The Big Easy

Art Deco Louisiana State Capitol, Baton Rouge

New Orleans, Louisiana

February 2, 2007

We initially stayed in Baton Rouge (the state capital), where we visited several museums. The LSU Museum of Art has one of the finest collections of sculpted Chinese jade that we have ever seen. The collection was a gift from a single donor. (A guy with bucks, no doubt.) I have always appreciated the intricacies of jade sculpture, but after seeing this exhibit and learning more about the creation process, I appreciate it even more.

One of the things that I learned is that when a scene has color, the color is natural to the stone and is taken into consideration when the artist chooses which scene to sculpt. I also learned that it is traditional to use designs of the past. As these are stone items, this practice makes it difficult to date pieces.

The Old State Capitol, built in the 1850s, was burned, accidentally, while being used by Union forces during the Civil War and rebuilt in the 1880s. It is a blend of Gothic and Victorian architecture with a great cast iron staircase, a colorful stained glass dome, and an audio-animatronic Huey Long.

Audio-animatronic Huey Long

We also went to the Louisiana Art and Science Museum and Magnolia Mound, a Creole plantation.

After Baton Rouge, we spent several days traveling through Acadiana, the Cajun bayou area of southern Louisiana. Vermilionville, an assemblage of historic homes and shops, celebrates the life of the early Cajuns, those of French descent expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in the 18^th century and dispersed throughout British North America (The Grand Derangement). The Acadian Cultural Center at Jean Lafitte National Historic Site also tells about Cajun life.

New Iberia's Congregation Gates of Prayer

New Iberia, The Queen of the Teche, is the only Spanish city remaining in Louisiana. It also has the only active synagogue remaining in bayou country. The synagogue in Donaldsonville is now an unrecognizable part of a hardware store and the synagogue in Morgan City, which still stands by itself, is the office of the “Shrimp and Petroleum Festival.” (Two things that I don't eat.)

As most of southern Louisiana is near or below sea level, homes do not have basements and in-ground interments are rare. In New Orleans and Acadiana, crypts are the preferred method for remains of family members. As the remains decay, which is faster is this humid climate, they are pushed to the back of family crypts to make room for the more recently deceased.

For Jews, who largely believe in in-ground burial, and others, a slab of concrete or stone (ledger) is places over the grave to keep the casket from rising through the ground during flooding. In the Jewish cemeteries of New Orleans, we saw raised grass plots with headstones. The lack of trees or shrubbery indicates that there are only a few inches of soil over a concrete base.

Some of the numerous shrimp boats seen along the Gulf Coast. (Morgan City)

Remember what I wrote about the devastation along the Mississippi gulf coast? Well, what happen in New Orleans and some of the surrounding areas is worse.

In Mississippi, the homes and businesses along the beach were damaged or destroyed; a few blocks from the beach, most things looked unscathed. When we were there last month, most had been demolished leaving vacant lots. Here in New Orleans, entire neighborhoods, (80% of the city) were entirely or partially submerged. There is much more devastation and there has been little demolition so far. Demolition costs money, so many properties have been left to be demolished by nature as their owners lost everything and cannot afford the costs; they've just walked away.

A FEMA Trailer Village

New Orleans evacuees being house in a FEMA trailer village in Baton Rouge.

Fields, parks, cleared areas and shopping center parking lots in St. Bernard and elsewhere have been turned into FEMA trailer cities in the city and surrounding areas. Some industrial plants have trailers on site for their employees. Domino Sugar is housing 200 employees in trailers on the grounds of their refinery.

We are staying in St. Bernard State Park in St. Bernard Parish, about 18 miles SE of the Vieux Carre (commonly called the French Quarter). The park just reopened last month. St. Bernard Parish had as much as 30 feet of water for more than a week due to the storm surge. (In addition to the water, more than a million gallons of oil spread through the community from the Murphy Oil refinery.) Devastation is everywhere. More than 90% of the homes were severely damaged or destroyed. The library is gone as is the post office. Major stores such as K-Mart, Winn-Dixie, and Home Depot stand empty and boarded; some with FEMA trailer cities in their parking lots. The areas look like the European towns that one sees in WW II movies where fighting is going on: buildings hollowed by explosives, debris everywhere, no one in the streets. Many traffic lights have been replaced by stop signs.

Lower down the delta, the devastation was even worse. There was not a building left standing in Placquemines Parish, we learned in a Katrina exhibit at the Louisiana State Museum.

We've been here before. We've driven through the 'Lower Ninth Ward,' many times over the last 20 years going from St. Bernard into New Orleans. The “Lower Ninth Ward' had always seemed to us to be a depressing pocket of poverty with many sections that should have been replaced by urban renewal fifty years ago; now it is just dismal. Destruction assaults the eye no matter where one looks. When the levee was breached, the water not only broke homes apart, but, in some cases, lifted the light wood-frame houses off of their foundations and dropped them on cars and homes blocks away.

The tourist areas are still here and in good physical shape. The French Quarter, Garden District, and downtown were not flooded; they are all on higher ground. New Orleans is shaped like a bowl with the center below sea level. Most of the damage to the city was caused by the breaching of the levees after hurricane Katrina passed; the six levee breaches are marked on the tourist map. The breaches were all in new levees; not the ones built in the 18^th century. After the levee breaches were plugged, the center of the bowl had to be pumped out.

There is just so much devastation that each time we drive into N.O. from St. Bernard, we see something that we hadn't noticed before. We plan to send a fuller report with more photos later as we explore more of the city and surrounding areas.

Mardi Gras is just around the corner. We can use the break.

Laissez le bon temps rouler,

A&S

To see the next post of this trip:  

New Orleans: Decimation, Devastation, and Destruction