New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape

"I can’t tell you how much I fell in love with this book. Some of it is timing in my life. I was in San Francisco, working for the New York Times covering Silicon Valley and my phone rang. I was asked to go to New Orleans and a journalist friend of mine said ‘you should read this book.’ It was the first book I read. It’s just so splendidly written. This guy is a geographer, he didn’t really know New Orleans when he got there, but he falls in love with it and just captures it. He doesn’t fetishise it like many others, he really captures what makes it unique: the architecture, the accents, the culture, the blending of French, Spanish, Haitian, free people of color, the jazz. He does such a great job of chronicling that. But there were little seeds of worry for this city in this book when it first came out in 1976. Then he comes back in 2003, which happens to be two years before Katrina, and it’s a frightening portrait. He’s watching as this city is building more and more on former swamp land, which is very dangerous. There are 96,000 people living in New Orleans East, almost all of them African American. They feel like they’re living the dream, but you read his book and you see they’re buying swamp land. Lewis is very angry no-one’s talking about the great risk of living there. He has this great line, that the elevator changed the New Yorks and Londons of the world, allowing you to build vertically, and the wood pump — invented in the late-nineteenth century — transformed New Orleans. It gave humans the arrogance to build on anything. Swamp land is five feet below sea level. They turned it into an expensive sub-division and sold the houses for a few hundred thousand dollars. It was such an interesting experience for me to be reading this book while the city was debating whether to rebuild the whole city or tell certain low-lying communities that they can’t rebuild. It’s such a complicated question, and he acknowledges it. What makes me like his book is that it addresses race. The African Americans weren’t given the opportunity to have home ownership until the 1970s, by which time all of the high ground in New Orleans was taken. So, by saying we’re not going to rebuild these low-lying neighbourhoods you’ve just told eighty percent of the city’s African American population that you’re not rebuilding their neighbourhoods. This book has a geographer’s perspective on a story that is all about geography. Fifty percent of the place is below sea level. One or two feet below sea level is ok, it leads to a little flooding in the street, but five or more feet and we’re talking about communities under water and that’s what happened after Katrina. New Orleans was swamped, there were ten feet or more of water in parts of New Orleans East. It’s prophetic, though it wasn’t a deliberate warning. There started to be a lot more urban problems, crimes and tensions. New Orleans is the Deep South. When they integrated the schools in 1960 that changed the shape of the city. 150,000 or so whites left because it would mean that their children would have to go to integrated schools. So a city that was two-thirds white was two-thirds black by the time of Katrina. That’s the backdrop that’s occurring while Lewis is writing this book. It changed the economics of the city. It became a poor city, there was less money invested in the schools. Even the whites who stayed tended to be uptown with money and would send their kids to private schools, parochial schools. There’s a defunding of the public schools system that was over ninety percent African American at the time of Katrina. He captures this in the two editions. The really interesting thing about New Orleans that I really understood after reading this book was that it’s an absolutely preposterous place to put a city. It’s low lying, it’s got terrible bugs, six months of the year it’s got to worry about hurricanes. But if you didn’t have a New Orleans there, you’d have to build a city because it’s the port of this amazingly important river, the Mississippi, which touches something like thirty states in the country. It’s essential that there be a port city there. So that contradiction is the book: It makes no sense to build a city there but they did, and let’s see what it’s like."