Flood Street

Flood Street 1965 Flood Street A New Orleans journal Dispatches from an imaginary disaster Lakeview The Last Mardi Gras The Parish Ninth Ward The Tree-Shaded Avenues The River New Orleans • disaster • Katrina • memoir • Louisiana • history • Hurricane Katrina • flood • St. Bernard • hurricane • levee By Mark Folse, publisher of Wet Bank Guide N.B. I fixed some broken links on 1-27-06. Sorry. mf Some edits to one of the pieces on 10-2-06

The city in this disaster may or may not be New Orleans . I’ve been gone so long its hard to be certain. Before the levees failed and swept away entire neighborhoods, so much had already begun to be abandoned to the elements. Long before the catastrophe, the iconography of my childhood was slowly eroded until only the skeleton of streets remained in some places, the names evocative of a distant, gilded age and faded ambition: Melpomene, Robert. E. Lee, Desire. The corner stores that differentiated one quarter from another—the visual anchor that placed you on one crumbling street of narrow, clapboard houses instead of one across town—were boarded up, as if in anticipation of the storm that would come, or were converted into the efficient national brands I could walk out my door and find a block over and 1,200 miles away. The houses, the clapboard shotguns and stucco-covered cottages and newer GI Bill ranches of discolored brick, will look I think much the same, sagging slightly on th

Lakeview is a neighborhood everyone in America remembers. It’s the idyllic subdivision in which so many of us grew up. Or wish we had. Or at least pretend to. I think I will recognize Lakeview if I get back soon. If I do not, it will live only in my memory, because Lakeview is a tear-down. When the levee collapsed near Bucktown, it washed away everything generations living and dead would remember of Lakeview. The trees that shaded the streets are broken and leafless. No birds or squirrels live in the shattered branches. The once uniformly green lawns and rampant landscaping are a sepia study of winter in another climate, all drowned in the lake’s brackish water. Any dogs left are feral and dangerous like the packs that once roamed the north end of City Park before the golf course was built. Everything that is not brown and dead is stained like the inside of an old tea mug, all color drowned out by the water's stain and a fine patina of dried mud. It is the picture of an old televis

In this city, people talk incessantly of past pleasures and of those to come, even as they regard the meal or the drink or the parade in front of them. We live in a stream of memory as dark and deep and powerful as the river that fronts the city. Memory's currents clutch at us and steer our lives, must be compensated for just as the ferry pilots compensate for the river's at every crossing, must be feared less they take us down into an eddy from which no body returns. Some of my earliest memories are of Mardi Gras . I remember as a child of perhaps five seeing Indians dancing at the corner of Galvez and Canal as we drove do my great aunts' on Royal Street. Later that day or perhaps a year before or after, I can clearly see Rex passing down Canal from atop my father's shoulders. Much later, my girlfriend and I slouched outside a hall in Arabi in the lost hours before dawn on the night of MoM's Ball, and a famous photographer took our picture. I've never seen the

I worked for a number of years for a weekly newspaper in St. Bernard Parish , a narrow strip of land running along the east bank of the river south of the city. The main community of Chalmette flourished after desegregation, a haven for white flight. This bothered me when I first came out there; but the more time I spent there, the less I noticed. This was not Mississippi, some place people raged against their neighbors. After desegregation, some of us in both communities chose to try to live among each other. Some in both communities retreated, and chose to live among themselves. St. Bernard was one of those latter places. The parish was also a perfect diorama of life between the river and the gulf. From the clap board shotguns and Creole cottages of Arabi, past the brick-clad suburban panorama off Judge Perez Drive and the shining and noisome refineries of Chalmette and Meraux, down to the hard scrabble fishing villages that perched on listing stilts along the coastal bayous, St. Ber

After a twenty year absence, some parts of the city are a blur in my memory. Then, suddenly, I read a line in the newspaper, and I am transported back in time, can clearly see the view out my car window as I drive down a street I haven’t traveled in over two decades. Today, I read this about the Ninth Ward: “The city plans to finally reopen the lake side of North Claiborne on Dec. 1, allowing residents to freely walk or drive around their neighborhood.” Until I read that line, I couldn't match the terrible newspaper or television pictures of devastation with a neighborhood, could not place it in my own experience because, frankly, I never knew Bywater or the Ninth Ward. In the early 1980s, it was a routine part of my daily commute to follow Claiborne Avenue out from Esplanade until it became Judge Perez Drive. The places I traveled on that daily traverse had not crossed my mind in years. Suddenly, after reading one line in a single story in a distant newspaper, I am driving along e