[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] New Orleans' Future
Sep. 17th, 2005 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThere's an interesting story in the main section of The Globe and Mail today, co-written by Jill Mahoney in New Orleans and Alan Freeman in Washington, exploring the question of New Orleans' future. Unsurprisingly, the authors conclude that the New Orleans of the near future will have a much smaller population, as displaced New Orleanians--especially poor ones, which in New Orleans' case means black new Orleanians--will move away from their city and its slums. The New Orleans of the future will also be significantly whiter. As the Wall Street Journal Mreported on the 9th, New Orleans' future seems to be predetermined by its old-stock aristocracy.
Mahoney and Freeman confirm this hegemony in their article.
It seems, alas, that the collapse of social capital that has allegedly hit New Orleans' blacks has managed to affect the city's white population, as well. As urban planner Thomas Campanella notes in the article, New Orleans' cultural vitality depended heavily on the contributions made by its poor: "It's these communities, poor as they may be, that gave us jazz, that gave us the blues, that gave us gumbo and jambalaya."
The poor don't count in New Orleans, though, almost as surely as the city itself no longer counts in the United States. Back in 1802, Thomas Jefferson was concerned with buying only the city of New Orleans; the rest of the Louisiana Territory, stretching up into what is now Canadian Manitoba, was a mere afterthought. Now that the United States' trans-Mississippi frontier has been secured, jazz and the blues have become global artforms, Cajun and Creole cuisine is popular across the United States, and New Orleans' port has been mechanized, there's no need for a metropolis at the mouth of the Mississippi any more. A smaller Disneyfied city's all that's really needed, the French Quarter with the likes of O'Dwyer living about it. Large-scale urban planning isn't in vogue.
More than a few people in Uptown, the fashionable district surrounding St. Charles Ave., have ancestors who arrived here in the 1700s, and high society is still dominated by these old-line families. Their social pecking order is dictated by the mysterious hierarchy of "krewes," groups with hereditary membership that participate in the annual carnival leading up to Mardi Gras. In recent years, the city's most powerful business circles have expanded to include some newcomers and non-whites, such as Mayor Ray Nagin.
Mahoney and Freeman confirm this hegemony in their article.
In rich white enclaves like Uptown, residents are wary of sounding racist. But with their deep business and family connections, they say they are determined to ensure the new city will be very different than the old one, which for so long has been associated with crime, poor schools, and corruption.
"Whatever you do, don't put people back in the city who are criminals and who are incapable of, or unwilling to, help themselves, said [Ashton] O'Dwyer, a volatile, white 57-year-old lawyer.
"What was once unacceptable in polite, respectable society has not only become commonplace over the past 30 years of Negro rule in this city, but it has become acceptable and I am not going to stand for it any more, said the fifth-generation New Orleans resident. If we return to the same old, same old . . . I'm outta here." (A23)
It seems, alas, that the collapse of social capital that has allegedly hit New Orleans' blacks has managed to affect the city's white population, as well. As urban planner Thomas Campanella notes in the article, New Orleans' cultural vitality depended heavily on the contributions made by its poor: "It's these communities, poor as they may be, that gave us jazz, that gave us the blues, that gave us gumbo and jambalaya."
The poor don't count in New Orleans, though, almost as surely as the city itself no longer counts in the United States. Back in 1802, Thomas Jefferson was concerned with buying only the city of New Orleans; the rest of the Louisiana Territory, stretching up into what is now Canadian Manitoba, was a mere afterthought. Now that the United States' trans-Mississippi frontier has been secured, jazz and the blues have become global artforms, Cajun and Creole cuisine is popular across the United States, and New Orleans' port has been mechanized, there's no need for a metropolis at the mouth of the Mississippi any more. A smaller Disneyfied city's all that's really needed, the French Quarter with the likes of O'Dwyer living about it. Large-scale urban planning isn't in vogue.
