Neighborhoods: December 2007 Archives

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