Like many, Liz Carter watched the events of Hurricane Katrina unfold with a mix of powerlessness and frustration, emotions that continued long after the television cameras moved on.
No direct ties to New Orleans fueled these emotions. Instead, it was her profession.
An adjunct instructor in the University’s Historic Preservation Program and a consultant in the field, Carter felt she could aid reconstruction without destroying the city’s unique character.
“It was this feeling of helplessness,” she said. “Like there was nothing I could do, and no one seemed to be doing anything. I wanted to be able to use a skill that I had, not just go down and work for the Red Cross.”
When the National Trust for Historic Preservation put out a call for volunteers, Carter jumped at the opportunity. She visited New Orleans in October and again in December to interview the trickle of returning residents about their visions for the city’s future.
But it was the city, or lack thereof, that brought Carter back to Oregon with a new sense of purpose. The near-total destruction of New Orleans’ destitute neighborhoods inspired her to prepare a PowerPoint presentation to help educate Oregonians about the real state of the city, the one the evening news had abandoned.
After showing the presentation to a class of graduate students in the program, Carter found she was not alone. She pitched the idea of sacrificing spring break to help out in New Orleans. Four graduate students decided to join Carter, acknowledging that without their efforts, the cultural importance and power of New Orleans’ architecture might be lost in the rush to rebuild.
Carter said their help, and that of other preservationists, was especially needed because the rush to rebuild had led many ignorant relief workers to strip the buildings of the pieces that made them unique.
After the flood
Carter’s presentation struck a chord with Sarah Helwick, Erica Steverson, Jennifer Flathman and Sarah Hahn because Carter offered the historic preservation grad students a glimpse into a broken world and a way to fix it.
“There’s been so much conflicting information in the news about what’s happening in New Orleans,” Flathman said. “I wanted to go there in person and make my own assessment of the situation and also do whatever I could to help the people that were there.”
With funding from the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office in Salem, the five preservationists left for New Orleans, where they partnered with the National Trust and the local Preservation Resource Center on two main projects.
The first was helping a local man, Alton Remble, clear his water-logged double shotgun house.
A hallmark of New Orleans architecture that preservationist are struggling to save, the shotgun house is a long and narrow single-story dwelling where the rooms connect in a single-file fashion without hallways.
The group removed all the wet plaster from Remble’s house to allow it to dry and be rebuilt. They were careful to leave as much intact as possible, unlike some other relief workers.
“I think a lot of people are just uninformed” about the value of the materials in these houses, Helwick said. “The whole issue of the student groups coming in and just totally gutting the houses, taking window casings, taking everything but the studs. That stuff is very important to the historical integrity of the structure and it’s also salvageable. It doesn’t need to go.”
“And it’s expensive to replace,” Carter added.
People have questioned why New Orleans residents would want to return to a devastated city, but the group said it was a simple issue of economics. Many of the poor black people living in the low-lying communities that were hit hardest by the post-hurricane flooding had been in the same houses for generations because it was all they could afford and all they had to show for their savings.
“My sense is that people who somehow get some sort of a break or some sort of an opening to come back will take it,” Carter said. “It’s a matter of finding where the crack in the door is and going through it.”
Flathman saw three groups of people affected by Katrina, two of whom were returning. The first was composed of affluent families from the French Quarter or the Garden District whose homes survived.
Those families “don’t seem so intact, even though they’re in a better financial position,” she said.
The second group consisted of people like Remble, who Flathman said had no choice but to return because they had no economic or social support beyond their homes, in which they had invested their lives and families for generations.
And then there was the large swath of the community members who didn’t return because they had the insurance payouts or education to move to a new community; sometimes their homes were completely gone.
Many of those who didn’t come back gave or sold their homes to the National Trust so they could be rehabilitated for those in need who are hoping to return.
Next door to Remble’s double shotgun house was a single that the trust had arranged for the Oregon group to clear out. That was the group’s second project.
Both projects were in an historic neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Bearing witness
In addition to their preservation work, the group members charged themselves with another important task that mainly involved driving around in their free time and surveying the damage.
“We had the specific work projects that we were asked to do by the Preservation Resource Center, but we also thought it was an important part of our mission to bring back info to other students and community members,” Flathman said.
Carter said people were shocked when she started giving presentations back in November. Over the months, as Carter continued to show her presentations, her audience grew more angry that the disaster situation wasn’t being addressed.
“Basic necessities that we in the United States assume everybody has, a lot of people down there don’t have” eight months later, Carter said. “They’re living in Third World conditions, or their neighborhoods are in Third World conditions. They’re not living in their neighborhoods.”
The only member of the group who had previous experience in New Orleans, Helwick expressed amazement at the places she had once frequented as a college recruiter.
“The thing that pictures can’t convey is the feeling of the place,” she said. “It’s deserted, it’s quiet. Things you’d normally see in a neighborhood, like birds chirping, there’s nothing. It’s hard to describe.”
Still, some hope remains for residents trying to rebuild, she said.
“As we were working with Remble, the homeowner, people would drive by and say, ‘Hey Alton,’” she said. “You’d see little sparks of life coming into the neighborhood.”