 Fall 2005 |
| ||||||||
| Faculty Column | |
|
Thoughts on the Cultural Impact of Katrina — People and Things
by Robert M. Craig |
|
See also Faculty Report
In a classic scene in The Grapes of Wrath, author John Steinbeck describes the uprooting of lives and the heart-wrenching decisions of dust-bowl victims forced to abandon their homes and to leave behind the material souvenirs of their lives.
|
In tragic times of displacement, whether brought about by natural or man-made disaster, our values realign to move “from sense to soul” from “things” to family, from material possessions and accumulated belongings to what really counts in life.
With the loss of life and displacement of citizens from their homes brought about by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, one hesitates to talk about lost or damaged buildings or cultural artifacts resulting from a hurricane coming ashore. Nonetheless, at times such as these, as an architectural historian whose career has focused on the study of buildings, art, and the culture of the past, I find compelling Steinbeck’s representation of Okies displaced from those “places,” as well as “objects” of their lives, and I found myself searching for news regarding the survival of historic landmark architecture, of pottery workshops and art collections along the Gulf Coast, and of archival records of centuries of New Orleans history.
Man, for centuries, has recorded the present, with an eye that future generations will glean meaning from this documentation, artifacts of what for our children is past. In St. Mark’s Rest, John Ruskin wrote, “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.” As a researcher, I questioned whether, in the palimpsest of time, Katrina had erased much of the autobiography of the Gulf Coast region and lower Mississippi Valley. I sought to learn what buildings still stood, what archival records or art collections had not flooded, and what cultural aspects of these extraordinary places called New Orleans, coastal Mississippi, bayou country, and The South, remained intact, and what had been destroyed.
|
Civilization and culture mean different things to different people. Our experience or knowledge of New Orleans may encourage us to focus on food, music, architecture (high style and urbane, or vernacular), literature, and drama, and our interests range from Cajun culture, Voodoo, Mardi Gras, and Bourbon Street to Spanish moss, shotgun houses, and a sense of place that is New Orleans.
Take food, for example. We all have “tasted” New Orleans culture in the literal sense of enjoying its regional food, even if a New Orleans-style restaurant may be located on the other side of the continent. In an essay published in the Baltimore Sun, John Woestendiek noted, “As with so much of its culture – its music, its art, its literature – New Orleans didn't just produce cuisine. It oozed it.” New Orleans means “beignets and crawfish bisque and jambalaya ... grillades for breakfast, a po-boy with chow-chow at bedtime, and tubs of gumbo in between,” writes Tom Robbins in Jitterbug Perfume. It means blackened redfish, boiled crawfish, jambalaya, oyster bars, and shrimp remoulade, but Katrina raised the question of the continuing supply of the very ingredients of such local cuisine. It is projected to take three years for the local shrimp and oyster industries to recover from the storm. And who has not sat at the Café du Monde sipping café au lait and eating beignets, those peculiarly New Orleans fried globs of dough sprinkled with powdered sugar which cannot possibly be thought of as mere coffee and doughnuts? (The Café du Monde survived Katrina.)
New Orleans means celebrity chefs Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse and famed restaurants like Antoine's, Commander's Palace, K-Paul's, Nola, Brennan’s, Central Grocery (featuring muffaletta), Galatoire's, and Tujagures. New Orleans is the “cradle of Cajun cooking,” the home of beef brisket with Creole sauce, the mecca for devotees of Oysters Rockefeller and Flaming Bananas Foster. New Orleans’s famed restaurants that help shape the culture of this place, and the researcher is motivated by more than academic curiosity in asking how long before they may reopen. Oh, (and this is one huge “by the way”) Displaced food industry workers number about 55,000. In New Orleans, almost 10 percent of the labor force worked in the city's estimated 3,400 restaurants. We are at once brought back to people.
Similarly, as one contemplates the impact of Katrina on the region’s culture, some of us may well ask when jazz, born in New Orleans in the late 1800s, will return to the streets. The architectural embodiment of New Orleans jazz is the saxophone player in the open square, the brass band and funeral parade in the street, and most especially the legendary jazz institution Preservation Hall. Built as a private residence in 1750 the hall evolved into a tavern, inn, photo studio and art gallery, today containing portraits of the musicians who first filled it with the beautiful sounds of New Orleans jazz. and opened as a jazz hall in 1961, Preservation Hall is, above all, the venue for preserving distinctive New Orleans jazz. Art museums and archives share this intention to keep art alive, and to the extent that the building stands for the preservation of jazz, it is noteworthy that Preservation Hall on St. Peter Street survived the storm.
The names of musicians – the people of Preservation Hall – may be less familiar to any but the most devoted jazz aficionado: John Brunious, Narvin Kimball, Joseph Lastie, Rickie Monie, Carl LeBlanc, Frank Demond, Ralph Johnson, Lester Caliste, Lucien Barbarin, Ben Jaffe, John Royen, Walter Payton. Most of us know the people associated with other sounds of New Orleans, the work and style of native-born performers Sidney Bechet, Pete Fountain, Al Hirt, Mahalia Jackson, the Neville Brothers, Louis Prima, Jelly Roll Morton, Harry Connick Jr., and Wynton, Branford and Jason Marsalis. Again, we return to people. We await the return of the people’s music to the streets and halls of New Orleans, the reopening of Preservation Hall. But the future is uncertain for much of what we may have taken for granted as always there in this city – the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival held every April, and the Voodoo Music Festival held in October. The New Orleans Opera has cancelled is fall productions. Members of the New Orleans Philharmonic Orchestra (one of the few symphony orchestras owned by its players) are scattered nationwide.
Given the disturbing news in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, with its horrific images televised and printed, many of us may better understand, perhaps, New Orleans’s association with that related musical idiom, the blues. The Associated Press reported on one noted blues player who became a victim of the hurricane. Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, born in Vinton, Louisiana, was a resident of Slidell, a low-lying dormitory suburb of New Orleans. He evacuated his residence in Slidell to return to the town in Texas where he had been raised, and on September 10t, at 81, Brown died. He was “completely devastated ... and heartbroken, both literally and figuratively,” his booking agent said. A singer and guitarist who had played blues, country, jazz and Cajun music for the past 50 years, deep-voiced “Gatemouth” Brown was known in the 1940s for such blues hits as “Okie Dokie Stomp” and “Ain't That Dandy.” His subsequent career was marked by “jazz, country, Texas blues, and the zydeco and Cajun music of his native Louisiana.” A Grammy Award winner (1982), Brown’s other recordings include “Boogie Rambler” and “Dirty Work at the Crossroads.” We cannot help but return to people even as we think of cultural loss.
And yet, New Orleans is also “brick and mortar,” and mostly wood frame. As we contemplate the physical city in our mind’s eye, we may readily question whether that peculiar ambiance of New Orleans as a place, its streets and neighborhoods and the character of the ensemble, will be lost forever. The streets around Elysian Fields Avenue, for instance, were described by Tennessee Williams in “A Streetcar Named Desire” as “poor but, unlike corresponding sections of other American cities, it has a raffish charm.” That character, somehow conveyed by the everyday whole more than by “high-style” parts, is often best known to us in literature and drama, in vernacular architecture and popular culture, and in poetry and song. William Faulkner decided in New Orleans to become a writer of fiction, and the South is richer for it. Other writers, born in New Orleans, include Truman Capote, Anne Rice, Lillian Hellman, Elmore Leonard, and John Kennedy Toole.
Recognizing the raffish charm of New Orleans, a September 1 New York Times article observed that Katrina ushered in “A Sad Day, Too, for Architecture.” The city “faces the loss of some of America's most notable historic architecture ... in neighborhoods like Treméé and Mid-City, which extend along Bayou Road toward Lake Pontchartrain and are rich in 18th- and 19th-century homes, shops, churches and social halls.” The survival of more elevated sections of New Orleans conveys a lesson about the wisdom of selecting building sites on higher ground, an issue which informed French colonial and 19th-century builders’ decisions but which has not always motivated 20th-century developers. All this is to say nothing about broken levees and the “bowl effect,” Gulf Coast beachfront condos, historic districts on the beach, or even ordinary towns along the Gulf. Architectural research must make renewed inquiries into issues of design and regional aesthetics, structure and construction materials, and behavioral psychology and sociology in order to define a new future for the Ninth Ward neighborhood, the beach house, and development in the wetlands.
As the winds died down, the initial focus for me was to obtain a status report on people and things. Therefore, “research at Georgia Tech,” for this researcher, involved activities different from those more typically reported in the pages of this magazine. My research went beyond test tubes, microelectronics, and laboratory or computer findings measured in nanoseconds. With undiminished concern for the people of Louisiana and Mississippi, I initially sought information about academic colleagues at Tulane, Loyola, University Southeastern Louisiana, and University of New Orleans, Lakefront, concerned for their safety, and so research focused on people. But, having confirmed that an editor colleague, having never left home, was safe, that a fellow historian was in San Antonio, that New Orleans art and architectural historians I knew had evacuated to Jackson and Memphis, and were with family, I then inquired about the survival of houses, especially historic landmarks. As an historian focused on architecture considered as an embodiment and expression of culture, and as a researcher vitally interested in the survival of documentary records of the past, I was immediately interested in the cultural impact of Katrina. I investigated the status of art collections, archives, museums, historical records, forts, lighthouses, plantation “out buildings” (including preserved slave cabins), 300-year-old oak-lined allées, an aquarium, a zoo, and even noteworthy modern buildings. I learned of the survival of 19th-century plantation houses, and the complete destruction of others.
Three years ago, with fellow members of the Southeastern Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) – an academic society founded in 1983 at the College of Architecture, Georgia Tech – I visited two houses in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, designed in 1890 by Frank Lloyd Wright for famed Chicago-architect Louis Sullivan and for his friend James Charnley as vacation homes. The owner of the Sullivan House reported that this early work by America’s best-known architect, had “vaporized” when Katrina made landfall, and the Charnley House next door was blown off its foundation with major destruction to the wood-frame structure.
How did other architectural landmarks of Louisiana, in and around New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast fare? Beyond observing obvious flood damage to low-lying neighborhoods (and as I write, this is further exacerbated by Rita’s over-topping of repaired levees and the re-flooding of the Ninth Ward), one may readily note that it will be a long time before one knows the full extent of water damage to cemeteries, to the city’s infrastructure, and to the presumed more substantial structures of even relatively recent date.
With regard to the Gulfport and Biloxi beachfronts, my “research” took me to my own son, Christopher, and his personal experience and impressions as part of the relief effort. Christopher is a member of a North Carolina “Special Operations Response Team,” which was staged in the Mississippi Valley two days before Katrina came ashore, and was soon moved to the Gulf Coast. Based on firsthand observations along the beach at Biloxi and Gulfport, Christopher described three to six blocks deep of a virtual "war zone" in Gulfport, property lots now only sand, and city block after block of piles of broken lumber.
My “research report” on the cultural impact of Katrina on Louisiana and Mississippi is posted on the Research Horizons web site at gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/reshor/rh-f05/craig-report.html. The report gathers together some known information as of late September, concerning the impact of Katrina on regional landmarks of 19th-century culture, on historic architecture, and on museums and repositories of 19th-century artefacts and art. I report some good news, and, unfortunately, some very bad news.
CONTACTS:Robert Craig at 404-894-3395 or rob.craig@coa.gatech.edu
Contents Research Horizons GT Research News GTRI Georgia Tech
Send questions and comments regarding these pages to webadmin@edi.gatech.edu
Last updated: January 4, 2006