Rebuilding after Katrina, one memory at a time

Today, the Lower 9th Ward is a dreary landscape of deserted brick and wood-frame structures, concrete slabs where homes once stood, unshaded streets and sidewalks buckled by uprooted live oaks and weeks of standing water. At night, a graveyard silence is broken only by the skittering of rats.

It is about as inhospitable a place as exists in post-Katrina New Orleans.

And yet sisters Tanya Harris and Tracy Flores are moving back.

To them, the “Lower 9” is still beautiful. In her mind’s eye, Harris is fishing with her grandfather in Bayou Bienvenue at the end of the street where his house stood. She and her sister are sitting on his front porch “door-popping,” their grandfather’s term for playful gossip and people-watching.

Harris and Flores, whose feisty, stubborn devotion to their neighborhood has become well known to City Hall since the storm, are determined to reclaim the neighborhood that nurtured five generations of their family.

Their efforts may seem quixotic to people who know the Lower 9th Ward only from TV news: block after block of houses flooded to their rooflines, and people waving frantically for rescue atop their homes. After the waters receded, crumpled houses had been ripped off their foundations by the wall of water that burst the levee, and lay strewn about, some on top of one another.

Almost entirely African American and working class, the neighborhood became symbolic of an economic divide, in which the have-nots were stranded, overlooked by their own government to the point that foreign nations offered their help.

But to many people who lived there, the Lower 9th is not a symbol. It is a 22-block neighborhood, once home to 19,000 people. It had a significant percentage of owner-occupied homes, a core of closely knit longtime residents and even its own celebrity: pioneering rock-’n’-roller Fats Domino. (Domino, who remained in his home during Katrina until being rescued, is rebuilding and expects to move back by summer.)

And it had families like Harris’ and Flores’.

Before Katrina, Harris, 31, and Flores, 34, were next-door neighbors in lookalike reddish brown and tan brick ranch homes. Their cousin Vernine Veasley owned the house on the corner, and another cousin, Inez Ellis, lived one block over. Josephine Butler, their grandmother, was less than two blocks away in a wood-frame Craftsman bungalow that her husband built in 1949. At least a dozen more relatives lived throughout the Lower 9th, which spans two square miles.

Flores finished renovating her flood-ravaged house in December and moved back in with her two children. They’re the only family currently living on her block. “I hope to serve as a beacon of hope to my neighbors,” Flores said. “I want them to see it can be done.”

Harris is the midst of repairs to her home. And last month, Butler, their grandmother, moved into one of the first new houses to be built in the Lower 9th Ward since Katrina.

Butler and Gwendolyn Guice, her neighbor of 25 years, were given keys to houses designed by architecture students from Louisiana State University, mold and termite-resistant elevated wood-frame structures built to withstand 160-mph winds.

Volunteers and paid laborers built the homes, for which a housing advocacy group secured financing through Countrywide Bank.

The houses -- one painted beige, the other powder green -- stand against the Katrina-scarred terrain: abandoned skeletons of buildings, missing street signs and pockmarked pavement.

But none of the surrounding blight deterred Butler from returning to the neighborhood she has called home for almost 60 years. “I’ve been here for so long, I just enjoy being here,” said the 84-year-old woman whose quick step and nearly smooth skin belie her age.

A close community

What is now a stark ruin was once a scene of promise.

Originally a cypress swamp with plantations running along the Mississippi River, by the early 1900s the Lower 9th was settled by working poor African Americans and immigrants from Italy, Ireland and Germany.

Separated from New Orleans proper by the Industrial Canal and completed in 1923, “it was always looked at as not as important as the rest of the city,” said Nilima Mwendo , a researcher and community activist who is also a former Lower 9th resident. “I call it the stepchild of New Orleans.”

Out of that isolation and neglect grew resilience and a particular community closeness, Mwendo said. “There was still that rural feel,” she recalled. “It was almost like when you crossed the Industrial Canal, you were coming into another country.”

Harris and Flores’ maternal great-grandmother moved to the then-sparsely populated Lower 9th in the 1940s, after the death of her husband. Ophelia Hugle Short worked cleaning stately homes along prestigious St. Charles Avenue for $3 a week.

Butler and her husband, C.F., a longshoreman and welder, decided to build their home next door to her mother’s in 1949 after a fire destroyed their tenement building in the Uptown neighborhood. “We just decided we weren’t going to rent no more,” Butler said.

C.F. Butler cleared the land covered in cypress trees, built it up, and with the help of his wife and her brother, laid the floor, installed the wood siding and hung the new home’s sheetrock. The house occupied the center of a quarter-acre lot.

The sisters recall their grandfather describing how he worked 16 hours on the docks in the city and then came home to work on the house. The stories stuck with them.

“You owe something to that memory, that perseverance, that determination,” Flores said.

“You dishonor their memory by giving up on it,” Harris added.

At one time, four of their grandmother’s brothers owned lots on the same street and planned to build there. When Hurricane Betsy slammed New Orleans in 1965, unleashing a deluge into the Lower 9th, they changed their minds.

But Butler and her husband didn’t think twice about returning.

“It was just water,” the matriarch said. “We gutted the house and moved back.”

Grandma Butler’s house would become the family’s official gathering place for Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July, Harris said.

Leading the fight

Katrina’s flooding washed Butler’s home off its piers and left it on top of three properties across the street. Everywhere, the family’s homes were ruined, and relatives scattered countrywide.

One cousin wound up at the Houston Astrodome, another found refuge in Oklahoma. An uncle landed in Tennessee before making his way back to New Orleans. Flores and her children, Harris, and their mother and grandmother spent about two months in at least half a dozen U.S. cities.

Citing safety concerns, city authorities prevented residents from officially entering the Lower 9th until three months after Katrina, and then they were only permitted to “look and leave.” Residents from other damaged neighborhoods were allowed home much sooner.

A high-spirited woman with a no-nonsense attitude, Harris would not sit back As a community organizer for the grass-roots Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, she has made it her mission to revive the Lower 9th.

When a preliminary city report suggested making portions of the Lower 9th into green space, Harris led the fight to prevent it. She fought for restoration of potable water and electricity long after other areas were being served. When city officials set a deadline for homeowners, many of whom lacked the money to comply, to clean up their property or lose it, Harris fought to overturn it.

Meanwhile, Flores was initially denied a permit to rebuild her home. She staged sit-ins at City Hall until she got one.

So far, only about 700 people from the Lower 9th have officially returned, an estimate based on utility usage, said John Hoal, an urban planner and designer who helped craft the city’s rebuilding plans for the neighborhood.

Flores acknowledged that some of her relatives would probably never return because they couldn’t afford to rebuild, or they couldn’t deal with the magnitude of the destruction.

But her cousin Rosemary Coldman will be back, even though her heartbreak goes far beyond material loss.

Coldman, 62, had planned to marry her fiance, Lee Norman, at the end of 2005. As Katrina approached, Coldman was visiting her daughter in Los Angeles. Norman, a San Diego native with little experience in a hurricane, failed to evacuate Coldman’s two-bedroom gray-brick home.

He was missing for seven months, until a demolition crew found his body on a debris-strewn median strip less than 50 feet from the house.

She knows Norman’s death will haunt her, but Coldman said she wouldn’t dream of resettling elsewhere.

“Lee loved it too. He would have wanted to come back,” Coldman said. “The Lower 9th is where my heart is.”

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ann.simmons@latimes.com