The Lower Ninth Ward

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The star attraction of New Orleans’ French Quarter is Bourbon Street, an American destination unto itself; an epicenter of local nightlife. Tourists have always flocked to the French Quarter for the annual event of Mardi Gras, jazz music originally made famous by Bourbon Street, unconventional levels of social liberalism, and the artistic New Orleans atmosphere which embraces all the tourists and yet battles their natural inclination to “Disnify” it.

Nearby, St. Claude Avenue is a small street that begins just outside the French Quarter. It merges with adjacent streets and quickly grows into a major thoroughfare, sporting multiple lanes of traffic in either direction. Traveling away from the Quarter towards the Industrial Canal - the border of the Lower Ninth Ward - one already feels the sense of abandonment that a lack of resources after the floods has caused. Dark, vacant car repair shops and small industrial lots dot both sides of the road, while the hipster bars that peeked out of the urban decay in the Foubourg Marigny near the French Quarter vanish quickly.

St. Claude Avenue seems to bear the marks of decay and sadness that penetrate the poorer neighborhoods of many urban areas well before reaching the Lower Ninth Ward. The scene recalls the decimated communities of the South Bronx in 1974, when a wave of arson left gutted multistory buildings beset by piles of rubble and vacant lots.

But after crossing the bridge over the Industrial Canal and its levees on St. Claude Ave., the discontinuities sit front and center in the eeriness, as the consciousness of being in an incredibly damaged atmosphere manifests itself. The South Bronx of the 1970s gives way to Nebraska after a tornado.

With all the rumors about the crime in New Orleans, the intense police presence in the economically viable French Quarter provides a strong sense – both mental and actual – of safety. Yet as one makes their way out from the downtown area, the level of overt law enforcement diminishes substantially.

East of the Industrial Canal, the New Orleans Police Department is no longer active. With the incredible devastation that has wrecked New Orleans, police precincts in this area were all but wiped out, and there are no longer enough officers to patrol the entire city. The Ninth Ward, the city’s largest ward, is protected – even if nominally so – by the United States National Guard.

Traffic lights and street signs no longer exist on St. Claude. Hand painted street signs, facing one direction only and tied to the middle of traffic poles identify the individual streets that cross in front of us, as well as for St. Claude itself. Empty green posts rise from the ground and occasionally cantilever over the intersection, stripped bare of lights or signage, blending in with the telephone poles and electric wires that provide the taken-for-granted amenities of modern life to those who still live here.

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