January 1st, 2014: Tour of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans

The Orphan Tattoo

The Lower Ninth Ward Still Waits To Be A Home Once Again

I am finding the history of the St. Vincent’s Guest House, our lodging for the Alternative Winter Break week, to be particularly fitting after our day in the Lower Ninth Ward.  The Guest House originally served as an Orphan Asylum starting in the 1860s, a home for children particularly necessary in yellow fever-stricken New Orleans.  The orphanage was in service until the 1970s, and then was repurposed as the Guest House in 1994.

In many ways the walking tour of the Lower Ninth Ward revealed an orphaned community, ever increasingly abandoned by a city, state, and country that move ever further away from Hurricane Katrina.  The Lower Ninth Ward cannot move from the path of Katrina, because the entire community is still so bound by it.

In the search and rescue efforts, then recovery efforts, various groups applied coded spray painted Xs to mark houses according to the Urban Search & Rescue Task Force manuals.  The “X-codes” or “Katrina Crosses” are lasting marks of the many legacies of the storm.  The cold marks noting death and destruction serve also as reminders of the government’s intervention as a critical element of the legacy that leaves the Lower Ninth Ward in a state of disaster recovery.  I was told that the Xs remain on many homes now again inhabited because the spray paint cannot be easily removed, covered, or otherwise erased.  Because of the nature of spray paint, scrubbing, painting, or sanding often fails to remove these tattoos of the storm that remain on many homes and the dilapidated structures left behind by those many who may never return.

As our tour wound through residential streets of the Lower Ninth Ward, I could not help but see the area as an aging orphan left hoping for a family placement, but ever increasingly concerned that such may never come.  The longer the wait, the less likely.  As time goes by, the anxiety of what will happen only seems to worsen.

Now over seven years removed from the wall of water that consumed his town, beyond the obvious blight and stark poverty, as the community ages beyond the storm, the waning opportunity to resurrect the Lower Ninth Ward obviously weighs on community organizer Ward “Mack” McClendon.  Mack sees and hears so many different concerns from those who come through the Lower Ninth Ward Village community center that he directs, that he can hardly hold one problem in his head before moving to another. 

Mack’s tour was as much a desperate plea for attention by the abandoned, as it was about any specific way to offer help.  One is left to wonder if the Lower Ninth Ward will ever be able to remove its orphan tattoo and again support a community that so anxiously wants to feel at home again.

Daniel Clark