Growing Pains

I’ve ridden through the Bywater on bike countless times and with each new trip my natural posture pushes me further to the ground as I keep my eyes forward and on the road. Even more now than before I walk with my eyes down so that I may avoid potholes, winged rats (a.k.a. pigeons), and mysterious liquids. Growing up in rural Kentucky I have grown accustomed to recognizing the landscape that I travel upon as cow manure tends to be hidden by tall grass. Bike riding has informed the way I see this city as the pursuit of safety has necessitated my ground fixation. By looking down in hopes of understanding multiple neighborhood relationships, subtle but specific responses can be found at the scale of the front steps and slightly higher at fences and gates. With such a narrow focus in traveling from my house on Independence, through the Marigny, into the French Quarter, and across the Mississippi to Algiers Point I hoped to find the specific responses to the street front condition at each stage. How would the street front change as I moved across the city and what would this tell me? Each segment of the city has unique features which separate it from the others as the neighborhood responds to different contextual problems like topography, economic standing, and culturally specific ideologies. Material changes and architectural typologies form the language of individual communities at the street scape so that different contexts produce different dialects.
Moving across the Bywater on Burgundy, the Shotgun house approaches the street differently from house to house but there remains a casual datum line which runs through to describe the level of porches. These datums inform a situation in which individual houses respond in new ways as compared to their neighbors in nearly exact conditions.
Material responses occur at each of these noted sites in both paving materials and handrails. At the sidewalk each porch or stairway tends to continue the street front up to the edge of the house. Whether it be a Creole Cottage on the far right, or a double shotgun like the two on the left, the material consistencies remain relevant across all three. In these cases, concrete and brick of the sidewalk seem to inform the decision to make the stairs out of the same material. As I ride through Burgundy this idea haunts me and intrigues me as an aspiring architect because the influence of space on the individual seem to hold true. But at the same time I know that sometimes material choices are practical, concrete is cheap, and a Creole Cottages hug the ground so brick is an easier alternative to steps. It remains however that as I moved closer to the Marigny the materials seem to change in a gradient from standard to more vernacular responses.
Entering the Marigny I crossed over this somewhat invisible barrier, for at the train tracks the Bywater seems to end as the number of old warehouses decrease and the streets grow more narrow. The houses seem to grow more dense but the datum that ran in the Bywater continues. . I was surprised that on the street level the neighborhoods were one and the same except for a few exceptions. I tried to find differences in the street fronts but still old rusted gates and crooked front porches met me at every turn, it was as if the Bywater was extended visually but the feel of the place differed. I can not say what is different about the places expect for how the every narrowing streets. This one simple taper changes the place and houses seem to grow higher, gates seem to rise above those in the Bywater. Burgundy however remained full of potholes, pigeons still ran the streets, but for some reason the smell changed. Restaurants seemed to grow in numbers along Burgundy as I neared Esplanade, the smells grew more complex than the visual cues as the number of private businesses became more regular. Once to Esplanade the landscape changed and for a brief moment the lines of oaks signaled the first real change since I left Independence.
The French Quarter manifests its street front vernacular more abruptly than in Bywater or the Marigny. Residents here have only a few feet to signal the change from public sidewalk and the private house. Front steps contrast with the concrete sidewalks in stone and wood, neither more ornate than the other. My eyes are shifted upward here because the streets are in considerably better conditions so that now I see gates and steps, the datum shifted up. Alley way gates in the Quarter seem to rise higher than before and I don’t know if its because they are actually higher or because the increased density and narrow streets are distorting my view. Gates and walls separating houses from the street grow thicker and act more as barriers here. With so many people taking pictures of the iron lace on balconies and riding on horse carriage tours, the implied barrier is often not as subtle as before. Here walls are built to keep people out and to protect what is inside. “The important point for urban design is the need for adequate spatial separation between groups whose codes of conduct are sufficiently different to prevent formation of a reasonably stable and safe community, of whatever type.” (Greenbie, 1982) But what groups? Tourists and residents or residents and residents? Keeping groups separate narrows the field to a group vs. group condition, the experience of the space is then reduced to a struggle for preserving identities through barriers. But these lines of gates and houses form a unified mass, linking one to the other. One of these gates I found was left open so I peeked inside to a courtyard and immediately I saw that the residents here were only displacing their neutral grounds inside private dwellings. Fewer parks and green areas require people to adapt different ways of experiencing the outdoors, so that the courtyard replaces the lost area taken up by sidewalk. The ride through the French Quarter was quicker than usual as the weekdays leave it empty. I decided at this point to head over to Decatur so that I could take the ferry at the Riverfront over to Algiers Point. At the river the French Quarter ends in one swift move, the datum is shifted even higher as private houses on the street front are replaced with private business and people live above them.
Approaching the ferry the concrete sidewalk grows more porous as it shifts to the metal
grate of the loading ramp then to slabs of steel on the deck of the boat. Riding across and looking back towards my own neighborhood over to the French Quarter and up to the CBD roof lines remain constant. The changing street condition influences the way I see each unique part of the city but in reality they remain relatively the same height, Algiers on the other hand as I look over sinks behind the levees and flattens. Algiers seems more like home to me in appearance than any other part of the city, I recognize front yards and a decreased density found in my hometown. Here there is no need for neutral grounds or courtyards, houses are spread out enough to allow for each to have their own semi private parcel of land. On Verret Street my eyes are allowed to wander, the roads aren’t so bad and traffic is minimal. Porches are shifted back down but left higher than the ones in the French Quarter and are more closely similar to those in Bywater. The Creole Cottage and the Shotgun are replaced by the California Bungalow, front stoops replaced by yards, and porches are substantial. Here due to the nature of the place the transition from street to house is pushed back and each house reacts differently with their fences. Every house meets the street with grass, pathways cut through the yards and meet concrete or wooden stairways. Like the Bywater and Marigny the natural materials are left on the ground unlike the Quarter where it is transplanted to the higher residential datum. Wandering through this part of the city front porches grow less important, differences less valid, and fences irrelevant. Algiers is unique not in the architectural cues it offers but in that the New Orleans natural landscape can be appreciated here, the flatness is massive. Live oaks and laurels line the streets, frying foods and Laundromats still drift on the air, but the city changes here in obvious visual ways but also in ways I do not yet understand.