Down Canal Street, and across Carrollton there stands a tan building that hums of voices, guitars, and drums and can be heard on the sidewalks through its painted, tan brick walls. Intentionally frozen, it represents the state of nostalgic longing in which New Orleans is suspended. The Mid City Bowling Lanes, or the Rock and Bowl is a revived 1940's bowling alley and music venue that has struggled to maintain the atmosphere of a lost era and has found itself to be marketed on its state of liminality. As a recent phenomenon of the last two decades, it is a rather new addition to the repertoire of New Orleans music venues that encompasses nearly every inch of this city, outnumbering restaurants and bars. Because if you aren’t eating in this city, you are probably listening to music in between meals. New Orleans however, is a city to be found in the cracks, its meaning buried behind layers of accumulated memory, piled, scattered, and pushed against the sides of each other until the mess and the order become the same thing. In this friction she thrives in the struggle and becomes the place she is. If we include in the notion of anthropological place the possibility of the journeys made in it, the discourses uttered in it, and the language characterizing it, then we separate New Orleans as a place from a memory of a space and she becomes malleable. Represented by myth and ritual, people return to her shifting soil with expectations of stability yet seek to find those moments where they feel the earth move beneath their feet. So to what extent should we nostalgically restore her crumbling facades or simply refill the cracks?
I walked up the steep staircase to the Rock and Bowl, climbing to the dance floor and bowling alley above, ascending into a cloud of bodies throwing themselves about to the music of a blues guitarist. Their friction made the room humid and hot as couples swung about the dance floor and their sweat hung in the air, dancing as if they had been here as kids, a weathered voice suspended and slow sang about a girl. The beaten floorboards, the smell of an old gymnasium, it is thick with dust and music, as its tired lanes are forever fixed in a state of repair when the old entertains the new. Like Vaughns, a Bywater institution, it exhibits a condition of glass jar preservation, in that the physical space and the phenomenal experience of performance are maintained over time. As I sat there watching standing soldiers fall over themselves, couples, side-stage stragglers, and solemn drinkers listening to a sad song, I was reminded of that place I call home, and realized that I often confuse nostalgia with preservation. Or rather a reconstructed fondness of a certain memory, with a contingent plan for the future which embodies the forecasted memories of people. Preservation is an act of forethought brought about with the act of restoration that will inspire new stories to be told in the midst of old ones, new myths and rituals can emerge out of the nature of contrast between past and present. This contradiction of conditions however perplexes and delays the immediate need for stability so that preservation moves aside for restoration. I find myself encouraging these New Orleans traditions to absorb the rising tide like a wet sponge, and yet simultaneously expect her to rebuild and begin anew. We are now in a demand for the re-use of this dripping runoff, questioning origins with the task of asking ourselves, What fills in the cracks? Having grown up on the flood plains of the Green River in Western Kentucky, I have seen my whole life the struggle to preserve a remembered past, seen it fail under a timid economy, and rise again with an iron boom. Rock and Bowl was preserved by a lack of actions, it was bought, sold, and used for its original purpose and so adaptive same- use made it a nostalgic place, but preserved its ability to serve its function in the community as a model for what a New Orleans tradition should be. As I left the bowling alley that night in the early hours of the morning riding down back into the Quarter, passing over puddles of water from the street washers and smelling all of the nights’ events toward my home in the Bywater, the city was still. Perhaps this is the quietest moment I have ever experienced in this city, no cars, no people, just the air and empty sidewalks. Up North Peters, onto Chartres, the produce warehouse glowed yellow, the train tracks buckled under tires and echoed out into nothing, the stretch ahead showed no life. And so the city was blank, but it was still New Orleans because my memory of her allowed me to fill in the blanks, but only with that which I already knew, that which was embedded in my mind as nostalgia. I saw dogs being walked along the levee, delivery trucks squeezing around the bend at the lumber yard, and an ever flowing fire hydrant leaking into the road. And so it wasn’t New Orleans after all, that street on which I imagined new possibilities had been intertwined with histories I chose, and so it was never allowed to move beyond my vision, as I restored her without thinking of what I was preserving. What histories are we prepared to erase for the sake of saving others? The stillness of the night allowed me to envision New Orleans as I never had, and so the quiet weighed heavy on me.
Toward the edge of Bywater at the coffee plant on Chartres there are two houses, each a little older than the other, pitched at angles so that one supports the other like two old ladies on Bourbon Street. One gray and the other a browner shade of white they stand in silence, for some reason froze. Their details are still immaculate under thick layers of peeling paint, but beyond their makeup each is in a state of decay that has offered me something more. Boards of siding have fallen off revealing a deeper history within the body of the walls. The bones of the house are exposed to the point that I am able to imagine the building of this place because I see the nails, dents, and bruises that the wood obtained in the making, and through a sectional peek the thinness of a wall tells me a much deeper story about the city, its heat, material availability, and the craft of labor. Leaning on each other for life support, the ladies are shells, whose memory remains vital to the street and to the people who live along it. These streets are scattered with occupancies like a staccato rhythm, catching sometimes where the grass has over taken the lot, yet holding at those where hammering rings. These places have grown to become the way I envision the street front, not nostalgic facades propped up by steel beams, but rather preserved in a broken slouch, covered in kudzu and still. But I do not know the pain of their emptiness nor will I ever feel the tear of their absent residents across my back as many have done and are doing, but I remain hopeful that they are seen by those as I see them. As I walk across the ancient ruins of this city with hundreds of others, Bywater locals on ten feet tall bicycles, the older gentleman in red on Royal who play’s harmonica, and even the Tambourine Lady at Tipitinas perhaps, all embark on the same journey across this immersed landscape, to speculate and wonder about the meaning of this place and the future of it, for certain that it will never change. It is with no surprise that the preservation of the built world of New Orleans is such a massive enterprise, yet there still exists in the rebuilding the contradiction between needed immediacy, economical feasability, and the loss of craft that plagues these times, but it is this tension to maintain a memory that will give this process meaning. How can she be expected to move forward when she so heavily relies on the past to survive?
I walked into a meeting at the Preservation Resource Center (PRC), through the brick facade, past an inner glass shell meant to preserve the historic building, yet still enable its use by creating a false front, a facade that acted as a billboard for the organization. The noise of Tchoupitoulas groaned behind me through the building as I looked around at a small portion of the task of this city, to preserve its meaning by restoring its architecture, forgoing nostalgia in place of forethought. I met with a program director who works in a division dedicated to buying, renovating, and selling historic properties now focused on the Holy Cross neighborhood whom I will call Dan. We began talking about the crisis of preservation, its necessity, and the inevitable downfall of the building arts in the wake of tragedy, as cheap, thin drywall replaces plaster, and contractors replace craftsmen. At the onset of our talk I mentioned adaptive re-use, an idea that goes relatively unchecked as a “good” thing whenever it is implemented. But I watch the efforts of re-use and so often see forced programs,or a buildings function, into an uncomfortable skin, forgetting its intention and forsaking renovation so that a glass shell can be placed inside an ancient stone wall. When I am at home, a Victorian Shotgun, the purpose of the space is clear, and its building allowed that to be revealed naturally to me and to others who have lived there. This city is still here because it was built to be preserved through use, allowing the architecture to speak in a way that patterns our lives here, that allows us to find stability.
“You want to talk about green building . . . the greenest house is the one that is already built. These houses were built for zero energy, with day lighting and high ceilings,” Dan said. In fact it goes beyond any environmental decision by a trades person. Take a plasterer or lather for example, the work involved, the physical connection to a detail or a single wall retains with it a memory of the project with that person and community in which it exists. But I understood what Dave was saying, at one point in time it was as if people were building and making things which they foresaw to accumulate and maintain memories, preserving them from the beginning. Our discussion moved into what the city was doing in terms of its post-FEMA preservation efforts and if they were satisfactory for the current housing demands of New Orleans.
“Today, people want to build a new house, when one already exists. One exists with embodied energy ” Dan exclaimed.
This embodied energy then is one of the carpenter, plasterer, painter, and metal worker. It becomes less about making and more about the spiritual memory of the making of things. When such energy is exerted into the creation of a place, its meaning then is that much more rooted and permanent. Since they embody the site, they become inseparable from it, from the fabric of the community, and from the people who live there. As trailers are taken away day by day, their absence requires that the resulting human density be displaced across the city, now. However, as Dan would then explain that the issue of immediate occupancy becomes troublesome. There must be established a difference between the practice of place making from building, between preservation and renovation. In the end it comes back to a question of origins, choosing which point to set the clock to. How local then will our vernacular architecture be? There is such an influx of building demands that the craft, much like the product, has turned from a specialized trade-based profession into something new, something that has begun to defy A New Orleans logic, denying site and the possibly the ability for a place to embody energy. Thus we are choosing to restore her to a point she may have never known, determining her history based on our own histories.
Across from my shotgun on the block bordered by Dauphine and Independence sits an old garment factory, a jagged metal warehouse with rainbow colors painted across it’s partly white faces. I have been told that this is the Levy Pant factory in which Ignatius J. Reilly had worked and toiled to relieve the suffering of many laborers. At night the wind grinds the loose sheet metal siding together which screeches out and echoes down the empty, dim lighted streets surrounding it. Two dogs which I believe belong to the neighbor guard this place, they bark and chase me each time I pass like most Bywater dogs tend to do. The other day began construction on this site for new artists’ lofts of which will be retrofitted inside this historic structure, adapting it to new uses. (29) There had been other attempts at developing this site, new buildings which would reach higher in order to increase density. This seems to be something that is feared in my neighborhood by talking to people and reading about it in the Times. How could it not be in a city of neutral spaces, the spaces in between are coveted, they are symbols of this place. Growing in between the cracks means that any new addition must be able to lean upon its neighbor for support and likewise be able to do the same. Creole builders made their reputations and livelihoods on their ability to do this, to be able to provide a mechanism for continual growth in the form of an adaptable space. These Acadian households expanded with additions when new requirements were needed, but they used the existing house as a framework, using it as skeleton on which to build. By means of communal building practices, the home symbolized in its making the beliefs of the people who inhabited them embodying memories before they were even made. Having read, Raised to the Trade: Creole Building Arts of New Orleans that Dan had recommended I learned that especially in certain neighborhoods like the Seventh Ward that residents would actually help each other build their houses over weekends, paying the labor with gumbo and beer. Families, traditionally Creoles of color, used their trades to come together and solve an immediate problem with specialization.
The Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans releases a publication entitled “Preservation” in which the issue of preservation and restoration are covered monthly. As an architect it is hard to say that new architecture can’t solve these problems, but rather I think that new ways of thinking about existing building typologies and technologies are being used by many in a successful way for immediate results. These new ways of thinking however tend to be those which have already been established and realized in this city. The solution of rebuilding may already be in place. So at the surface level, doing nothing would actually market the city better than trying to do everything. Perhaps New Orleans is too unique to apply other American urban planning models to, perhaps this is an instance in which new doesn’t mean more but rather new means less. I see my neighbors each day restoring their homes back to normal in large parts because something about the older model worked, this architecture was built for this place and there is no separation between the city and the building. There is no dichotomy here between built and natural or old and new instead it belongs to the same fabric that is the essence of this place so that a change in one strand is felt across the tension and responded to by another. And it is frustrating that some seem to feel this pull across more than others and some are left to fall in between the weave so that they no longer feel part of the very fabric they helped create, so that is why I question whether it is helpful to do anything but do nothing.
For each day and each passing hour that I am in this city I grow to love more and more the tragic beauty of her decay and growth. Houses lean with the swaying earth, sidewalks sheer like tectonic plates, and with each movement something fills the void, weeds, grass, spare building parts, or old cars. We are in constant motion here, as every passing delivery truck or train can be felt
underfoot as it vibrates across the earth into our bodies, so we begin to physically feel this place and this movement then makes us all move relative to each other so that we are static. Yet the world outside these levees continues to grow, and expects the same New Orleans they left years ago. Whether it is the Church on Burgundy, my neighbors shotgun on Independence, or the Rock and Bowl, the process of preservation has been underway for quite sometime. A phenomenon not new to this city as in others, and not contingent upon on the levee breaks but something with much deeper roots as this was a city built to be preserved. It has to be. The weather eats at everything, the humidity so thick that I can’t tell the difference between water and sweat. If a yard goes un-mowed, a house un inhabited, a neighborhood forgotten, Louisiana swallows it. Historic Preservation then has a stranglehold on this place more than any other city in America. As it attempts to reconstruct loss, its roots in preservation shouldn’t be forgotten, but yet it should learn to distinguish the difference between a glass jar and a glass box. Glass jars open and allow the contents to shift, but yet still fit inside the respectable shell, preserving the memory of the jar itself forever. Glass boxes fit inside the contents and are thus shaped by it, preserving themselves only as long as the object around them exists. In other word’s the metaphor should inspire one to move beyond the initial experience and into new possibilities. Seeing that ghostly datum running across this city, there is a stillness here that bleeds into a static suspension on moving ground. While the lives of those lived inside the bowl and around it change, growth is relative across people, place, and time as they are all moving and changing, yet holding on with clenched fists to the memory of what was had, lost, and possibly not replaced.
