful, clear blue waters of our Gulf Coast, my renewal die was cast with the sea. I saw the sea as a metaphor for renewal and a cleansing of our emotions and physical being,” he said.

New Orleans, despite its crippled government, rose triumphantly through this tragedy.

An octogenarian widow, who tirelessly worked to restore the city, bravely quoted Shakespeare to me to illustrate the New Orleans spirit in facing and overcoming the tragedy.

“Sweet are the uses of adversity, which like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in its head ... And ... Finds tongue in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything.”