By Ross Kelley
Tulane School of Architecture
Ross Kelly and other students from the Tulane School of Architecture worked with the Historic Seventh Ward Neighborhood Association surveying the Seventh Ward to complete their service requirement.
Coming into Tulane University as an architecture student, I had heard about the things that the school was doing for the city. The most talked-about program was UrbanBuild, an upper-level class in which students design a house and then actually get to build it. However, this semester I participated in a service project where the scope was much larger than a single lot on a city street; it encompassed whole neighborhoods, reached back through time, and will hopefully have a positive impact on the future.
When Tulane reorganized its undergraduate curriculum following Hurricane Katrina, the university created a graduation requirement obliging all incoming students to take several classes integrating both classroom and service components throughout the students’ time at Tulane. My first such class happens to be a history of architecture class. I have been working with fellow students and the Historic Seventh Ward Neighborhood Association surveying the Seventh Ward to complete my service requirement.
The sixty or so students in the class were spread out across the city. Along with the Seventh Ward, teams have been working in Pontchatrain Park and Gentilly Woods with the Pontilly Neighborhood Association, in parts of the Tremé and along Esplanade Ridge with the Downtown Neighborhoods Improvement Association, and in the Tulane-Gravier neighborhood with the Phoenix of New Orleans.
To say that I was ambivalent to start volunteering in the Seventh Ward is an understatement. I received my orientation for my work from representatives of the Historic Seventh Ward Neighborhood Association following a day spent in the New Orleans convention Center at Community Congress 3. The congress was my first experience in large-scale planning and hearing what the people at my table had to say negatively influenced my opinion of the congress.
Among others, sitting at my table was an activist and her son, two friends from the Fifth Ward, and an academically uneducated but thoughtful gentleman from Gentilly. They rarely, if ever, had anything positive to say about UNOP, the Road Home program, and the Community Congress itself. They had many common complaints about UNOP and the Road Home, and they felt that the congress did not adequately represent the goals of New Orleans citizens.
Furthermore, Community Congress 3 being the last Community Congress, my table felt that the issues we were voting on were far too vague and could be “interpreted” to rebuild New Orleans in any way that the Powers-That-Be would see fit.
We were told by Angela, our neighborhood liaison, that FEMA, the infamous FEMA, was surveying a large part of the Seventh Ward, but that the area we were to survey, a pie-shaped area at the top of the ward bounded by St. Bernard and AP Tureaud Avenue, was not deemed “historic enough” for the agency to survey. After my experience with Community Congress 3, my faith in the government’s ability to rebuild the city was not restored.
Despite FEMA’s apparent disdain for “our” part of the neighborhood, we were to work under the guidance of an agency field worker, analyst, and architecture historian. My reticence towards the project increased even more when the architecture historian taught us about the neighborhood’s various building types and styles at the beginning of our first Saturday in the Seventh Ward.
He showed us pictures of several neighborhood buildings and ignored Angela’s and other neighborhood association representatives’ input about the history of the buildings. He even argued about some of them with the representatives, who were clearly well versed in the neighborhood lore. Again, FEMA was living up to its mediocre standards popularized by the news and its reputation.
However, once we got out into the neighborhood, everything changed. I started surveying houses and saw the true devastation of the city’s flooding, but I also heard the stories of the people who live in the Seventh Ward. The stories were what gave my experience gravity. After hearing what many of the people who moved back had to go through, it no longer mattered with whom I was working, just that the work was getting done.
One woman, whose family had owned three houses on one block for over one hundred years, talked about how the neighborhood was great when she was a girl, but how it had become a dangerous place to live. Another woman said that her home currently sits on its third lot. Years ago, the house was moved from another neighborhood to a lot on which I-10 currently sits. When the expressway was built, the woman moved her house from the construction zone to its current location.
A third woman talked about how lengthy and difficult the rebuilding process has been because she could not get any money from the government. The government’s stated reason was that her home was too close to I-10. She was told that she might be able to get rebuilding money for her father because he is an old jazz musician; she opted against even trying because she knew how disappointed she would feel if she did not receive any money after going through the long, frustrating application process.
These stories and others angered me but also encouraged me to work my hardest to help the community. As I worked, I realized that the FEMA workers were not all “heartless monsters,” as the media portrayed the administration to be. During our second week, one worker explained to us that our overall goal was to compile a convincing report so that at least one level of government would recognize the neighborhood as architecturally, culturally, and/or historically significant, which would in turn bring more rebuilding money to the people in the community. This information became a turning point for me; I worked with new dedication to document the houses and to listen to the community members’ experiences.
When we first started working in the Seventh Ward, there was concern that we would be viewed by the community with disdain as “the white kids in the black neighborhood,” as some of the other service-learning groups had been viewed. The first week or two many people in the neighborhood approached us very guardedly, but when we explained that we were volunteers with the neighborhood association working to get them rebuilding money, they were very grateful towards and open with us.
By the third week, when word had gotten around that we were there, many more people approached us and told us how happy they were that we were there. Even though I was initially turned off by the work we did, by the end, I, too, was happy that I was there.
I hope that this small project, which brought a few over-privileged students to a community that needed them, will have a great positive impact. I hope that our overall goal is reached and that the people of the Seventh Ward, some of the people who need the most assistance in rebuilding, will get the assistance they need to make their life what it once was. After seeing the dedication of my classmates and the community association, as well as a completely different side of FEMA, I believe that that goal can be achieved.
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