Hey y'all, it's Andrew with Free Tours By Foot New Orleans, and today we are getting into the
second part of our exploration of sites connected with Hurricane Katrina, and with the history of
hurricanes in New Orleans in general. This is going to build on our first installment,
so if you haven't seen that already, you can find it either in our playlist of New
Orleans videos or hey -- there's a link right here in this one, so check that out first
and in this one we're going to be going into areas that were some of the most affected by the storm,
both immediately as it happened and in the many years of recovery that followed.
So now it is day two of our expedition, we are working our way down to the lower Ninth Ward,
coming by something that relates to what we talked about before.
You can see on the supports for this highway next to us oak trees painted on these columns, and
where earlier we saw -- mentioned anyway -- a highway that had been built over the former side
of a canal because it provided width enough for a canal, here this was a live oak tree lined avenue,
looked a lot like St. Charles Avenue -- the place where the streetcar rolls up by the
Garden District. But this one was in this sort of middle-class black Creole part of the city,
and it was chosen as the site to send the new interstate highway system through. So all of
these trees were cut down, those paintings were put there as replacements for them,
but it represents this huge change where you can see these really beautiful houses,
but that have been afflicted with this highway right outside their doors for all those years,
and that's a manmade example of things being pretty unequal here, but it happens that way in a
lot of respects. Also on the right, we've got the Mother-in-Law lounge, and this place is incredible
y'all -- beside from being obviously super, super colorful -- that today is the home of one of our
musicians, Kermit Ruffins. we're also passing by Circle Foods, which is a grocery store that closed
after Katrina, reopened and then closed again from another flood, and just getting back online. Uh
grocery stores are a real problem post-Katrina, lower Ninth Ward still doesn't have a grocery
store for getting fresh produce, so putting those back in neighborhoods where people are trying to
return to even today is an ongoing part of the recovery.
Anyhow, um so the the original creator of that, if you ever heard the song Mother-in-Law which is uh,
by this guy Ernie K. Doe, uh the kind of hook of it is--very beginning: "the worst person I know,
Mother-in-Law, Mother-in-Law," that's his one like radio pop song. He could be described as
obscure and kind of a one-hit wonder, did not think of himself that way;
he dressed crazy over the top, called himself the Emperor of the Universe, just a real personality
uh first and foremost before he was even really a musician. And so people here absolutely adored him
and he married this woman Antoinette K. Doe, they opened this place together, and after he passed
away, she rode out Hurricane Katrina there, sheltered people, fed people from there. But a
short way after Katrina, we had a mayoral election and among -- so Louisiana has these things called
"Jungle Primaries" where you don't have party primaries and then an election that's between,
you know two main candidates and some third party candidates, you have a massive primary with
everybody in it, and you you go down to the--the small number of most popular candidates, or if one
person manages to win more than 50 percent you're just done. So we had 20 something candidates for
this mayoral election, and everybody--all based on some pretty uh, extreme platforms sometimes:
"active prevention of poor people from coming back to New Orleans" was one person's platform,
stuff like that -- and our our incumbent mayor who was running again also increasingly had been shown
to have some-some shady financial dealings during Katrina, so there was a lot of desire for change,
and Antoinette K. Doe submitted Ernie K. Doe -- who was dead -- as a candidate in this election,
and she like sold t-shirts and everything and all of it was a fundraising game for the New Orleans
Musicians Clinic, which was working on getting musicians able to live here again and have uh,
the same semi-prosperous life they were able to have beforehand. But it uh was this huge publicity
play, and also this just badly needed moment of levity. You can tell Katrina is a heavy subject,
and we would do anything we could after the storm to just find an instant of lightheartedness,
and you saw the same thing with the first Mardi Gras after Katrina; people would take the the
blue tarps that they were given by FEMA to cover up holes in their roofs and make a
costume out of those, and people would dress up as the hurricane or as FEMA or any number
of the the characters -- human and natural alike -- that frustrated us during that time. Up here,
so we're about to come up to the bridge to the lower Ninth Ward. Right now, we're in what's
called the upper Ninth Ward and we're on the edge of Marigny right now, about to be the Bywater, and
this is a place where we started the tour, it's also an area that has changed a lot post-Katrina.
A lot of people who moved to New Orleans chose to come live here. This was a place that was near
the French Quarter, bright, colorful, really distinctive, access to all the stuff that was
usually part of your first impression. And this is one of the surprises of Katrina, was that a lot of
newly graduated college students and young kind of startup types, and especially a lot of film
professionals with the explosion of film and TV in Louisiana moved here post-Katrina, and it was no
longer a city that was mostly people who had grown up here -- mostly still, but not nearly to the
degree that it was beforehand. So we're gonna be crossing a canal to get to the lower Ninth Ward,
and on either side of that canal, the story is gonna be massively different;
on the upper Ninth Ward side is this kind of expat neighborhood where uh, you know,
formerly rickety old family residence in the shotgun house style that we-we know so well here
can sell for a number in the millions, whereas on the other side you're in an area that still
has empty lots and has never -- or you can really tell that we have never gotten back up to the same
population numbers that we had pre-Katrina. So as we go over that bridge in a second, it really is
going to be two different worlds on either side. If you visit the Marigny or the Bywater today,
you are seeing a pretty well to do area, that's where Frenchmen Street is for reference -- if
anyone's visited town or made plans to visit town, Frenchmen is in the Marigny
right outside of the French Quarter -- whereas visitors to town very rarely make it outside of
this side of things into the lower Ninth Ward, not a lot of Airbnb's over there.
All right y'all, we're just about to go up on the bridge over into the lower Ninth Ward.
So this crosses the industrial canal, and this is a bigger canal
than most of what we've seen, it's a shipping canal -- it's what it's built for -- so
size is a big part of that, a lot more water also to shed out into the neighborhood when
the levees breached and the flood walls of this canal breached on both sides.
Not super high ship traffic, it's never lived up to what it was estimated to be
when it was first built. You'll also be able to see as we come back down
a monument in the -- what we call the neutral ground -- the middle portion between the roads,
the median -- which portrays the level that the water reached here, multiple levels but
the tallest of the poles that you're going to see will get you the full depth of that.
So deepest water in the city was as much as 14 feet, and those depths were both here and
elsewhere. Y'all we're getting a closer view now of the flood wall along the industrial canal from
the lower Ninth Ward side, breaches having happened multiple places along this length.
The Lower Nine has a history totally separate from Hurricane Katrina, and
frankly they like it that way. A lot of people around the country had never heard
of the lower Ninth Ward prior to Hurricane Katrina, but of course it existed already.
And Katrina brought about so much fame for this neighborhood that there came to be this kind of
pattern of disaster tourism with buses coming over on this side, touring around the area,
seeing places and people that were struggling harder than almost anywhere else in town -- and
eventually the consensus in the neighborhood came to be such that the neighborhood actually banned
bus tourism -- there's something about having your picture taken through tinted glass one too
many times that really cemented that decision. So tourism is still very much a thing that's welcomed
here, but if you ever decide to visit this side of town -- yeah, most people come here in a car,
it's a little bit of distance from everything else, but it's definitely worth getting out
of your car at some point and exploring the local food, Cafe Dauphine, awesome restaurant;
local museums, the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum is just about the history of this neighborhood;
and really a lot of our our culture exports from here. So one of our favorite musicians -- Kermit
Ruffins, whose club we saw over on the underpass -- he came from this neighborhood. Mahalia
Jackson, our famous gospel singer, started off her life in this neighborhood. We also
have Leona Tate, who's one of the heads of that Lower Ninth Ward Museum -- not a household name,
but somebody who was one of the first four girls to integrate a public school -- this was this
group of four young black girls in 1960 who went to newly integrated schools, one in the lower
Ninth Ward and one over across the other side, and endured all of the the massive burdens in terms of
hostility and constant supervision -- and to put it lightly, a very difficult learning environment
for the years that followed in order to make things easier for the people that followed them,
and this as very, very young children. So Leona Tate is one of the big figures in the
neighborhood now who's kind of a an arbiter of the neighborhood's history -- and too Fats Domino,
one of the best known musicians anywhere, and one of the most influential -- not only grew
up in this neighborhood, but even chose to stay here once he was a millionaire, and just made his
house flashier than it was before. And famously during Hurricane Katrina he was airlifted out, but
somebody painted "R.I.P. Fats, you will be missed" on his house, and that made a lot of people think
that he had passed away, and there was a whole grief cycle followed by this unexpected hope
that sort of mirrored people's attitude in a lot of ways towards the city at large;
this feeling of there's no way it's coming back, followed by unexpected discoveries that in some
ways at least it could. So this is a neighborhood where that optimism was hard to hold on to.
Not only is Katrina a big part of its history, it's been a place that's had it pretty tough the
whole way through. So in its earliest days, the Lower Nine is down river of the French Quarter
and the other neighborhoods that developed earliest, meaning when all kinds of undesired
stuff was thrown into the river, it floated down past here and that made this a pretty undesirable
place to live. It developed industrially before it developed residentially to speak of,
although in its earliest known history there was a Maroon Community here -- escaped enslaved people
made their own community over here away from the city -- and you also have the people who
worked in those industrial sites living around it, largely because they had to, but eventually
for their children and down, because they were born here and this was their home because of that.
And the flooding history here is more complex too -- not only do you have Katrina and--Katrina,
Rita, the whole 2005 complex, and Betsy the 1965 storm that flooded this as well as other parts of
the city that we've seen -- but there was another flood that only affected this part of the city,
and that was the 1927 Mississippi River flood; not related to storms at all,
but the level of the river got so high during that time that it burst its banks
in a lot of different parts of its route. When that looked likely to happen here in New Orleans,
there was a group of bankers in town who were fearful of there being a financial panic and a
rush on their banks that could potentially ruin them, and so they conspired sort of
extra-governmentally to have the banks of the river dynamited down here in the lower Ninth Ward,
and that was very soon after what you see here had been built, in such a way that damage could
be done to this side of the city by flooding that would not -- because of these walls -- pass
through into other parts, you could sort of surgically sacrifice this side of the city
for the well-being of what's on the other side. That was done -- naturally without any input from
the people who lived here -- and knowing that, and knowing that that was a piece of the history that
could easily sound like a conspiracy theory, but really took place, and that the river didn't
even flood here afterwards, the bank of the water lowered naturally -- that-there was a-a paranoia,
or really a justified paranoia come other storms -- Betsy and Katrina -- that such damage was
going to be done again by human beings. So among the people who stayed in the lower Ninth Ward,
all the reasons for staying that we mentioned earlier -- particularly exacerbated by the fact
that this is a largely impoverished, mostly black neighborhood where cars and income and so on are
all pretty limited, but also because there is a history of this place being sort of victimized
for the sake of the rest of the city -- but among one of the early hopeful stories that New Orleans
was telling itself and the world post-Katrina was something that specifically happened here,
and we have a view from here of some of the what we call "Make It Right" houses. So
you'll notice maybe, if you've seen much in the way of New Orleans architecture, the houses
around us don't look the part; this is a pretty different looking area right in the ground zero of
the worst effects of Katrina, one of the hardest hit neighborhoods right by a levee breach where
the pressure of the water was enough to push houses completely off of their foundations.
So rather than restoration, this area needed complete rebuilding, and there were a lot
of efforts like that around town -- including Musicians Village, which was built specifically
for musicians and artists and their families -- but also this one, Make It Right, which was
a little different in that the houses were these new designs. This was spearheaded by Brad Pitt of
all people, he came here in 2006 to shoot Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie set in the parts
of the city that did better -- the French Quarter, the Garden District -- and in a way told the
story to the world that New Orleans was open for business and you could come here and see a place
that looked just fine. But Brad Pitt also saw the Lower Nine, ended up co-founding this organization
that commissioned architects from much of the world -- a lot of Louisiana -- but some-some
real architectural stars to design houses for their understanding of what the problems were
that were faced here, and hence you get the density of solar panels in this neighborhood,
they kind of--never a flat roof anywhere, you even have houses that were designed in such ways
that if someone didn't have the knees to climb stairs up into an elevated house all the time,
you had houses built at ground level, but that were equipped to float when flood water came in,
theoretically they would rise up above the flood plain and then come back down again. So
some real sophisticated, exciting stuff, and definitely they played their publicity game
very well. Brad Pitt is a great front man, all these world-renowned architects brought in a lot
of fundraising, and the mission was to build 150 houses specifically for people returning
to the neighborhood and for also teachers and first responders, so really focusing
on what--where the greatest need was, and these people would buy these homes and live in them,
but paying ultimately less than the cost of the materials to do so. So there was a lot of positive
press around this, there was even a semi-joking semi-serious write-in campaign to elect Brad Pitt
mayor after this all happened, and then time has passed since then and the legacy becomes a whole
lot more complicated. Nowadays there's been time for these houses to have to sort of sustain their
lives, and for an organization or for a building, that's where the real last call is. In this case,
we've even seen -- so they petered out around a little more than 100 houses, which -- not nothing,
but not quite what they aimed for either -- and some of those houses have not stood up to the test
of time, they've begun to fall apart because of quality of construction -- whether or not quality
of design -- and you've actually had lawsuits against Make It Right and some of their affiliates
which are yet to totally play out, so the ultimate legacy is very much to be determined. On the other
hand, this is one of the -- despite what you see -- one of the most densely repopulated areas of
the neighborhood, and it's possible that having that sort of beacon of possibility made some
people come back here who otherwise wouldn't have, whether they were lured in by a promise that was
larger than what the reality played out to, or whether they were able to make it work in spite
of that, that's going to be individual stories and very much in line with the history of the Lower
Nine in the term--in terms of really mixed success and hardship. So what you're seeing here is a very
atypical piece of the lower Ninth Ward. It is very much still in a rebuilding process today, but not
just from Katrina, also from many other troubles that have come along since. Again, if you ever do
pay it a visit, this is one of the neighborhoods where your spending dollar goes the furthest in
terms of supporting people who are working really hard, oftentimes in a tourism job to make New
Orleans great for y'all, so highly recommend if you decide to come down and check this out -- that
Cafe Dauphine, other restaurants, as well as that Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum, the House of Dance
and Feathers, any kind of group that is working to put the culture of the neighborhood on display
independent of the big bus tourism that people tend to think of for down here.
Y'all one last little thought, right now we're right by the Presbytere in Jackson Square. This
is the hub of visitor activity in New Orleans, and so you're sure to pass through it if you pay
us a visit, and if you want to know more about Katrina -- like we mentioned earlier -- this
is the resource right on the beaten path, you can get the big picture of it and it is
paired with the Mardi Gras Museum to make sure the experience is net-neutral, or net-cheerful
anyway, that's our take y'all. Thanks for tuning in, again bigger story than this,
so if you got some thoughts, share them down in the comments, let us know your experiences,
your memories. Tell us about other disasters, tell us about earthquakes -- we don't know
anything about those -- we'd love to hear from you down there. And please like, comment, subscribe,
all the usual stuff to let us know that you'd like to see more. And if you enjoyed this,
our tours are always pay-what-you-will, you'll see my contact information up that way if you'd
like to throw anything our way, thanks so much for tuning in! See you next time!