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The Pitt Theater, located at Elysian Fields Avenue and Robt. E. Lee Blvd. The theater opened in the 1930s. This photo is from 1954.

My memories of the Pitt go back to the 1960s. My dad took us there a few times, because it was down the street from the University of New Orleans, where he worked. When I went to high school, down the street from the theater in the opposite direction from UNO, we'd go to the Pitt all the time.

By the late 1970s, the owners divided the theater in half. In 1977, I watched "Star Wars" three times in a row in one side of the Pitt. In the 1980s, the Pitt was sold to the Joy theater chain. That company divided the Pitt into four and turned it into a "dollar theater." The Pitt was sold in 1999, torn down, and a Walgreen's was built on the corner.

The corner of the building closest to the street corner is a drugstore, Parker's Drugs, in the photo. By the 1970s, that space was a Tex-Mex place, "Taco Tico." It's your classic local version of Taco Bell. There are still a couple other Taco Ticos in town, in Metairie and Kenner, but I miss the one in Gentilly.

The corner of Robert E. Lee Blvd. and Elysian Fields Ave. was a major intersection in Gentilly prior to the storm. Of the four corners, one was Ferrara's Supermarket, one a convenience store/gas station, the Pitt, and a nightclub/disco on the fourth. My fraternity's house was two blocks down from there, and my first apartment after graduation two blocks west. As a college student, grad student, and new high school teacher, the local taco place and cheap movie theater were important parts of my existence.

The Federal Flood dumped 10' of water on the corner of Elysian Fields and Robt. E. Lee. Of the four corners, only the Walgreen's is back.

Dillard University, located at 2601 Gentilly Blvd. This is a WPA photo of the campus right after it opened in 1935. The building on the left is Rosenwald Hall, and Kearney Hall is visible in the right background. The photo was shot from Gentilly Blvd., which was a one-lane road at the time. Now it is a 4-lane boulevard, and Dillard is a gated community monitored by campus police for the safety of faculty and students.

Dillard is an Historically Black University. It was founded by the United Methodist Church and still operates under the church's auspices. Dillard opened its doors in 1930, the result of a merger between Straight University and New Orleans University. The University is named after philanthropist and Tulane graduate, Dr. James Hardy Dillard.

President Bill Clinton will be speaking today, in support of his wife's presidential campaign, at Dillard's Lawless Assembly Center (formerly known as Lawless Memorial Chapel). The chapel is dedicated to Alfred Lawless, Jr., a leader in African-American education in New Orleans, and his son, Dr. Theodore K. Lawless, an internationally known physician.

Of all the colleges and universities in New Orleans, Dillard was hit hardest by the storm. The London Avenue Canal is the western boundary of the campus. Floodwalls along this canal breached on 29-August-2005, the result of a 40-year pattern of lies and perpetrated on New Orleans by the US Army Corps of Engineers that has brought shame and dishonor upon the United States Army. A large number of Dillard students evacuated to Shreveport, LA, and were taken in by Centenary College in that city. The university began the rebuilding process in the winter of 2006, operating out of an office building downtown. The main Gentilly campus is still undergoing renovation and repairs as classes and student life have resumed.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, Carnival Parades in New Orleans were held in a number of different neighborhoods. Uptown, Mid City, Algiers, New Orleans East, and like the Krewe of Pandora, in Gentilly. This shot, from February of 1978, is of the Budweiser Clydesdales coming down Elysian Fields Ave. in Gentilly. I found this photo in a box of stuff from when I was attending the University of New Orleans. The location is in front of what was then the Lambda Chi Alpha house, my fraternity. The chapter sold the house in the 1990s and bought another one down on Gentilly Blvd. The Elysian Fields house got over 10' of water in the storm, but the current owners repaired the place and it looks great.

Pandora was one of two krewes that paraded through Gentilly in the 60s through the 80s. The other was the Krewe of Hercules. Hercules was actually older, being the all-male krewe. Like many neighborhoods, the wives and girlfriends didn't want to be left out of the fun, so they would form their own krewes and parade. Hercules paraded on the Monday before Lundi Gras (8 days before Mardi Gras), and Pandora on the Saturday before that. Neither were big parades, 12-15 floats apiece. There used to be a lot of NOPD and Levee Board cops in Hercules, because it was neighborhood to many of them, and because 8 days before Mardi Gras was a good night for a cop to get off. The closer you get to Mardi Gras, the more people out at parades, the more cops you need.

Carnival krewes in the 60s and 70s were not just about the parade, but rather were year-round social organizations. With strong ties to a particular neighborhood, a krewe would meet monthly in a neighborhood meeting place, like a school cafeteria, VFW hall, etc., to plan and socialize. In the early spring, that meant having a crawfish boil; in the summer, a picnic. The whole family got involved, and life-long friendships were forged. Even the "super krewe" of Endymion had such humble beginnings, starting out as a Gentilly parade (the original route was in the neighborhood near Da Track).

Hercules eventually folded as a krewe, as the city put pressure on them to move the route away from Gentilly. Many of the krewe were lured away by the growth of Endymion, as their "super krewe" status solidified over time. The women kept Pandora going, because there were so few krewes where women could ride. Pandora eventually became a female/male parade, before they disbanded as well.

The photo shows the Clydesdales leading the parade, followed by shriners and police on motorcycles. The Queen's float followed, then school bands, marching units, and more floats with lots of beads and doubloons!

Tomorrow, there won't be a Pandora, but we'll go out to the Metairie parade, the Krewe of Caesar, to see my son march with the Brother Martin High School Band. For a Gentilly school, marching in a Metairie parade is a bit like slumming, but the school's administration asked them for a favor, because they recruit heavily from the 'burbs.

Walgreens on Gentilly Blvd. and Frenchman, in 1962. Gentilly Blvd. from Norman Mayer to Elysian Fields was the commercial district for the Gentilly Terrace neighborhood, anchored by Economical Supermarket on Elysian Fields and the Maison Blanche Budget Store down the street.

The strip malls that sustained Gentilly Terrace for years had already become "ghost malls" long before the storm. The MB Budget Store became a Chuck E. Cheese, then an auto parts store. Gus Mayer on Elysian Fields and Gentilly became a Blockbuster, as the higher-end retail outlets left the neighborhood, either to go to the malls or close outright. What time and the trend towards malls and big-box stores didn't kill, the Federal Flood did.

After the very-successful ride of the Phunny Phorty Phellows on Monday night, a number of folks in Mid City wondered aloud (and on line) why this couldn't become a regular event, where the PPP start by City Park and end up somewhere Uptown. The short answer has three letters:

ADA

That's the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA has opened many, many doors to disabled folks that would never have been accessible to them without direct legislative help. It's complicated our streetcar lines a bit, though. Here's how it works:

St. Charles - The St. Charles line, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The strict interpretation of this designation is that the line must be preserved in the state it was when it was listed, in 1971. That means the route is from Carondelet and Canal Streets to S. Carrollton and S. Claiborne Avenues. The 35 900-series Perley A. Thomas streetcars that were operating in 1971 have been preserved and continue to operate on the line. NORTA (and NOPSI before them) is charged with making sure the line and the streetcars stay in good shape and operating.

ADA mandates that public transit be handicap-accessible, but this conflicts with the basic design of the 900s. They were built in 1923-1924, and wheelchair access wasn't an issue then. NORTA just can't cut holes in the sides of these vintage streetcars, so the line is exempt from the requirements of ADA.

Riverfront - The original Riverfront line opened in 1988, prior to ADA. It used three 900-series streetcars rescued from other places in the country after the Canal line was converted to bus operations in 1964. The line also used two Melbourne W2 cars that have center-opening doors. The stops on Riverfront are raised platforms, so a rider in a wheelchair could go up the ramp and board one of the Melbourne cars. When the line was re-worked in 1997, it was expanded to double-track and converted from standard (railroad) gauge to wide gauge. The changes were so significant that the line came under the ADA microscope. ADA activists were not satisfied with every other streetcar on the line being handicapped-accessible and insisted that all cars be in compliance. That meant the vintage 900s could not be used. NORTA decided to design a new class of arch roof streetcars. The 400-series Riverfront streetcars look very much like their green cousins, but they're equipped with wheelchair lifts.

Canal - The 2000-series Von Dullen cars also have wheelchair lifts on both sides, making them fully ADA-compliant.

The storm disrupted regular streetcar operations. Because of the severe damage to the ADA-compliant streetcars in the NORTA fleet, there's just no way to offer proper service until the 400s and 2000s are rebuilt. ADA isn't the only thing in suspended animation at the moment. Since the wiring and track on St. Charles were damaged by the storm, the 900s couldn't return to service on the historic line immediately. NORTA received approval to run the 900s on the Canal line, where the infrastructure was essentially intact in spite of the flooding in Mid City. So, for the last two years, the streetcars have been operating in an environment of regulartory anarchy.

NORTA anticipates that the the Von Dullens will be back on Canal this summer. When that happens, the regulatory limbo that currently exists goes away and the pre-storm rules have to return. That means green streetcars on St. Charles, red ones everywhere else. Last Monday's PPP ride can't happen under the pre-storm rules. Under those rules, the 900s that the PPP boarded at Beauregard Circle can't operate on "revenue runs" off the St. Charles line. They're not ADA-compliant, and the Canal line must maintain that compliance.

The 400-series Riverfront cars have wheelchair lifts, so they can operate on revenue runs on Canal. When they get to Carondelet and St. Charles, however, they run into a problem. The 400s didn't operate on the St. Charles line in 1971, so they're not on the NRHP list. If NORTA operates a 400 on St. Charles for money, the line would lose its ADA exemption. That would create a situation similar to what happened on Riverfront, and the 35 vintage 900s would no longer be able to operate on the line.

So, even though there now are track and electrical connections between the three streetcar lines, that connection between Canal and St. Charles exists solely for the purpose of streetcar maintenance. Once the Von Dullens return home to Canal Street, the 900s will go back to their barn on Willow St. The red cars will be able to switch onto St. Charles to return back to the shop at Carrollton Station, but they can't do it for a buck

I have a modest proposal for the people of Mid City: If the Phunny Phorty Phellows decide to return to their traditional Uptown ride next year on Twelfth Night, charter a 400-series car and have one of your own! My guess is that the PPP will consider imitation to be the sincerest form of flattery. They're folks who like streetcars and like Mid City. Even if the party run was just from Beauregard Circle to the Canal barn, it would return some of the "neighborhood" feel of Carnival back to the area. The days of true "neighborhood" parades are long gone, as NOPD and City Hall have jammed almost every krewe into Uptown routes. Endymion still gets a pass on this, but Endymion is so huge that it has a life of its own. A Twelfth Night streetcar run on Carrollton and Canal would be something fun for everyone in Mid City, and we at CanalStreetCar (dot com) would gladly work with y'all to make it happen.

As part of my "Twelve Yats of Christmas" feature on my YatPundit blog, today is "three," which is:

On da third day of Christmas, we stopped at

McKenzie's, for

three french breads

McKenzie's (prounounced MUH-ken-zees) Pastry Shoppes was a New Orleans institution for several generations. People used to say they were going to "McKenzie's Bakery," but the stores themselves weren't bakeries. They were retail storefronts, literally "pastry shoppes." The main bakery was down on Desire Street. All the goodies were baked down there, then trucked to the 30+ retail stores throughout the metro area. To this day, you'll have people tell you that they miss McKenzie's donuts or turtles, or petit fours, or blackout cake, or...well, you get the idea. Even my 19-year old misses their chocolate whip-top pie.

The McKenzie's chain closed in 2001. This is, to my knowledge, the only McKenzie's sign left (If you know of another, please let me know). "Chicken in a Box" was a feature of the McKenzies on the corner of Frenchmen and Foy in Gentilly:

The entrance for the pastry shoppe was right on the corner, or you could go around to the side entrance and get fried chicken. After the storm, someone took over the entire location and it's now a take-out chicken-and-sandwiches place.

There was only one "Chicken in a Box." There was one other variation on the typical McKenzie's store, the "McKenzie's Ice Cream Parlor, on Harrison Avenue in Lakeview. That also closed years ago. The location, a bay in a strip mall, was slated to become a Tastee Donuts prior to the storm, but it never materialized.

An aerial view of Pontchartrain Park from the early 1950s. The area in the top left corner is Camp Leroy Johnson, an army supply depot. That land was turned over to the University of New Orleans in the 1960s, and is now the university's East Campus. On the right, jutting out into Lake Pontchartrain is Lakefront Airport (NEW). The top left corner of the undeveloped area is now the campus of Southern University in New Orleans. The drainage canal separating the park from the rest of Gentilly on the left is the Florida Avenue canal. Next to the canal are the tracks for the Southern Railroad. They head from in town, curve right then travel east across the Industrial Canal and out to the train bridge across the lake that runs parallell to US90 and I-10. The canal and the train tracks make for a significant geographical boundary between the established part of Gentilly on the left and the new Pontchartrain Park subdivision on the right.

In the late 1940s/early 1950s, Pontchartrain Park was a new subdivision developed for upwardly mobile black families. Jim Crow laws were still in force at this time, making a new subdivision a gold mine for the developer, since a lot of black men took advantage of their GI Bill benefits, went to college, and now had good jobs. These men became the doctors, lawyers, and other professionals of the black community in the 1960s and 1970s. Shopping centers in Gentilly Woods and Gentilly Terrace (along Gentilly Blvd., just off this photo to the south) began an even faster growth. The archdiocese of New Orleans built St. Augustine High School to educate many of the young black men from these families, and St. Mary's Academy moved out to Chef Menteur Highway from the French Quarter in 1965. Southern University in New Orleans (SUNO) opened in 1959.

Fast forward to 2005. The Federal Flood hit the Pontchartrain Park area as hard as the rest of Gentilly. The combination of Army Corps of Engineers-designed structural failures in the floodwalls of the London Avenue Canal to the west as well as wind pushing water over the tops of the levees and floodwalls of the Industrial Canal in the east were a double-whammy for this neighborhood. Homes in the area got anywhere from 3' - 8' of water. Then, to add insult to injury, a tornado spawned from thunderstorms associated with Hurricane Rita touched down in this neighborhood.

Victims of the Federal Flood who had less than 4' of water come into their homes, generally speaking have had an easier time of rebuilding, since it's possible to cut out drywall interior at 4' and replace it with new sheets of the same height. This is assuming you have the funds to fix your house, and that's where the problem comes in for many residents of Gentilly. Those doctors and lawyers who moved out to Gentilly in the 1950s are now old folks. Their mortgages have been paid off for years, and with those mortgages often went flood insurance coverage as well. When a bank holds paper on a house in most neighborhoods down here, the owners are required to buy flood insurance. The premiums are factored into your monthly note and paid by the lender. Since a lot of folks are on fixed incomes by the time they burn their mortgages, they drop flood insurance. After all, the Corps of Engineers built all these levees and floodwalls, right?

That's where "Road Home" is supposed to help, but the program has been problematic. The state was making it up as they went along, so a lot of early applicants got lost in the shuffle. By the time the process was refined and (supposedly) working, other homeowners found that the state was cutting back on what they were wiling to pay them, fearful in some cases that there wouldn't be enough funds to go around. In other cases, some accuse the program of deliberately being an obstacle to keep blacks from coming back to the city. (I don't subscribe to the notion that they're directly discriminating--I think they're just bloody stupid.)

Then there's the geniuses at City Hall. The city wants to demolish homes that are supposedly "threats" to the neighborhood. Judging by the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit (PDF) filed against the city to halt demolitions, if you're not living in your home or in a FEMA trailer on the front lawn, your house is in danger of being summarily knocked down, no matter what the condition is. Read the lawsuit, it's scary.

But if you think that developers are having a field day tearing down housing projects, just wait until the Shaw group and other contractors get ahold of entire subdivisions. People still in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Houston, and Atlanta can't keep an eye on their homes 24/7 while they wait for Road Home money and insurance settlements. Those who voluntarily choose not to return are selling their houses back to the state. Imagine if your dad's house is one of two or three on a block that didn't get sold back to the state? Do you really think those couple of houses are going to slow down these people?

This is how we're treating our middle class in New Orleans. These are people who, in many cases, busted their asses to get out of the projects to make life better for their families. These are men who went to war and women who supported them. Entire neighborhoods still lie empty, hanging in limbo.

The public housing debate has made for dramatic theater in the last couple of weeks while the city, state, and Republican private sector are combining to eradicate what's left of the black middle class in New Orleans. Without a middle class, there will be no tax base. There will be no pool of skilled labor and professionals for corporations to employ. There will be no black health care professionals (and there already are bloody few white ones at the moment).

This is the story you should be blogging about. Those of you who are watching developments unfold in other parts of the country and world see the news coverage and read local accounts of the public housing debate are getting very emotional about what is essentially a small portion of the displaced population of the city. What about the homeowners? It's not fair to say that these people have more of a right to return than those who have less than them, but they damn sure deserve advocates as loud as the out-of-town activists who have been chaining themselves to fences. They're going to move on to the next kabuki stage while people in Gentilly struggle to rebuild.

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.

Oak Park Civic Association
Coffee Social and Marketplace
Saturday, December 8th
Oak Park Shopping Center (Mirabeau and Paris Avenues)
8:30am - Oak Park Neighborhood meeting
9:30am-11:30am - Breakfast, social, shopping

for more info, contact Nikki Najiola at n_najiola@yahoo.com

The main gate of City Park, yesterday afternoon.