Past is not even past

Here's Richard Campanella's follow-up article to that Tulane gentrification panel I mentioned yesterday.  With apologies for the length of the cut and paste, here are two paragraphs that give you an idea of what he's on about.

Looking to the past helps address this question. New Orleans two centuries ago underwent a transformation so draconian that today's changes practically evaporate in comparison. Starting a few years after the Louisiana Purchase, migrants from the Northeast and Upper South poured in by the thousands. On their heels came immigrants from Ireland, greater Germany, France, Haiti and dozens of other nations, who arrived in numbers larger than any other Southern city and oftentimes second only to New York. By 1850, more than two out of every four New Orleanians had been born outside the United States, and nearly three out of every four had been born outside New Orleans.


As the city's population doubled roughly every 15 years, its culture roiled and diversified tumultuously. The city's primary language shifted from French to English, and its dominant race went from black to white. Its Spanish-influenced Roman civil code became mixed with English common law. Its chief religion increasingly shared the spiritual stage with other sects and creeds. Its West Indian-style architecture became Americanized with center hallways and Classical façades introduced from Europe via the Northeast. Its night scene adopted the "concert saloon," a variation of the English music hall imported from New York that would later evolve into vaudeville venues and burlesque nightclubs. Its festivity, in the form of Mardi Gras, transformed from decentralized street mayhem, to organized krewes with scheduled parades. Its view of race veered away from the old Caribbean model that included an intermediary caste of free people of color, in favor of the American "one drop" rule. Even Louisiana's surveying system changed, from French long-lots measured in arpents to American rectangular sections measured in acres.

There's a lot more to this so go read the rest. It's very good. I would reiterate my point from yesterday, though, that just because we can demonstrate that "Progress" does not "destroy culture" this does not mean that there are substantive conflicts taking place.  Campanella more or less says as much in this article but it's not his main point.

If I had to compare the current state of anxiety to a chapter in the city's history, though, I don't think I'd go back as far as the Louisiana Purchase. Instead, New Orleans today looks very much the way it did during the late 70s just prior to the oil bust. Then, like now, the boom time New Orleans was attracting lots of young families and new money. And then, like now, pains of economic inequality were leaving poorer residents isolated. Here is a series of films by Andrew Kolker and Louis Alvarez from that time collectively titled "Being Poor In New Orleans". The themes are gentrification, crime, public housing. You could basically just re-make these today and hear the same perspectives from the same sorts of people.

On the other hand, Campanella notes one further historical episode which might have some relevance today. 

Acrimony mounted, getting so bad by the 1830s that New Orleans underwent a sort of metropolitan divorce, trifurcating into rival municipalities delineated largely along lines of ethnicity and nativity. Talk about heavy-handed conflict resolution: Imagine New Orleans today breaking into three cities, with downtown transplants pitted against Uptown bluebloods and Gentilly Creoles, each with its own council, laws and police! 

As we've noted previously, the city is well on its way toward establishing several independent neighborhood police forces. But now it seems the newcomers are forcing yet another civic divorce... on Twitter. 

It began innocently enough with a thing that happens practically every day. One (relatively) new to New Orleans personality decided to create a new Twitter account.

The Twitter account @sweden, in operation since December of 2011, is one of those beloved online curiosities that is a product of the social media age. Overseen by a pair of government agencies that handle tourism and the promotion of Swedish culture, the account is given over to a different citizen of Sweden every seven days - the goal being to display the diversity and character of the country through individual voices, 140 characters at a time. Under the cheery slogan “A new Swede every week,” the account now has more than 66,000 followers.

In the spring of 2013, it occurred to a former Loyola student and tech-industry professional, who tweets prolifically under the handle @ChampSuperstar, that the quirky formula might also be an effective way to showcase the singular and variegated essence of New Orleans to the world. 

Most Americans who even care in the first place first became aware of the @Sweden account last year when one of its curators appeared to wonder out loud if the Nazis had the right idea when it came to identifying nearby Jewish persons. But nevermind that. For the most part, people seem to like @Sweden. So why not bring the concept to New Orleans? What could possibly go wrong that would be worse than Nazis?

Well, if you answered a whole bunch of parody Twitter accounts, you obviously already know how this goes. 

The account @BeingNOLA went live on June 1, with Chris Boyd, a Baton Rouge native and founder of the Apptitude app-development studio, in the pilot’s seat. Currently tweeting as @BeingNOLA is schoolteacher and Uptown resident Bobby Hadzor, who’ll hold the spot until June 16; the account, as of Tuesday, June 11, had about 600 followers as well as several parody accounts - including @BeingMetairie, @BeingKenner, @BeingBywater and @BeingLakeview, so far - that started up (perhaps predictably) in its wake.

And, of course, since then, the situation has deteriorated as more and more Being____ accounts have come into.. um.. being. A partial list of these has been compiled by yet another Twitter user who (perhaps fittingly) goes by the handle @Blathering. There are more than just those by now, though. Expect the city's Twit-space to continue multi-furcating for the rest of the week after which most of the joke accounts are likely to go dormant and a new paradigm will have been established.