Residents ofNew Orleans’ Ninth Ward, an area many declared dead after Hurricane Katrina, know their history – and the resurgent arts district that marks their comeback. They worry that a huge industrial project would bury the great resurrection. And it’s only the latest crisis with which they have grappled.
For all its grandeur and rocking street pageants, New Orleans faced another crisis after the New Year’s Day terrorist attack killed 14 on its globally famed Bourbon Street. Would the killings turn away tourists? The city doubled down on security as it hosted the NFL’s Super Bowl in February, with help from the state government. Lavish media coverage followed. The city rolled into Mardi Gras in early March, with crowded parades, nightclubs, restaurants and art galleries, a healthy boost for New Orleans’s $8bn tourist economy.
Yet to come: the bittersweet 20th-anniversary commemoration of Hurricane Katrina, when the city nearly drowned on global television. On 29 August 2005, the 175mph winds drove a 25ft water surge from the Gulf of Mexico up 90 miles of ragged wetlands, smashing the federal levee system, flooding an area seven times the size of Manhattan. In the city’s Black-majority Ninth Ward, people on rooftops pleaded for rescue as bloated bodies lay below. A subsequent federal investigation faulted the US army corps of engineers for negligent operation of the levees. “The worst engineering catastrophe in US history,” said a national engineers’ society.
The army corps operates a shipping link known as the “industrial canal” that runs from the Mississippi River levee five miles north to Lake Pontchartrain, dividing the ward into the Upper and Lower Ninth. During Katrina, an unloosed barge shattered the canal’s protective wall. Water gushed across the sprawling Lower Ninth Ward, more than 20ft high in places, spilling into the adjacent suburban community of St Bernard parish, where levees also broke.
Though poor and scarred by crime, the Lower Ninth Ward had a 61% home ownership rate, the city’s highest. But many dwellings with mortgages paid had no insurance. The area fell into dense overgrowth for years. Slowly, the gritty rebuilding began. A strain of gentrification came with writers and artists seeking affordable spaces. Today’s Lower Ninth Ward – population 5,000 – is two-thirds less populous than it was in 2005.
The same army engineers who were responsible for the levee failures that redefined the Lower Ninth Ward after Katrina now oversee river-related projects with the port of New Orleans, a political subdivision of the state that is one of Louisiana’s most powerful institutions. Its portfolio of warehouses, wharves and other properties earn rent, while fees from cargo, cruise ships and railroads add to its projected 2025 revenue of $27m. A public hearing on 20 February, in the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood of Holy Cross, reviewed one of the big ticket projects being pursued by the entity that markets itself as PortNOLA.
Such gatherings rarely draw 50 hostile people, such as those who came that day from Holy Cross, named for a high school of stately brick which was displaced by Katrina damage. The community now consists of condos and apartments along the levee, a linear park with riverine vistas for families, kids, dogs and joggers.
These community members know their history. And they worry those spinning the project as an industrial victory for the region could annihilate a post-Katrina comeback symbol – as well as a vital bohemian enclave of the arts – in the process.
The project at issue involves an empty warehouse on the levee, a facility known as the Alabo Street wharf. It is being leased to Sunrise Foods International, a Canadian multinational with plans to rebuild it into a terminal for importing organic grain from foreign ports. A spokesperson told the Guardian the port had spent $37m through January on preliminary engineering design and permit support. It has also spent $3.3m for upgrading a long-dormant Norfolk Southern rail line which will take cargo on Alabo Street to link with tracks on the median of St Claude Avenue, a main Ninth Ward thoroughfare.
At an open house last fall, residents decried the prospect of 24 rail crossings, sirens, clanging bells, traffic gridlock and trains trundling over streets where children play. “This has never been about where we are as a stabilizing community,” said the Rev Willie Calhoun of the Fairview Mission Baptist church. Calhoun called the project’s plans as presented by the port, Sunrise and Norfolk Southern “a dog and pony show”.
Calhoun and others joined Stop the Grain Train, the name of a movement led by small business owner Jeffrey Wittenbrink. Findings the group acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests stoked complaints about secrecy. Sunrise has since posted a study insisting grain dust will not be a threat. But Calhoun unloaded grain as a longshoreman in the 1970s after air force duty in Vietnam, and he said: “Grain dust is not good for anybody. I asked Sunrise about their system to get it out of the terminal into the railcar. They said they were still in design. How do you permit it without an environmental impact statement?”
An army corps of engineers spokesperson told the Guardian that the agency had not received two of the relevant permit applications for the wharf project.
Wittenbrink’s group met with city council members seeking help. Soon thereafter, council member-at-large Helena Moreno, a candidate for mayor in October, wrote to the port chief executive officer, Beth Ann Branch. Moreno cited residents’ “fear regarding safety, health and noise issues, as well as concerns about the devaluation of their property and the potential destruction of their neighborhood if the grain terminal project proceeds”.
Branch declined the Guardian’s interview request. However, the port of New Orleans press secretary provided information to the outlet.
On 20 February, Branch and five board members sat for an hour of comment, listening.
One Holy Cross resident, Patricia Ordinate, held a walker and told the officials they were “destroying an entire neighborhood”. “It’s criminal and inhuman!” she said.
Jolie Robichaux said: “We moved to Holy Cross for peacefulness. We have not heard a plan for safety!”
Another man cried, “You should all be ashamed,” while accusing the port of withholding information.
Jennifer Ward sat holding a Stop the Grain Train sign. With a long background as a curator for galleries, she did not testify. A Holy Cross homeowner, Ward leases an 11,000-sq-ft building called Art Conscious, a ground floor gallery and upstairs print and framing business, in Arabi, a St Bernard village just below the Lower Ninth. Ward has six employees and is hiring. Her home and larger business have a combined value of $1.5m, she told the Guardian.
Ward said her home value on Zillow had fallen $40,000 since the port plan became public, though a direct correlation is impossible to gauge. “I am scared to death that if this area goes industrial, what I have made here will be lost,” Ward said after the hearing.
“This plan is an atrocity after everything the neighborhood has survived,” Gary Lavigne, a Ninth Ward historic renovation builder, told the Guardian.
As residents filed out of the port hearing, Branch congratulated board member James Carter – a Black attorney and former city council member – for having been named the honorary king of a carnival parade.
A renaissance arts district
As TR Johnson – an English professor at New Orleans’ Tulane University – sees it, the Ninth Ward “has replaced the French Quarter as a catalyst of New Orleans arts”.
“This cluster of neighborhoods … has evolved into an enclave of artistic production that marked the French Quarter from the 1920s through the 70s,” he says.
A look at some of the area’s residents supports the notion that it is a renaissance district. They include the distinguished Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera (a Tulane professor), author most recently of Season of the Swamp; the painter Regina Scully, whose 2017 New Orleans Museum of Art exhibit made her Japanese-inspired cityscapes a hot item with collectors and galleries across the country; and Leyla McCalla, the pop singer and cellist formerly with the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops.
To name a few others, there is also bestselling novelist Jami Attenberg; African American photographers Chandra McCormick and husband Keith Calhoun; Black Masking Indian artist Demond Melancon, who won the 1858 Prize for contemporary southern art; environmental photographer Ben Depp; members of RAM, the Haitian rock band; singer Dawn Richards; the memoirist Anne Gisleson; painter Gina Phillips; and film documentarian Katherine Cecil.
The resurgent cultural footprint stretches across the city line into St Bernard, whose population of 40,000 is down from 75,000 in 2005. Arabi, the site of Ward’s Art Conscious building, is a slow-tempo section of St Bernard with artists’ studios scattered about. It is home to the Ranch, a film production soundstage. In adjacent Chalmette, a repurposed Ford auto plant developed by attorney and arts patron Sidney Torres III is an arts center on the National Register of Historic Places.
PortNOLA’s expansion plan includes the multibillion-dollar Louisiana Industrial Terminal (LIT) in Violet, a community 8.6 miles south of Arabi. Servicing the superport will require crushing an 1,100-acre cypress and wetlands forest to erect an elevated highway for 1,728 industrial trucks to travel 17 miles daily to Interstate 10. PortNOLA has invested $107m in site acquisition and other costs.
Irony hovers here like a mushroom cloud. The LIT is in a $14bn federally funded flood protection zone the army corps of engineers executed in upgrading the levees post-Katrina. The port’s LIT budget of $1.8bn includes $300m in federal funds. But it requires a permit by the army corps which, if approved, would then have the agency gutting its own post-Katrina remedial work through dredging and facilitating destruction of the coastal forest, a storm-surge buffer.
The wheel of history rolls backwards in this scenario.
In 1963, the port and the army corps, with locals’ support, began dredging for the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet – or MR-GO, a 76-mile artery – with Congress’s approval as an alternate shipping route downriver to the Gulf of Mexico. Construction wrecked a forest of cypress trees and tidal wetlands, a buffer to storm surges comprising more than 23,000 acres in St Bernard. MR-GO opened a sluiceway for Hurricane Betsy’s Gulf waters barreling into the city in 1965, with deep flooding in parts of St Bernard and the Lower Ninth Ward. Seventy-six people died in Betsy, the first storm of $1bn in assessed damages. More than 160,000 homes flooded, with bodies found in scattered attics.
Forty years later, Katrina’s storm surge followed a similar route, wreaking far greater damage in the Ninth Ward and St Bernard in terms of death, cost and population loss. Today’s New Orleans of 357,767 people is down from the 484,674 in 2005. Many residents were too poor to move back after the natural disaster. “MR-GO never delivered the results its boosters promised,” writes the historian Craig Colten, citing a meager impact of “about 3% of the New Orleans port’s freight tonnage”. In 2009, by political consensus, the corps began filling in MR-GO, as the wetlands’ reseeding began.
St Bernard officials oppose the Violet superport. Torres, an attorney, in challenging the plan cites a PortNOLA public notice that 1.8m cubic yards of “native materials will be excavated and filled with” nearly 3.9m cubic yards of river sand.
Torres in a legal motion said there would also be nearly 2.4m cubic yards of crushed stone and paving with more than 1m cubic yards of thick reinforced concrete. “Debris removal and stone must be trucked,” he said. “The existing vital forest will become a giant concrete hardscape covered by over 14m tons of materials. There is no reversing the impacts of this environmental devastation.”
Advising St Bernard’s local government, architect-engineer John Vickerman is a maritime consultant based in Williamsburg, Virginia, specializing in freight logistics for heavy cargo ports across the globe. Vickerman did consulting for PortNOLA on a 2017 plan. He evinces a trace of scorn, calling the Violet LIT project “risky” in a Guardian interview. “Consider the environmental risk of some 1,700 container trucks a day to transport ship cargo” to I-10, he said. Vickerman cited downriver sites in the community of Plaquemines parish that have “better connections to road or rail”.
Vickerman’s report argues that the river dimensions at Violet can’t accommodate mega-ton supercargo ships without help from outsize tugboats to literally turn around before leaving the dock, meaning “82% of the navigational river traffic would be completely blocked during vessel departures from LIT”. Vickerman’s document criticized PortNOLA for “neglect[ing] to conduct and/or share crucial project due diligence information and justification analysis to rigorously evaluate and justify the LIT” proposal.
“The permit application for the proposed LIT project in Violet is still in review,” an army corps spokesperson said in an email. The spokesperson said the applicant was working through an environmental assessment and that the agency anticipated hosting a public hearing in the summer “to gather … feedback on the permit application”.
Resurrection tides
New Orleans seduced the Kentucky-born artist Gina Phillips, who earned a master’s in fine arts at Tulane in the late 1990s. As her works gained sales and critical notice, she put down funds in 2004 on a blighted house in the Lower Ninth Ward as part of a Federal Housing Authority package for first-time buyers. Just off the river, Phillips’s lot abutted an earthen levee along the industrial canal. She plunged into long days of sweat-equity repair work. With paintings that explore southern identity, she liked the Lower Ninth quilt of churches, shotgun houses and vegetable gardens. Some folks raised chickens. Some hunted rabbits and squirrels in the savannah near the back swamp by Bayou Bienvenue. Six days before Katrina, with work nearly done, Phillips visited friends in Richmond, Virginia. She was heartsick less than a week later realizing her house was underwater.
A mile down from Phillips’s place, the late rock and R&B legend Fats Domino and his wife raised eight children in a baronial home with an adjacent shotgun house. The army corps’ harbor patrol vessels rescued Fats and his family from the Katrina flood. They soon made it to Baton Rouge to stay with friends. When Domino moved back to a New Orleans suburb, graffiti on his old house reading “RIP Fats We Love You” became a must-stop on “disaster tour” buses from downtown hotels, tourists agog at the Lower Ninth’s washed-out streets, feral dogs and cats roaming trash mounds. About a million people in and around New Orleans evacuated. Many took years to rebuild their homes, with $3.3bn in federal aid for homeowners who were underinsured.
In July 2006, Phillips began a long slog of renegotiating loans, dealing with the Road Home federal assistance program. “I didn’t have flood insurance because it was in a so-called safe zone.” She had $90,000 invested when the flood hit. Road Home eventually paid $150,000. After restoring an 1,100-sq-ft house, she built a studio in the yard with oak trees. She calculates their value at $500,000, “but that’s arbitrary if the army corps ends up widening the industrial canal”, she said. “Who wants to live next to a multiyear construction zone?”
After the federal report on its levee failures, and litigation from citizens’ groups, the army corps has moved slowly on an envisioned $1bn new lock for the industrial canal. It is now projected to take 13 years. Members of a group billing itself the Canal Will Kill Nola attend meetings with hard questions. A short documentary featuring Dr Joshua Lewis of Tulane University’s ByWater Institute for Coastal Studies captures the history of hurricane destruction abetted by flawed development projects such as MR-GO.
“The lock replacement would devastate neighborhoods on both sides of the canal for an unknown period of time,” said Sam Bowler, a Lower Ninth Ward metal sculptor and community organizer. Residents fear that the lock work, which involves widening parts of the artery, will crack their walls and foundations and affect home values and quality of life. “We keep asking, ‘How long will it take? What’s the impact of pile driving?’ They have to demolish a gigantic amount of underwater concrete. The levee walls have failed twice [in 1965 and 2005]. They’re asking for a third shot. Really? The alternative is to find another navigational route.”
In 2008, Phillips began her Fats Domino series, an exhibition over several years celebrating the Lower Ninth’s most famous resident as a resurrection symbol. The legendary singer died in 2017. The family’s restored home faces the renamed Fats Domino Avenue, just above the city line and the Arabi arts district.
From England to the Lower Ninth
Raised in Dorset, in the south of England, Katherine Cecil lives today with her children, ages 12 and seven, in a steamboat gothic house a block from the river in the Lower Ninth. The kids ride bikes on the levee. Ship foghorns boom like basso profundo bullfrogs. “Sometimes you hear bullets at night – but the birds sing in the morning, making it rather idyllic,” Cecil said.
In the early 2000s, while studying for a master’s degree in literature at Tulane, Cecil grew intrigued by the city as a cultural crossroads and transitioned into documentary work. She filmed the 2006 mayor’s race. The incumbent, Ray Nagin, a Black businessman who won in 2002 with 86% of the white vote and 38% of African Americans, cast himself as a post-Katrina populist, advocating for displaced Black people. He defeated the liberal Mitch Landrieu, at the time the lieutenant governor, with 83% of the Black vote and a mere 21% of whites. Cecil’s documentary, Race, shows the election as a referendum on Blacks’ right of return. Nagin never delivered once re-elected. Unable to run again after his second term, he went to prison for bribery. Landrieu won in 2010 and led a major rebuilding of the broken city before becoming the White House’s infrastructure czar during Joe Biden’s presidency.
PortNOLA’s plans for the Alabo wharf, some six blocks down the levee from her house, haunt Cecil for its parallels with her work-in-progress: the multi-platform Claiborne Avenue History Project, with Dr Raynard Sanders, an urban scholar.
In the mid-1960s, amid the civil rights movement and before Blacks voted en masse, the city tore down several miles of stately oak trees on the grassy neutral ground of North Claiborne, the crosstown avenue with an industrial canal bridge between the Upper and Lower Ninth Wards. Bulldozing the vertical park saw scores of Black businesses on Claiborne sacrificed for a highway overpass that linked the suburbs to the French Quarter and downtown business district. The Tremé neighborhood lost a quarter of its population and was economically devastated for years.
“Most residents who saw the oaks go down are elderly and don’t remember much opposition,” Cecil said. “Dodie Smith-Simmons, a legendary activist, told us they were too busy fighting for civil rights to realize what the city was doing. There is a similarity with the port and Alabo. These infrastructure projects are presented as done deals with almost no opportunity for public comment. The port began the train tracks here before an environmental evaluation. In the 60s, the city made no effort to solicit input from people; the bulldozers came out of nowhere.”
Saying “there’s a stealth aspect to this”, Cecil called for a moratorium until “a fully objective environmental evaluation can be done” on dust control and cost management.
What it takes to raise a neighborhood
The Louisiana national guard’s Jackson barracks – brick buildings on a lush lawn – lie on St Claude Avenue just before the city line where Arabi begins. The Rev Willie Calhoun lives seven blocks from there on Delery Street, by his childhood home. He recalls the 1960s’ Lower Ninth Ward as a “tight neighborhood fabric, [with] close families”.
The pastor, his wife and mother evacuated before Katrina. The flood reached 20ft there. “I rebuilt my house and my mother’s from the ground up,” Calhoun said. “The bonus God gave me was the years I had left with my mom.”
The man “around the corner, he drowned. One of my schoolmates, she and her sister drowned in the attic. On this block now we have four houses and seven empty lots.”
Calhoun worked 32 years with the Federal Aviation Administration. “I retired in order to rebuild. Insurance paid $100,000. Road Home gave me $47,000. The gentleman who did my claim said I had overbuilt for the area – it would be $300,000 to rebuild. Before the flood I was debt-free. To rebuild, I had to take [a small business loan] I’m still paying on today.”
He estimated perhaps five of more than 50 non-profits “that came here after the storm … are left”.
“Even though properties here are dirt cheap, it’s expensive to rebuild,” he said. “We haven’t gained an understanding of what it takes to raise a neighborhood. I guess that’s why they figure they can industrialize it – and why we keep fighting.”
Several blocks away from Calhoun’s home, on a street near the Jackson barracks, Regina Scully has a grassy yard and rebuilt house where she has lived and worked for nearly a decade. Her sister, novelist Helen Scully, is finishing a law degree at Loyola University New Orleans and lives nearby.
Regina Scully’s odyssey is one parable of the Lower Ninth.
Domestic installations out on the street
Raised in Virginia, Scully studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2004, after several years in New York, she moved to New Orleans, where her mother, sister and brother had gone. Her father had taken a job as a Loyola University dean.
Her work back then focused on “abstract figures, very psychological and large in composition,” she said in a 2021 interview with the Artful Mind magazine.
As Katrina bore down, she went to Mobile, where her mother had family. She returned months later to the flood-battered city. Helping friends dig out to salvage their homes, she took photographs of castoff toys, coat hangers, lampshades, tricycle parts. Her paintings took a sharp realistic turn in abstract style.
In 2008, she began a master’s in fine arts at the University of New Orleans. She soon found space to paint with a job managing a bed-and-breakfast in Bywater, the Upper Ninth neighborhood of Victorian cottages and camelback houses with tropical yards, cheek to jowl with Greek revival manses, warehouses and old stores being repurposed as homes and studios. Meanwhile, across St Claude Avenue, Habitat for Humanity was building houses in the upstart Musicians’ Village, today an Upper Ninth entertainment hub.
Scully felt a metaphysical pull to the Lower Ninth, photographing “dead houses and strewn shapes, like domestic installations out on the street, and it shook everything up for me”. She reflected one recent afternoon, surrounded by paints, brushes and varied objects arrayed throughout her front rooms and kitchen. A cat lounged in the yard outside the screen door. Scully spoke of being fixated on “how water can be so destructive and yet so beautiful”. Her style evolved into vistas of water melding with shards of land, objects and people mixed into the flow, sensations of beauty amid destruction.
Her break came in a 2011 exhibition, Double Crescent, of five New Orleans artists and five from Istanbul, chosen by the influential New York curator Dan Cameron. In the catalogue, Cameron calls her work a “representation of the Gulf Coast environment, its strong symbiosis between land and water and its ongoing dialogue between gestation and decay … a world where boundaries keep shifting”.
She moved to the Lower Ninth in 2016, paying $225,000 for a 3,000-sq-ft house that is mostly work space. “Basically,” she said, “I was priced out of Bywater because the studio rent kept going up along with the home prices.”
In 2017, at 42, Scully had a major exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Japanese Landscape: Inner Journeys. Having never visited Japan, she did intense study in the museum’s archives, focusing on the animated, abstract landscapes of Nanga artists in the Edo period (1603-1868) known for fluid brushwork in black ink. Memories of the flood shadowed Scully’s immersion in the Japanese style. “She considers the beauty of nature, its vastness, and its potential destruction,” wrote Lisa Rotondo McCord, Noma’s curator for asian art, “pushing the boundaries of her practice to explore different environments and spaces within”.
Life in the Lower Ninth was not always pastoral. A drive-by shooting near Scully’s house several years ago was jarring. But, she said, “I don’t hear many gunshots today”, perhaps a reflection of an overall drop in violent crime that the city has reported.
Scully is still pushing boundaries. She recently severed ties with her local gallery and sells her work via referrals from her website. Every few weeks, high-end collectors drive past the Alabo wharf and visit her house to see pieces that range in price from the low to upper five figures.
Most of her neighbors are Black. “This is a flourishing place,” she said. “My neighbors and I get along well. The creative spirit is strong but has a delicacy as it grows.
“If the Alabo development goes through it would cut up these neighborhoods, and we’d be crushed by the pollutants and noise.”
Options and issues
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718 on an oxbow of the great river for its geo-strategic value, 90 miles upriver from the Gulf. He ignored French engineers advocating for Biloxi, Mississippi, and broke ground near present-day Jackson Square, securing the city’s raison d’etre. Even with the fusion of the climate crisis, sea rise and land subsidence, the river is an economic lifeblood. The port of south Louisiana, with 54 docks along the lower Mississippi, ranks first nationally in key indices of cargo.
But the separate PortNOLA, once a pre-eminent docking area in stand-alone terms, has been steadily slipping. It ranks 15th of the top 30 individual ports, well behind the top five: Los Angeles, Newark, California’s Long Beach, Georgia’s Savannah and Houston in overall cargo. Several reasons explain this. For one, New Orleans’s Crescent City Connection, the bridge across the Mississippi to its west bank suburbs, is not high enough to facilitate supersized cargo ships – and proximity to rail and trucking lines is also key.
Population is another factor pivotal to an economy supporting a major port. Houston has been growing for years. New Orleans is well behind its pre-Katrina population. But unlike the 2010s, when young people flocked here for jobs with digital startups, it has seen a decrease of 6.65% since the 2020 census, according to the World Population Review. In 2020, it had 383,997 people. Today the figure is about 357,767. Those 26,000 exiles, part of 50,000 who left Louisiana, departed for better jobs, less costly housing and more affordable insurance – and to escape hurricanes, according to various studies.
Rebuilding a population turns on promoting the promise of life. New Orleans’ historic appeal has been a rooted culture with an authentic quality of life. To that end, the Lower Ninth and St Bernard stand as miracles of American resilience.
The port of Plaquemines downriver from Violet has proposed a joint venture with PortNOLA to place the superport at its facility. How the major investment in Violet would be recouped is a sticking point. Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry, has remained neutral. The Avondale shipyard on the Mississippi River’s west bank in the New Orleans area suburban community of Jefferson parish is potentially an alternative site for the grain terminal.
PortNOLA’s two-pronged plan for the Alabo wharf and the Violet super-terminal reflects the politics of mid-20th-century urban renewal – and high-scale land use that prized economic development over expendable communities. Many such projects sacrificed sustainable neighborhoods for highways as well as river and industrial expansion. Today’s research-driven impact statements and regional planning bodies weigh past mistakes – like disasters – in gauging benefits to citizens in the way.
The secrecy behind the port’s logic of “start building, get permissions later” ignited a political firestorm with the leading contenders for mayor. Council members Helena Moreno and Oliver Thomas, a son of the Ninth Ward, united against the Alabo plan. For the army corps of engineers to greenlight PortNOLA’s permits means reversing its post-Katrina agenda of protecting the city, with a cynical wink and nod to plans that would smash two areas that beat the odds as comeback zones with the Mississippi River central to the fabric of their respective neighborhoods.
Jeffrey Wittenbrink, the Ninth Ward activist, invokes a long-range plan, Redeveloping the Crescent, a prize-winning study of a repurposed riverfront advanced by local architects in 2008. The plan envisions sequenced spaces along the levee as a greenway from the French Quarter down to St Bernard. The Alabo wharf, says Wittenbrink, would be one hub of the linear park and become a magnet for building population in affordable neighborhoods with economies of scale.
For Wittenbrink, the solution lies in purchasing enough of PortNOLA’s property in the Lower Ninth to engineer a shift in location to Avondale Global Gateway, the port across the river on the west bank with a 200-acre industrial site. That would mean a joint venture among the port, Sunrise Foods and Avondale far from residential areas. PortNOLA and Sunrise could amicably terminate their lease. “They would both make money,” he said.
Wittenbrink thinks the conversion of the Alabo wharf and nearby port properties would facilitate restaurants and spaces for concerts and workshops, anchoring the comeback. “If the port and its board are open to selling the property, including two warehouses off Alabo wharf, it offers little downside,” he said.
His group is working on a prospectus to seek “public and philanthropic funding sources” – about $60m.
Based on meetings he’s had with people on different sides, Wittenbrink says he thinks “the port would seriously consider this if we can come up with the money”. He refused to disclose details.
In a city as poor as New Orleans, $60m is a tough hunt. Yet in real world terms, it’s rocket fuel for the resurrection zone the rest of the world wrote off years ago as a lost cause at the bottom of America.
www.theguardian.com
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