Advertisement

Little to Reclaim in the Lower 9th

Share
Times Staff Writer

The sun was still burning off the fog Thursday morning when 88-year-old Nelson Meyers climbed five stairs onto a concrete porch he had built four decades ago. The railing was there. The house was gone.

The 25-foot wall of water that burst through the levee forming the western boundary of New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina lifted the home off its foundation. The house landed in the neighbor’s yard, on top of a car, caked in mud, its lacy curtains shredded into filthy ribbons.

“A man’s home is his castle,” Meyers said. “And this is what we’ve got.”

Currently living with 28 other relatives in Florida, Meyers and three family members drove to New Orleans to take up Mayor C. Ray Nagin on his offer to sift through the wreckage, to salvage what they could.

Advertisement

The Lower 9th had been closed since the flooding, and residents had grown agitated over not being able to get to their property. Nagin relented, cautioning that the neighborhood -- probably the pocket of the city hit the hardest -- was not stable enough for people to move back. But, he said: “Everybody can get their stuff.”

So for two hours, Meyers and his family rumbled through the Lower 9th in a small convoy, stopping at four family homes that dated back five generations. They all had their wish lists: the lovely picture of Meyers and his wife enjoying a picnic, taken in the ‘40s. The family Bible. Birth certificates.

They came away with nothing.

Like hundreds of other families, they did not -- could not -- salvage a single item.

Little more than three months ago, few outside of New Orleans had heard of the 9th Ward. Today, the neighborhood remains a singular testament to the wrath of Katrina’s flood, a mind-boggling heap of splintered houses, upside-down cars, refrigerators stuck on rooftops and, across Jourdan Avenue, a massive barge that floated through the levee breach and settled atop a school bus.

The mayor’s “look and leave” program could do little to stem the pain -- or to extinguish the anger among many residents, who feel that they were forgotten even as politicians’ promises were echoing off the deserted streets.

“We heard so many words,” said Linda Garth Llopis, 60, as she stood outside her partially collapsed home on Deslonde Street. “Our president said he was going to help. Everybody said they were going to help. We are citizens of the United States. And we’ve just been thrown away.”

It is popular in New Orleans these days to remind people that they should feel blessed to have survived, that material possessions can be replaced. But such reassurances sounded empty Thursday to those who had lost everything.

Advertisement

Llopis is living in a hotel, with no job and no hope for rebuilding. At her feet was a small pile of belongings that her husband was able to retrieve from their home -- a handful of costume jewelry, a batch of his heart medicine, most likely ruined.

“We had a nice life,” she said. “We had marble countertops. I had a mink hat for church.”

She and many of her neighbors say they are fighting the conventional wisdom that the 9th isn’t worth saving, that it was dirty and crime-ridden anyway, that the storm’s silver lining was that it washed away the city’s blight.

Like most poor neighborhoods, the 9th had its troubles. But it was a community, said Barbara Ponder, 50, who had never lived anywhere but the 1900 block of Deslonde. Just about everybody owned their home; there were very few renters. There was a preschool down the street from Ponder’s house. Several nearby houses had been remodeled in recent years.

Ponder lived a few hundred feet from the levee lining the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal. Her daughter used to play there, often skidding down its sloped, grassy bank on flattened cardboard boxes.

On Thursday, Ponder stood on a flattened lot. There was no sign of her house. The few remnants of life where her home once stood -- some dishes, a bashed-in stove, a flyswatter -- were not hers. They had floated in from elsewhere.

She had made her final mortgage payment in July.

“We had our crimes and everything -- car thefts and things -- but this was my home,” she said. “Now it’s gone. My whole life, everything I owned, everything I have ever accomplished, has vanished.”

Advertisement

Much of the destruction in New Orleans, particularly in the Central Business District, was brought by a slow, seeping flood. That was not true in the Lower 9th, much of which was crushed instantly by a wave of water when an 800-foot-wide section of the levee collapsed early in the storm. Close to the canal, entire blocks are gone. Even a mile or so east, houses have been reduced to rubble, as if a giant stomped through town.

Here, the notion of rebuilding seems faint at best. Almost all of the houses above Claiborne Avenue -- an 11- by 25-square-block area -- will be demolished. Most were below sea level, and it is far from certain that the neighborhood will ever be rebuilt.

Nelson Meyers and his relatives knew it was going to be bad. But, he said, they were not prepared for what they found Thursday.

They began at a single-story home on Caffin Avenue, where his daughter, 58-year-old Patricia Meyers Washington, lived. Five generations of the family had lived in that house. Washington’s grandmother had lived there for years, until she died recently at 105. The garden she had tended to was still there -- tomato plants and turnip greens.

“It was beautiful,” Washington said. “There were flowers everywhere.”

With nothing to recover, the relatives hopped in their cars. Their next stop was a relative’s four-bedroom home in the 1800 block of Lizardi Street, five blocks southwest, or “Upriver,” as they say around here. Washington leapt out of the car.

“It’s gone,” she said.

It was a vacant lot. A blue jacket and a pair of pink tennis shoes belonging to Washington’s granddaughter were the only reminders that the family had ever lived there -- until Dewitt Lucas, another relative, spotted the home about 200 feet away.

Advertisement

“There it is!” he said, pointing and standing on the bumper of a car. “That looks like the front door over there.”

The house had collapsed on itself. They couldn’t get inside, and didn’t need to bother anyway.

They hung a right on North Derbigny Street, past the skeletal remains of a couple of businesses -- “Po Boys and Hot Plates,” one sign read -- and a house where rescuers had spray-painted “POSSIBLE BODY” on an outside wall. They headed to another home owned by Washington, where more relatives had lived. She had decorated and maintained the house, and it contained a slew of her possessions, including antique tables and a painting she had bought in the French Quarter.

They pulled up. Someone’s shed had been carried into the yard. Lucas squeezed inside the blown-out front door as Washington stood on the porch and peered in behind him. Thick, dried mud coated the floors and walls. She pointed to items that she thought she might be able to save as Lucas climbed over the jumbled furniture, including a picture of her grandson, Cornell.

Lucas handed her the small gold frame. Inside, the picture was curdled and faded.

“This was a picture of my baby,” Washington said with a smile. “It was taken on Easter, when he was 2. There was an Easter Bunny down there.” She pointed to a large white blob in the corner of the photo.

“What about those picture books, the albums?” she asked, pointing to a bookcase that was still standing. Lucas climbed across the room.

Advertisement

“No, Pat,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Their last stop held their greatest hope. It was on the 1600 block of Gordon Street, farther east of the levee breach.

Like the first house they stopped at, which had floated off its foundation, Meyers built this one himself, in 1952, and he had raised five children there. Meyers had added storm braces to the walls -- 2-by-4s crisscrossed inside the walls -- and they had done their job. The house was still standing, though the walls were beginning to separate from the floor.

The mud, however, had gotten inside. The dining room table was upside down, though there were still bills dating back to August on top of the television. Meyers dispatched Lucas into a back bedroom to retrieve two boxes containing the family’s papers, birth certificates, deeds and the like. But the floor of the attic had collapsed, burying the room in debris, so he couldn’t get there.

Everyone went outside except for Washington, who was desperate to come away with some token of what had been their lives. She lingered for a few minutes, pawing at framed photos, scraping away slime and mold to see if any could be saved. No luck. In the corner, she spotted the thick family Bible. It had been around for as long as anyone could remember. Important dates -- birthdays, weddings -- had been written on the inside cover.

“Daddy! I found your Bible,” she shouted.

Meyers poked his head in the door. His daughter bent down and tried to open it, but the pages had melted together in the flood.

“We’ll get another one,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“I’m ready,” she said. “Nothing more to do.”

Advertisement