[wordup] Under the Freeway in New Orleans

[Adam Shand]

You have to visit the site to see the pictures so you should probably 
just go there and read it.

Adam.

From: http://www.flaneur.org/04_02/0402_walker.html

Under the Freeway
by Rob Walker

  The first time I visited New Orleans, it was on a college road trip 
from Texas. I remember how Interstate 10 rose as we zagged toward the 
center of town, and how we seemed to be soaring over the city, looking 
out at the buildings from 30 feet above the ground. So when we took our 
exit, it was as if we descended into New Orleans — and it was kind of 
scary down there. On one side were abandoned-looking buildings, and on 
the other a weirdly open area underneath the highway itself, shadowy 
and strange after dark, with a surprising number of people walking 
around. What on earth were they doing Under the Freeway at night?

  Then we took a right, toward the French Quarter, and I basically 
stopped thinking about it, although the image stuck with me.

  Now I know that the blocks-long stretch of cracked pavement under I-10 
along North Claiborne Avenue has a story, and it's one of my favorite 
things to point out to visitors. Almost any time you drive under I-10 
anywhere between say, Canal Street and St. Bernard Ave., there are 
people hanging around, maybe just on their way somewhere, but 
occasionally eating, chatting, sometimes even sitting in a lawn chair, 
or playing dominos. It's bizarre. Because the physical space beneath 
the Interstate is exactly as appealing as you would guess, which is to 
say not at all.

  But this was not always so.

  New Orleans has many spacious avenues that are most remarkable for the 
very wide strip of ground that separates the two flows of traffic. To 
call this "the median" is inadequate, because it's area that can be 
thirty or fifty feet across. So here such strips are called "the 
neutral ground," and I guess the archetype is the neutral ground on St. 
Charles Avenue. This is where the streetcar line runs, from Carrolton 
Avenue all the way to the Quarter. Along with the enormous oak trees, 
the grassy neutral ground is part of what gives St. Charles such a 
grandiose feeling. During Carnival, most of the important parades 
follow a route that leads along a chunk of St. Charles, and the neutral 
ground, by Fat Tuesday, has been completely taken over by virtual 
encampments of families and friends who set up ladders for better 
viewing, and barbecue pits for better eating.

  Also port-a-johns.

  In another part of the city, the same thing happens on the sprawling 
neutral ground of Orleans Avenue, where it was pretty common to see 
couches and other furniture arrayed for parade-viewing comfort, until 
the city cracked down on that kind of thing.

  Up until 1966, Claiborne Avenue also had a very pretty and park-like 
neutral ground. It was about ten blocks long and 100 feet across, 
totaling thirteen-and-a-half acres, lined with two rows of mature live 
oak trees — around 250 of them altogether.

  It so happens that the two neighborhoods bisected by this particular 
public space were Treme and the Seventh Ward, which were, it also 
happens, predominantly black. Claiborne was lined with businesses and 
residences, largely one- or two-story wood-frame structures from the 
nineteenth and early twentieth century, and largely black-owned. In the 
pre-Civil Rights era, black revelers weren't particularly welcome to 
the uptown Carnival parade celebrations, and thus many celebrated Mardi 
Gras on Claiborne. The famous Mardi Gras Indians — one of the iconic 
images of New Orleans today — were a main attraction. Daniel Samuels, 
who studied the area as part of his graduate work at the University of 
New Orleans, wrote in his thesis that North Claiborne was "the locus of 
cultural and economic life for New Orleanians of African descent."

  I thought it would be interesting to look back at the newspaper 
accounts from the 1960s about the pitched battle that must have been 
fought over the decision to erase a place of vital importance to a 
community that has done so much to shape the city's character.

  What I found was nothing. There was no dramatic public battle. I'm 
sure people objected, but in those days they were easily ignored. It 
also seems that many area residents didn't know what was going to 
happen until the demolition and tree "removal" process began in August 
1966. The city's planning commission, according to Samuels, had already 
concluded that the North Claiborne area showed "existence of severe 
blight" — they should see it now! — and apparently the thinking was 
that no one would be harmed or damaged by running a highway through 
here.

  No one who mattered, anyway.

  I wish I could pretend that all of this is truly remarkable, but I'm 
afraid that if you know anything at all about the way cities have 
developed in the U.S. in the past fifty or sixty years, you have a 
pretty good idea that the various sacred grounds of impoverished 
urban-dwellers have been paved over or otherwise obliterated with some 
regularity.

  What is remarkable about the former Claiborne neutral ground is that 
it is still used as a public space. I don't mean in any formal way. And 
I certainly don't mean to suggest that the area, with litter and broken 
glass on the ground and the claustrophobic roar of cars overhead, is 
anything like the "promenade" that long-time area residents described 
to Samuels.

  But I myself have been Under the Freeway many times. I've followed 
jazz funeral parades on routes underneath it (the acoustics, actually, 
are fantastic), and I've hung around on Mardi Gras day and at other 
times when the Indians gather. This past Mardi Gras, I watched as a 
Mardi Gras Indian dance at Claiborne and Esplanade spilled into the 
street itself, bringing traffic to a complete halt. One unfortunate 
woman began blaring her horn, and was informed by several onlookers 
that she was in the wrong place, on the wrong day, to be doing that 
sort of thing. An area civics organization called Tambourine and Fan 
has devoted itself to a mission described succinctly on a banner that 
fluttered from the freeway over the corner of Claiborne and Orleans: 
"Bring Mardi Gras Back to North Claiborne."

  Most of the time the space is used in more quotidian ways. The other 
day I rode my bike down, and the first thing I saw was an older black 
man sitting on a little ledge around one of the massive columns that 
hold the freeway up, eating his lunch. Just like a picnic in the park. 
Only Under the Freeway. Most of the people walking, biking, or sitting 
under I-10 are black (the demographics of Treme and the Seventh Ward 
haven't changed much), and many look old enough to remember when this 
space was grass and oaks.

  I wanted to take some pictures of a somewhat recent public arts 
project that aims, I guess, to at least make a public acknowledgment of 
what this area used to be: A number of support columns have been 
painted with wraparound murals.

  The columns on the outer edges have renditions of oak trees — painted 
by prisoners, it turns out. Other murals were done by various local 
artists, with varying degrees of technical skill. Some have celebratory 
themes — a parading brass band on one, Mardi Gras Indian on another. 
Some celebrate achievements — the city's first black surgeon, a family 
that has produced two mayors. And other murals depict slavery, police 
brutality, and lynching.

  I have some copies of photographs of North Claiborne, pre-1966, that I 
got from The Williams Research Center (they asked me not to digitize 
these), and I was especially interested in seeing what was still 
standing from two photos taken at the corner of Claiborne and Ursulines 
in 1947. In the pictures there are some cool old signs, one for ACME 
Life Insurance, and another, shaped like a huge paintbrush, for a 
hardware store.

  What's there now is a freeway ramp.

  So I rode on. A lot of this space is used for parking, especially near 
the corner of St. Bernard, where Circle Foods actually looks a lot like 
it did in a picture I have from 1954. Except of course that the 
presence of the hulking freeway, and the dearth of other businesses 
nearby, makes it seem more menacing today. (Samuels found 130 business 
were listed on this stretch in 1960, and thirty-five in 2000).

  I took more pictures. It's a nice thought, I guess, painting these 
columns, but the net effect is pretty depressing. It doesn't mitigate 
the loss, it underscores it. Which has value, too, I guess.

  Not all the columns are painted, and I noticed one that seemed to have 
newspaper clippings pasted on it in a sort of cluster. They were death 
notices from the local paper (the Times-Picayune runs at least a 
thumbnail obit for pretty much everyone who dies in New Orleans). A guy 
sitting in his car about forty feet away waved and motioned me over. He 
was older black man, missing a lot of teeth, wearing sunglasses and 
black cap. As far as I can tell he was just hanging out in his car; 
maybe he was waiting for someone shopping at Circle Foods, but he was 
parked an inconvenient distance from there, or from anything else. He 
rolled his window down and said he'd seen me looking at the obituary 
column.

  "Yes," I said.

  "You know any of the people on there?"

  "Not really," I said. "Are those all people from the neighborhood?"

  "That's right. My sister's up there." He was smiling through all of 
this, very pleasant and friendly.

  I said: "Oh. Who, uh, who puts them up?"

  He said someone's name — Chuck, I think — and pointed at a house, as 
if I would of course know Chuck who lives across the way there, or 
whatever. I said I thought it seemed like a very nice idea, and he said 
he thought so too, and that he had enjoyed speaking with me. He rolled 
up his window.

  Somehow pasting obituaries to a highway support column says more, to 
me, than the murals do. My point here isn't to romanticize these 
neighborhoods, or to condemn the decision to slash an interstate 
through them. I'm neither sentimental nor angry about North Claiborne. 
But I am somewhat awestruck.

  We all know how a place can have a hold on us, how a patch of earth, a 
strip of land, a corner, a building, or the most arbitrarily bordered 
swatch of territory you can imagine, all can have a sort of symbolic 
meaning. But surely even that meaning has its outer limits, right? If 
someone knocks down the building or paves over the land, how can the 
significance of the place where something used to be hold onto its 
significance?

  Often, I think, the answer is: It doesn't. But sometimes it does. This 
not because Symbolic Importance comes bubbling up out of the ground 
like a hot spring. In fact the meaning doesn't flow from places to 
people at all — it's actually the other way around. That's the only way 
the specialness of a place survives the most violent changes in its 
physical aspect. You can't impose this, but you can't thwart it, 
either. All you can do is admire it. And you should.