Haunted by the East moment

This morning, Leigh wrote about New Orleans East a little bit.

After all this time, the East still haunts me...probably because it is similar to the circumstances in which I grew up. It is one of the most stereotypically suburban parts of New Orleans - if anybody wants evidence of how much this city styled itself after larger cities such as Houston and Atlanta, it need only take a look at the skyscrapers in the CBD (most of which are currently empty and rotting) and at lakefront neighborhoods such as that of the East. These places were representative of the ultimate in civic hubris, of the faith in physical expansion leading to greater economic development. Patrician inequality giving way to a more plebeian sharing of the local wealth. If it is built, all of that will come and heal New Orleans' ills.

Yeah, well, maybe. I'm no big fan of suburbia but you won't find mine among the pointed fingers shaming the idea of developing that land in the first place. We hear the word "hubris" thrown around a lot in regard to Albert Baldwin Wood's triumph over the backswamps. I have trouble accepting that, though, because 1) it's inherently fatalistic and 2) it discounts as folly the nuts and bolts of the past three generations of life in New Orleans. The neighborhoods flooded after Katrina were not mistakes. Quite the contrary they were made possible by a remarkable technological solution to a drainage and flood control problem. Now they are challenged by a new but similar problem in need of a similarly remarkable but (hopefully) achievable solution.

The East may not have been aesthetically or functionally anybody's ideal urban living space. But that's a different issue from whether or not anything should have been built there at all. In February I wrote about the demolition of the East New Orleans Regional Library which was a place I knew quite well first as a young child and later as an adult employee. The internet archive has preserved for us the now-defunct web page which described that building and its services. In the lobby there was this bizarre sculpture credited to a "Mrs. John Petre" of what appeared to be a young man in an ambiguously uncomfortable pose. Blurry picture below.



Last week, I accidentally happened upon that same statue downtown.



I have no idea what's supposed to happen to it eventually, but encountering it in this state was, well, in a word, haunting.