Waiting for the Resurrection:
New Orleans in the Aftermath
by Randolph Delehanty
This article was published in Museum News May/June 2006
For seven days and seven nights, from Monday, Aug. 29 to Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005, the world watched in horror as one of America’s most storied, most culturally fecund and most fragile cities lay abandoned by all levels of government, from the local police to the president. Eighty percent of New Orleans, 144 square miles, an area seven times the size of Manhattan, was inundated. The city sat under 4 to 12 feet of fetid, sewage-polluted water for four weeks. Of its 180,000 houses in the city, 110,000 were flooded. More than a million people were evacuated from the metro area. It was the first time in American history that a major city was completely emptied. At least 1,300 people are known to have died. After Katrina came Rita, which reflooded the region. Little of the damage has been repaired.
Eight months later, New Orleans has been abandoned a second time, but now without television correspondents standing in rain- lashed parking lots broadcasting the news to the world. Locked in a downward spiral of municipal bankruptcy—New Orleans has lost much of its tax base—the city’s future has been suspended. Local demographic and political upheaval; fruitless city, state and federal mutual recrimination; insurance company delays and a series of no decisions, partial decisions and delayed decisions all contribute to the ongoing disaster.
The city’s richly varied museums, large and small, are trapped in this larger quagmire of indecision. Their fate is only partially in their hands. Museums, after all, are part of their communities. They are expressions of a community’s fortunes, its ideals and its failures.
Not a Surprise
Neither the failure of the floodwalls lining the drainage canals nor the failure of the government comes as a surprise. Storm surge barriers on Lake Pontchartrain were approved by Congress after Hurricane Betsy hit in 1965 but were halted by an environmental lawsuit in 1977. For the past five years, federal funds for flood protection in New Orleans have been shrinking. Undetected, the city’s incomplete levees were slowly subsiding. We now know that the system was fatally flawed: drainage canals without floodgates piercing the levees, sheet pilings along canal floodwalls not sunk deep enough, the base of the levees not reinforced with concrete. The joint failure of the Army Corps of Engineers and the Orleans Levee Board has been branded the greatest engineering failure in American history.
A Peculiar and Persistent Culture
The Crescent City has always been the sauce piquante in our national gumbo. There has always been a stubborn oppositional attitude among Orleanians toward all who live on the solid ground beyond the watery Île d’Orléans. It is a deeply rooted culture that confounds the conventional categories of race as understood in the rest of the country. New Orleans also embodies a certain attitude about life that looks beyond economic calculations. Whether it’s the Uptown elite’s elaboration of the rituals of debutantes coming out, office workers hosting king cake parties at Carnival or Mid-City working-class African-American Mardi Gras Indians spending scarce money on beads and feathers for their gorgeous costumes, New Orleanians choose open-handedness and celebrating the moment over Calvinist calculation and delayed gratification.
Much of the commentary on New Orleans culture in the wake of the inundation has focused on the desperate plight of poor and working-class blacks and how their exodus will diminish the city’s culture. There is good reason for this concern in our harsh, neo- Social Darwinian age. But wealthy and middle-class New Orleanians, most of them white, are also important to the continuation and revival of New Orleans culture. Most museum-goers and museum members are from the educated middle class. The complete devastation of neighborhoods like middle-class Lakeview is as detrimental to the city’s culture as the ruin of the working-class and black Lower Ninth Ward.
The social ecology of New Orleans has been forever changed by the destruction of whole neighborhoods: their houses, schools, churches, clubs, shops, restaurants and bars. It’s not just the buildings, important as many of them are. It’s the human connections: the families, the friendships, the parishes and congregations, the business networks, the Social Aid and Pleasure clubs, the Carnival krewes old and new that have been disrupted and scattered to the winds. The fabric of life that weaves individual New Orleanians into a community of many subcommunities has been ripped to shreds.
The hopeful part of me knows that New Orleans’s peculiar culture will survive. It has survived setbacks before, though none of this cataclysmic magnitude. On Mardi Gras 2006, New Orleanians danced once again through the city’s old streets in the ancient communal rite of renewal. The theme of this year’s Rex procession was “Beaux Arts and Letters,” a timely celebration of New Orleans and Gulf Coast artists and writers from the Newcomb potters to Clementine Hunter, from Lafcadio Hearn to John Kennedy Toole. It was a joyous affirmation of what endures in a precarious watery world suddenly gone awry.
What follows is a tour through the disrupted cultural landscape of a devastated city. It is not meant to be encyclopedic. It is a personal look at some aspects of a city I know well and that has given so much to me.
Artists’ Losses
Since the 1980s, New Orleans has been home to astonishing creativity in the visual arts. Low rents in the declining city, a lively music and cultural scene, the pro-bohemian attitude of many art-buying New Orleanians, a network of galleries on Julia and Magazine Streets, a steady stream of sophisticated visitors who buy art—all this sparked a renaissance in painting, photography, sculpture and glassmaking. But the back-to-back hurricanes extracted a fearsome toll on the city’s artists. Like everyone else, they were forced to evacuate, disrupting their lives and their work. Many lost their studios and their works in the flood. Such losses are particularly devastating to artists, writers and musicians who live on the edge financially. Eight months later, many are still trying to patch their lives back together. Just as bad, local collectors suddenly have more pressing needs in rebuilding their own lives. Well-heeled visitors have all but stopped coming to the city.
National Parks and Louisiana’s Wetlands
In a better-governed world, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita might actually result in a major improvement: the expansion of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve to protect vastly more wetlands and help buffer coastal Louisiana from devastating tidal surges. There is a plan to do just that. The Coast 2050 plan, forged by the state of Louisiana and many federal agency partners, proposes a systemic solution to the loss of wetlands over the next half century by allowing the Mississippi River to replenish the protective marshes. But it has a price tag of $14 billion over 10 years. One funding proposal includes dedicating a portion of federal oil lease revenue from the Gulf beyond the three-mile limit. (Louisiana produces about a quarter of all domestic oil and gas, most of it offshore.) Recovery of the marshes that have been starved of silt by levees and diced and sliced by oil and gas drilling canals is critical to the future of southern Louisiana. Katrina and Rita destroyed about 118 square miles of protective wetlands, about six years’ worth of “normal” erosion. The federal government will spend many times the cost of Coast 2050 just on fixing post-Katrina damage. Current estimates put the total repair costs at about $100 billion. Despite support from Louisiana’s senators and representatives for Coast 2050, the Bush administration has shown little interest in replenishing the eroding marshes.
Also in an uphill battle for funding is the most innovative national park in Louisiana’s history, the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, authorized by Congress in 1994 in recognition of the transcendent importance of New Orleans music to the nation and the world. The park’s mission is to “take a leadership role in preserving the people, places and music of the New Orleans jazz tradition.” This promising but still nascent project has a meager $540,000 annual budget and a staff of nine, including park rangers who are themselves musicians. The plan includes a proposed visitor center across Rampart Street from the French Quarter in the Faubourg Tremé. But funding and staffing remain serious problems. Currently the jazz park has the money to restore and adapt only one of its four historic buildings, about $3 million out of total capital needs of about $15 million. Its program of hiring local musicians to present free jazz to visitors and school children allows more people to learn to appreciate this defining American music. A truly visionary plan would also have a revolving loan fund to help restore the modest cottages and social halls in the now devastated working-class neighborhoods where jazz was born in the decades bracketing 1900.
The South Rampart Street rebuilding project closer to the Central Business District, the last authentic fragment of the old black entertainment district, is also in need of funding. A New Orleans Jazz Conservancy should be organized to raise private and foundation money both to enhance the national jazz park and help keep this endangered part of New Orleans culture alive. Now more than ever, the city and the world need the sweet-sad sounds of New Orleans jazz. But in recent years all the national parks in the southeastern United States have suffered budget and staffing cuts. The small budget of the New Orleans Jazz Commission that advised the park and linked it with the community was zeroed out in 2005.
Louisiana State Museums
Louisiana has a rich and complex history centered on storied New Orleans. Over many generations, donors and the state of Louisiana have made a major investment in the cluster of historic buildings and museums around Jackson Square at the heart of Old New Orleans: the Cabildo, the Spanish colonial government seat and the adjoining Arsenal and Jackson and Creole houses; the mirror image Presbytere on the other side of the cathedral; the 1850 House in the Lower Pontalba Apartments flanking Jackson Square; nearby Madame John’s Legacy, the oldest West Indies-style building in the French Quarter, with its popular folk art collection; and the Old U.S. Mint on Esplanade, housing Louisiana’s colonial archives and an important jazz archive.
Because they are all on relatively high ground in the French Quarter, the buildings escaped flooding, though a large part of the Old Mint’s copper roof was torn off by the winds. Documents retrieved from the Mint were immediately freeze-dried and moved to Louisiana State University’s Hill Memorial Library in Baton Rouge for conservation. The rest of the collection was removed to a temporary storage facility. Of the five key state museums, only the Cabildo, the general history museum whose story stops in 1876 just when modernity begins in the South, is open, with reduced hours.
A real problem for all New Orleans museums is the loss of affordable housing across the city. Museum workers have no place to return to, especially lower-paid support staff such as guards and janitors. The Cabildo reopened only because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funded temporary housing in a nearby hotel; that money will soon run out. The state also instituted a hiring freeze, which impedes the recovery of the state museums.
The Louisiana State Museum (LSM) system has a statewide constituency. Just as the hurricanes struck, LSM was in the process of opening a new 69,000-square-foot facility in Baton Rouge, the state capital. One of Katrina’s permanent effects was depopulating New Orleans and propelling a surge of refugees north to Baton Rouge. The population balance has shifted and the capital is now the largest city in the state. Historically, the state legislature has had little love for downstate New Orleans, for reasons that are centuries old and divergent cultures deep. There will be continuing political support for expansion in Baton Rouge but much less legislative enthusiasm for revivifying Old New Orleans. But the Louisiana State Museum complex in New Orleans is key to Louisiana’s historical memory and central to its visitor industry. It is Louisiana’s “Smithsonian,” her storehouse of memory and most prominent heritage attraction. But LSM’s marketing efforts need to be boosted considerably. A first step toward the future was taken in March when the board of governors and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu named David M. Kahn, formerly executive director of the Connecticut Historical Society, to take over as director of the Louisiana State Museum.
The state museum, along with several other institutions, created the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (http://www.hurricanearchive.org) to record the social, economic, cultural and environmental impact of this natural, personal and institutional disaster. With all that the state of Louisiana has to do to rebuild, the state museums in New Orleans would seem prime candidates for significant, long-term national foundation money to conserve and enhance these nationally important treasures, including the building where the Louisiana Purchase was transferred and where Plessy v. Ferguson was initiated.
Art Museums
One of the heroic stories to come out of Katrina was the devotion of the New Orleans Museum of Art’s staff. Eight employees and their families stayed inside the building to guard its precious contents. Six days later, the National Guard evacuated them by helicopter to an elevated section of I-610, where they waited for three more days under the baking sun to be bused away to distant cities. Director E. John Bullard set up a temporary office at the Louisiana Art and Science Museum in Baton Rouge. AXA Art Insurance Corporation flew a team of retired New York City police officers and a large generator to the temporarily island-like museum in flooded City Park. Though basically intact, the museum suffered about $6 million in damage, most of which will be covered by insurance and FEMA funds. But in October, all but 15 of the museum’s 90 employees were laid off. As with many urban museums, NOMA’s building and collections are owned by the city, and its staff are city employees. With its tax base devastated, the city has terminated nonessential civil servants, including museum workers. Bullard and the museum board had no choice but to mothball the museum to conserve as much as they could of the limited $25-million endowment. The museum was closed for half a year, with no income from admissions, shop and cafe sales, facility rentals or annual fund raisers. Museum memberships were automatically extended for six months, meaning no new membership income, either.
As of March 3, NOMA is open again, but only on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. When the adjoining Besthoff Sculpture Garden reopened in December, it drew some 300 visitors per weekend, compared to 3,000 visitors pre-Katrina. Bullard expects to be able to bring the staff back up to about 40 employees, putting NOMA back where it was when he arrived in 1973. Many museum volunteers also evacuated, so that important corps of the museum also needs rebuilding. The board has launched a three-year, $15-million campaign to stabilize NOMA. About $4 million was raised between December 2005 and March 2006 from local donors, including the Zemurray Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon, Andy Warhol and Luce Foundations. But with all the needs in devastated south Louisiana, the rest of the money will have to come from beyond Louisiana, from donors who understand the importance of art in feeding and lifting a battered and abandoned community’s soul.
What the aftermath of Katrina revealed so clearly is museums’ dependence on the gate to cover operating expenses. Tourists were an important part of the museum’s 300,000 annual visitors. NOMA has evolved over its 95 years into a regional resource, not just a municipal one. Today greater suburbia, and indeed the whole Gulf Coast and lower Deep South, are NOMA’s service area, not just devastated Orleans Parish. The traditional, inherited model of city ownership and city funding of major museums became obsolete 50 years ago when the majority of the educated population and the tax base moved out to suburbia.
In what may be a harbinger of the future, NOMA decided to make the museum free to all Louisiana residents for all of 2006. This effectively makes it the “Louisiana Museum of Art” and recalls its origins in 1911 as the free Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, a “temple of art for rich and poor alike.” To celebrate its limited reopening, the museum staged a three-day cultural festival the weekend after Mardi Gras. In a heartening gesture of international solidarity, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Pompidou Center and other Paris museums will organize an exhibit of French art to lend to NOMA to help bring art lovers back to the art museum.
University Art Galleries
Colleges and universities, both private and public, historically white and historically black, have been pillars of New Orleans culture and economy. Private Tulane University has long been the city’s largest employer and the anchor of Uptown. All of the higher education institutions have had important art and music programs. Most have small but vibrant art galleries or museums that give texture and depth to the city’s art scene. But as New Orleans colleges struggle with costly repairs, falling enrollments and lost faculty, their art galleries face daunting challenges.
The Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University is open, as is the Dibold Gallery at Jesuit Loyola University next door. The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, part of the public University of New Orleans, is also open. It mounted several Katrina-themed exhibits and programs and its staff rescued the works of modernist sculptor Ida Kohlmeyer when her studio flooded.
New Orleans’s African-American Universities
New Orleans’ historically African-American universities are especially vulnerable. Dillard University, with its elegant white-columned, oak-lined campus and its important role for the black middle class, is in low-lying Gentilly and was inundated by 8 feet of water. Along with the problems of a dispersed faculty and displaced students, Dillard faces some $500 million in repairs. Southern University, the historically black public university in New Orleans and a portal for first-generation black college students, was also flooded. Xavier University, a historically black Catholic university, also suffered flooding. These universities have seen a drastic reduction of the population base that sends its students there. Against so many competing needs, their arts programs and galleries may be difficult to sustain.
African-American Culture and Two Small New Orleans Museums
African Americans are integral to the culture of New Orleans and contribute to this community in ways both obvious and subtle. This is historically a port city with a complex economy that supported a significant number of free people of color as well as enslaved Africans, many of whom passed through the French and Spanish Caribbean colonies. As such, New Orleans has a social history that is unique in the nation. One of the abiding ironies in New Orleans is the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of her people of color. In her religious sensibilities, cuisine, music, art and attitudes, not to mention labor base, New Orleans would not be New Orleans without West Africa and the Afro-Caribbean world. Though approximately one-third of Louisiana’s people are of African descent, only a handful of museums of African-American history and culture exist in the state, including New Orleans.
Today’s view is that each ethnic and racial sub-community should have its own museums and cultural institutions to tell its story in its own way. New Orleans was working toward this goal before Katrina struck. But sustainable museums need more than a good mission; they need members and money. They need roots. The post-Katrina experiences of the two museums in Tremé, across Rampart Street from the French Quarter, are instructive.
One is a museum created by a past mayor using federal funds and the other is a grassroots proprietary museum reminiscent of the Peale Museum in Philadelphia of long ago. The Tremé Villa Meilleur: The New Orleans African American Museum of Art, Culture and History opened in 1996 in a small, elegant restored 1830s house set in a walled garden deep inside the desperately poor Faubourg Tremé. Using federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) monies, then-mayor Marc Morial’s New Orleans Affordable Homeownership, Inc. bought it and several adjoining historic buildings to create a cultural complex.
Its staff were city employees. Several art exhibits were mounted and conferences were held there. Mayor Morial also used the villa for official receptions. But when a new mayor was elected, the project came under the microscope. The staff was fired and the gates were locked in 2003. A 2004 HUD audit found that block grants had been improperly used, though the city has not had to repay the funds. Current Mayor Ray Nagin appointed new members to the museum’s board. In March 2006, the museum was still closed, its fence was breached, weeds were rampant in the garden and the basement doors were wide open. Miraculously, the building still had some art on the walls and had not been vandalized. The question arises: How deeply rooted was this museum if no one cared enough to nail shut the basement doors six months after Katrina?
In contrast is the funky, grassroots Backstreet Cultural Museum just a few blocks away in a former funeral parlor on St. Claude Street, across from historic, Creole-of-color St. Augustine Roman Catholic Church. Sylvester Francis, a self-taught photographer who began documenting jazz funerals in 1978 with a Super 8 camera, founded the museum in his rented garage in the Seventh Ward. Francis’s mission in life is to keep New Orleans jazz funerals alive.
When the Blandin Funeral Home closed, the owners offered the modest one-story raised cottage to Francis to house his growing collection of jazz funeral mementos and spectacular, feathered and beaded Mardi Gras Indian costumes. A survivor of the unspeakable degradation in the post-Katrina Convention Center and homeless since the inundation destroyed his Ninth Ward apartment, Francis and his wife Anita are living temporarily in the back of the bungalow museum. On the day before Mardi Gras 2006, the museum was alive with black and white neighborhood folks milling about and the WWOZ radio crew setting up on the front porch for the next day’s broadcast of Mardi Gras Indians dancing in the street in front of the museum. Backstreet is a rare and authentic window into African-American New Orleans.
Historic House Museums
Katrina and Rita proved the wisdom of the old city. Before the modern drainage pumps of the early 1900s, New Orleans confined itself to a narrow band of relatively high ground. The middle-class French Quarter and much of wealthy Uptown were built on natural levees and escaped the flooding. The working-class neighborhoods built inland on drained swampland have always been prone to flooding from heavy rain. Traditionally, New Orleans houses were built about three feet off the ground to keep them dry. It was not until the 1950s that houses were built on ground-level concrete slabs. New building regulations will probably call for raising houses off the ground, a tradition that should never have been discontinued.
Because most of the city’s historic house museums are in the French Quarter, they survived the floods with only wind damage to their roofs and trees. But visitation has plummeted and operating costs are not being met. At the Hermann-Grima and Gallier Historic Houses in the Quarter, visitation in December 2005 was only 220, compared to more than 5,000 the December before the hurricane. School tours and Elderhostel groups have yet to return. At these two houses the professional staff has returned, but due to the scarcity of workers’ housing, as of March none of the non-professional staff was back. Major fund-raisers that provide 40 percent of the houses’ annual operating budgets had to be cancelled.
Relief money for brick-and-mortar repair does nothing to replace lost general operating funds, most of which pay salaries. But as Stephen Moses, the executive director of these two landmark attractions, hopes “New Orleans will be back to its old ways in about a year. The city will be smaller, probably different in many ways, but still New Orleans, a place unlike any other in the U.S.
Historic Architecture and Old Neighborhoods
Much of pre-1940 New Orleans qualifies as for the designation of National Register Historic Landmark Districts. Indeed, the city has some 20 National Register districts. The city is that old and that distinguished. The great questions now are these: How do you revive a formerly anemic and now crippled economy? And what will happen to the city’s incomparably rich stock of historic houses and close-knit neighborhoods with all their satisfying human connections? The answers seem especially elusive when you witness the almost incomprehensible damage in New Orleans and the miles of ruined houses still without electricity or residents. The situation is deeply depressing. Many of the flooded houses stewed for weeks in polluted water. Mold and mildew destroyed what the water didn’t.
The Preservation Resource Center has been a strong advocate for the restoration of the city’s incomparable historic architecture in the many devastated neighborhoods. The PRC, with 32 years of success in reviving blighted houses and blocks, advocates many small-scale, neighborhood-based restoration projects rather than drastic, large-scale, top-down redevelopment. The National Trust for Historic Preservation also backs this bottom-up approach. But there are serious obstacles. In January the Bush administration turned down a buyout plan proposed by U.S. Rep. Richard Baker (R-Baton Rouge) that would have offered homeowners 60 percent of their pre-Katrina equity. Instead, the federal government proposed $6.2 billion in community development block grants for the entire state, not just hard-hit New Orleans. FEMA has still not completed its flood-plain maps for Orleans Parish that will determine insurance availability and rates. These in turn will decide where banks will lend money to rebuild. A now-rescinded municipal moratorium on building permits in heavily flooded areas penalized those without money and credit more than those with the resources to wait things out. As Orleanians have discovered, no decision is a decision.
Meanwhile, survivors continue to ponder an uncertain future. What will the smaller city look like? Will it revert to the crescent- shaped footprint of the river-hugging city of the 1880s, before drainage pumps made it possible to spread into the Back o’ Town swamps? That, along with the Y-shaped spur of the Esplanade- Metairie-Gentilly ridge? Landfill along Lake Pontchartrain in the 1920s and ’30s created an artificial high ground far from the old river crescent, with expensive housing in Lakefront and the extensive University of New Orleans campus. Will the city end up like an elongated doughnut with empty grassland in the center? No city is shaped like that. Roads and utilities are too expensive to cast across an uninhabited hollow core.
Schools and the Louisiana Children’s Museum
Modern museums are educational institutions, not just storehouses for precious objects, and visiting school groups are a vital constituency for museums. New Orleans’s public schools were in desperate shape before Katrina. Now the city has shut down its public school system, something unprecedented in American history. Six months after the flood, the public school population had plummeted by 86 percent. Public school teachers were advised to seek jobs in other places. A skimpy program of about a dozen charter schools is not filling the gap. New Orleans’s private schools, and her Catholic schools as well, are also facing daunting challenges. The best-endowed and probably best-governed among them, Isidore Newman School in Uptown, predicts that it will shrink from 1,154 students to 800 to 850 students. Newman was fortunate enough to be able to borrow against its endowment to pay its faculty through December. Then it was forced to reduce faculty and staff and trim programs.
There’s a chicken-and-egg cycle at work here: if New Orleans has no schools, it will lose workers at all levels of skills and income. If there are no workers, there will be no children to attend the schools. It is a bleak picture. Half a year after the flood, the Louisiana Children’s Museum in the Warehouse District was closed. It didn’t even post a sign on its doors saying when it might reopen.
History Museums
The Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) in the French Quarter is securely endowed. Its complex of five important historic buildings at Royal and Toulouse Streets and the separate Williams Research Center on Chartres Street survived the storm and escaped the flood. Part of the collection was temporarily evacuated to the Alexandria Museum of Art, well away from the hurricane.
HNOC reopened on October 11 and its board decided to continue its planned programming for the year, including a symposium and exhibition on the historic links between New Orleans and St. Domingue in Haiti. This groundbreaking exhibition traces the impact of both the colonial and revolutionary eras in Haiti. The first black revolution sent a wave of émigrés to the Crescent City and revivified its francophone culture. After Katrina, HNOC conservators conducted “restoration road shows” at shopping malls to advise Louisianians on damaged heirlooms and launched an oral history program recording the experiences of firefighters, police and other rescue personnel. The museum’s photographers began documenting Katrina’s ravages, neighborhood by devastated neighborhood.
The oldest museum in Louisiana is Confederate Memorial Hall, founded in 1891 to house the records and provide a meeting hall for veterans of the Lost Cause. When Confederate President Jefferson Davis died in New Orleans, he lay in state here. Its Richardsonian Romanesque building on Camp Street, off Lee Circle, is a museological time capsule, valuable because so little has changed. The museum recently survived a challenge from the University of New Orleans Foundation’s new Ogden Museum of Southern Art over title to the structure it has occupied for 110 years. Some suggested that the museum change its mission and tell the story of both sides of the Civil War. In response, the museum now describes itself as the Confederate Civil War Museum. After closing for Katrina and surviving the high winds, the museum reopened in January 2006. With virtually no endowment, the museum is dependent on admissions for its survival. Visitation is slowly returning. In an age that preaches about diversity, it is remarkable how intolerant some people are of this institution’s point of view.
Half a block away is the phenomenally successful National D-Day Museum, which opened on June 6, 2000. The brainchild of the late historian Stephen Ambrose, this museum is here because New Orleans’s Higgins Industries built the thousands of landing craft used in the invasion of Normandy in 1944. The museum also tells the story of the amphibious operations in the Pacific and has lately broadened its scope in a bid to become “America’s National World War II Museum.” It has an especially strong appeal to men and boys. Adult admission is $14, but members of the armed forces in uniform receive free admission.
Its exhibits feature short videos and many oral histories. They tell an American-centered story of the allied war effort. (The key role of the Red Army in defeating the Nazis, for example, gets short shrift.) Housed in a converted brewery in the former Warehouse District, with a large glass- fronted annex to display landing craft and suspended military aircraft, the museum has garnered national media attention and financial support from as far away as California. Celebrities including Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have raised the institution’s visibility. This museum was created “so that future generations may know the strength of the American spirit and the value of leadership, courage, optimism, loyalty and teamwork.” As the generation that fought in World War II dies out, the D-Day Museum has created the National World War II Museum Legacy Society to accept bequests.
The D-Day Museum was closed for 93 days following Katrina and reopened in December on a five-day-per-week schedule. In 2004 the museum launched a capital campaign to raise $282 million for an expansion and an endowment. Currently occupying half a block, the expanded museum would spread over two adjacent blocks and quadruple the size of the current museum. At its heart would be a 1.5- acre “parade ground” 14 feet above street level. It would be surrounded by converted historic warehouses and new pavilions, all under a sun-shading canopy supported by pylons. Despite Katrina, D-Day is going ahead with its ambitious plans.
While this major new military history attraction is thriving in the Warehouse District, a tragic story is unfolding on the Orleans Parish line at the historic Jackson Barracks and its new Military Museum. This architecturally outstanding citadel of 14 red-brick, white-columned Greek Revival buildings just inside the Mississippi River levee was built in 1835 by the U.S. Army and was long the regional headquarters of the Louisiana National Guard. Though the river levee held, the barracks was inundated by water from the breach of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal. Six months after the flood, the ground floor quarters in the historic post were still filled with moldy furniture and personal effects. The receding waters left piles of debris inside the rooms like sea wrack on an ocean beach. The historic brick magazine of 1837 and its compatible modern military museum are closed. The guns, tanks and aircraft displayed on the grounds survived in relatively good condition. But it is hard to conceive of the Louisiana National Guard reoccupying this historic site. What will become of this national historical and architectural treasure?
Nearby is the Chalmette Battlefield and National Cemetery where Andrew Jackson defeated the British in 1815 in the Battle of New Orleans. A National Park Service site, it too is closed, its visitor center destroyed in the flood. It plans to open this summer with a temporary visitor center in a trailer.
Vanished Supporters
While much is made of tourism and its role in the New Orleans economy, tourists are not the most important supporters of most museums. That role is filled by local businesses and regional professionals. Before Katrina, New Orleans had a small but proudly supportive business community that included locally owned banks, oil service companies and Entergy, the private electrical utility. Today, some key New Orleans banks are being bought by outsiders and Entergy is bankrupt. (The federal government has made it clear it will let the market decide Entergy’s fate and will not help as it did ConEdison in New York after Sept. 11, 2001. Utility bills could soar by 140 percent in struggling New Orleans, making it even harder for museums to survive.)
Six months after the flood, only about 20 percent of Central Business District office workers were back. The one industry that had been expanding here and brought educated, well-paid, museum-supporting professionals to New Orleans was health care. Doctors have long been key supporters of culture in the city. But in February 2006, seven of the city’s 16 hospitals were still closed. Several will probably not be rebuilt. Scores of private medical and dental clinics were also destroyed and may not reopen. Of the approximately 4,500 doctors and medical residents who evacuated, only about 1,200 have returned. The loss of this professional cadre is devastating to both independent schools and museums since the consistent support of cultural institutions is highly correlated with educational achievement and income.
The Getty and Other National Foundations
In the wake of Katrina, the Getty Foundation funded the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s emergency teams of volunteer architects, conservators and engineers who assessed the damage to historic structures on the Gulf Coast. In February 2006 the Getty Foundation announced a $2-million initiative to assist New Orleans visual arts institutions with conservation grants for buildings and collections and planning grants for “longer-term organizational effectiveness and realization of an organization’s mission.” Except for assisting with NOMA’s stabilization fund, other major national foundations have yet to step up to the plate in New Orleans. The Southeastern Museums Conference, with a $100,000 grant from the American Association of Museums, was quicker to respond. By February it had raised over $155,000 for its Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort, which includes money for general operating costs, a museum employee assistance fund with grants of $1,000 per person for living expenses and smaller grants to fund conservators to evaluate and preserve collections. While heartening to museum people, the need continues to far outstrip the monies raised so far.
Class, Race and Numbers in the Shrunken City
New Orleans’s museums will come back, at least the strongest of them, to the degree that the city itself comes back. If, that is, the levees are improved. But New Orleans is likely to shrink drastically. In 1960, there were 627,500 New Orleanians, two-thirds white and one-third black. By the time Katrina struck, the city had dropped to 484,000 residents, nearly 70 percent black and many under-educated, unemployed and desperately poor. An analysis by sociologist John R. Logan of Brown University predicts that about half the whites and as many as 80 percent of the blacks who fled Katrina might not return.
By Mardi Gras 2006, the population was only 189,000, a 59-percent drop. New Orleans has suddenly reverted to its pre- 1975 pattern of being a white majority city with a complex and culturally creative black minority composed of Creoles and American blacks. Like the flood, the city’s probable retreat to relatively higher ground, while sensible and objectively defensible, will adversely affect the poor, both black and white, more than those better off. It will also probably result in a city with fewer very poor blacks and whites, and proportionally more better- off whites. This demographic upheaval in Orleans Parish will probably tilt the state’s politics away from the Democrats and toward the Republicans.
Ideology and Delusion vs. a National Response
Even after eight months, the recovery of New Orleans’s museums has only just begun. It will take years to play out. The response of the national museum community has been generous, but the challenges facing the city’s museums and their staffs go far beyond what volunteers can provide. New Orleans and the Gulf Coast need sustained national help from both the federal government and national foundations. In general, the physical assets of the city’s cultural institutions survived; insurance and FEMA monies will probably cover much of the damage.
But museums are their people as much as their buildings and collections. What is needed now is a national effort by foundations and other philanthropic organizations to keep museum staffs together and their institutions alive by providing help with operating costs. The needs are basic and immediate in the short-term. Most museums cannot pay their staffs. In the longer term, New Orleans needs carefully phased reinvestment over at least a decade.
In the devastated landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans, about half the residents are gone, many businesses have closed and tourists are few. With these losses, the means of support and sustenance for museums and so many other cultural institutions that are this creative city’s heartbeat have been seriously diminished. The Bush administration insists that we shouldn’t create “new bureaucracies” to cope with this unprecedented catastrophe. Beefed-up community development block grants and patching the existing flood control system will have to do. That, and tax breaks in a proposed Gulf Opportunity Zone—as in Iraq.
The federal government’s bungled response to this catastrophe is about much more than one community and its desperate museums and other civic institutions. It’s about who we have become as a society over the past generation. My own view is this: What we need as much as rebuilding in New Orleans is political and social reconstruction in the United States of America. New Orleans is a national treasure and deserves a national rescue. Who needs museums if we don’t have a society?
Randolph Delehanty, Ph.D., is a historian, author, curator and founding director of the UNO Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. His books include The Ultimate Guide to New Orleans, New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence, Art in the American South and In the Victorian Style.
