The fire station at Elysian Fields Avenue and Pelopidas Streets in Gentilly. As you can see from the sign in the photo, this station was a WPA construction project built during the Great Depression. NOFD gave the building back to the city in the early 1980s, and it was converted into a storage facility for the New Orleans Recreation Department. It was being used by NORD until the Federal Flood. This is how it looks today:
This part of Gentilly was once a vibrant commercial district, with Zuppardo's Economical Supermarket on the corner of Elysian Fields and Gentilly, gas stations, fast food places, a K&B Drugstore, strip malls up a block on Gentilly Road, and McKenzie's "Chicken-in-a-Box." Behind the fire station are a number of small office buildings, housing doctors, dentists, the Amalgamated Transit Union, and several other small businesses. Farley's Florist was one block down on Mandeville.
Post-storm, the supermarket is now an empty lot, torn down because flood damage. The McDonald's is now a Chinese buffet (arguably an improvement), but at least Chicken-in-a-Box is back. Down the street, Dillard University still struggles for survival after being heavily damaged by the Federal Flood.
Gentilly is a mess, and it's very slow in returning. The Baptist church Elysian Fields by I-610 has been rebuilt, and Brother Martin High School repaired their damage and re-opened in January of 2006. Residences are extremely slow returning, however. Drive down St. Anthony Blvd. from Gentilly to Robert E. Lee, and you see way too many FEMA trailers. The site of those white disasters is a mixed blessing. Their numbers indicate that the property owners are trying to come back. That there are so many of them two years later means there are way too many obstacles in their way.
DailyKos diarist mlharges has written some very compelling diaries on Gentilly, particularly this one on Jean Gordon Elementary just yesterday. He returned to the school where his girlfriend worked pre-storm and documented its current state and that of the neighborhood. While his counts on houses in the neighborhood behind the school (which was on Robert E. Lee and the London Avenue Canal) aren't scientific, they jive with my observations around Elysian Fields, as well as further down Paris Avenue, in my wife's old neighborhood by Cabrini church. His observations:
Walking up and down the block, I counted twenty different properties in that street. Before the storm each property had a slab on grade home of approximately 1800 square feet. Today the count is as follows: two homes repaired and occupied, a third repaired and for sale or for rent (which ever happens first) and a fourth being repaired and raised. Six empty lots where homes once stood. Two of the remaining ten homes have piles of debris where the owners have cleared out flood damaged belongings but have done nothing else. The remaining homes are untouched.
20% of those houses have been repaired. 30% have been razed, with no likelihood of new ones being built on those slabs.
Two of Gentilly's Catholic church parishes are still closed, St. Raphael on Elysian Fields and St. Frances Xavier Cabrini on Paris Avenue. The entire property around Cabrini was leased to Holy Cross School this year. They've torn down the church and are moving forward to build a new school on the site, moving out of their historic Ninth Ward home. On the positive side, St. James Major parish, on Gentilly Blvd., just off of Franklin Avenue, fared much better, to the point where their school building now is able to house St. Mary's Academy, an all-black girl's high school whose New Orleans East campus was badly damaged.
Fridays are now going to be "Gentilly Fridays," because there needs to be an increased level of awareness of the plight of this neighborhood. It's impossible to say that one neighborhood or one aspect of the city's problems are more important than others at this stage--that's like saying that one Gold Star Mother's suffering is more than another's. What Gentilly is lacking is publicity. Residents of public housing have Bill Quigley and his staff, along with scores of activists and protesters. Da Nint' has Brad Pitt, Harry Connick, Jr., other celebrities, and many folks in the local music community. Gentilly has nothing more than a lot of middle-class families who are wrestling with re-building, dealing with insurance companies and Road Home, all while trying to earn a living.
Without neighborhoods like Gentilly, the city's tax base goes down the tubes. With no property and sales taxes coming in from blue-collar and professional families, the services needed to allow the working poor their "right of return" will never get put back into place. The people rebuilding in Pontchartrain Park, or over on Cameron Blvd., or off St. Bernard Ave. need help, prayers, and support. They need political representation at City Hall, in Baton Rouge, and in Washington that will give them the opportunity to return to a productive and happy life in the city they love.
