Gentle Rise Was Big Edge

When Marvin Trudeau was looking to buy his first home 11 years ago, he was drawn to a timeworn bungalow at the end of Pauger Street, in the Gentilly district of New Orleans.

The block was part of a middle-class black neighborhood, and many of the homes had been passed down from one generation to the next. Trudeau liked that. The homeowners had respect for each other and for themselves; each weekend, they swept up the leaves that had fallen from the block’s six towering oaks. Trudeau liked that too.

He was so sold, in fact, that he gave little thought to the real estate agent’s chief selling point. The neighborhood, he was told, was called Sugar Hill; it sat atop a rise that, although imperceptible, could offer protection in the event of a storm.

“Maybe I’m cynical. But I thought: ‘You’ll tell me anything to sell the house,’ ” said Trudeau, 45, who counsels teenagers in a psychiatric hospital.

He’s a believer today.

Tiny Sugar Hill, though part of it was ruined and the livable portion is hemmed in by destruction, is one of a handful of neighborhoods that survived Hurricane Katrina because of a geographical quirk -- a narrow ridge created when the Mississippi River bored a different path through southern Louisiana.

“It’s amazing. It’s surreal. And it’s eerie,” Trudeau said.

The smattering of residents who have returned to these outposts are far removed, physically and otherwise, from the larger, intact portions of the city. They are pioneers, not by choice, who shoulder an enormous responsibility: Because they own the only inhabitable homes in their pocket of the city, their blocks will become the anchors of reconstruction.

By day, they are tortured by conflicting emotions -- relief that they were the lucky ones, and guilt for the same. By night, they are prisoners of the silence and darkness that envelop their homes.

All along, they are a reminder of how much work lies ahead.

They still might not have regular mail service or working telephones. They might have to drive through miles of deserted neighborhoods to get to work. The simplest task -- such as buying a Christmas tree when only a few vendors offered a limited supply and quickly sold out -- requires considerable effort. But their homes are standing, and for that alone, they are expected to be thankful.

Vicky Williams, 48, a flight attendant, bought the white clapboard house next to Trudeau’s five years ago. She came home to the 4000 block of Pauger Street last month after more than four months of storm exile in Houston.

She found that neighbors had painted “help us” on her roof, where they had taken refuge. She’ll let that fade. Williams plans to remove the now-familiar hieroglyphics that rescuers spray-painted on her garage door to indicate that there were no bodies in her house.

Today, there are plants blooming on her porch, hanging over a pair of Adirondack chairs -- a suggestion of civility and normalcy that would seem preposterous just two blocks away amid the ruins of the flood.

“I feel really strange,” she said. “Everyone I know -- everyone -- lost their house. I met a guy just today; his mother died and he couldn’t find anyone who would pick up her body. He went and did it himself with big trash bags. He’s burying her tomorrow. So I don’t even tell people about my house. I don’t like to talk about it. People ask me how I made out in the storm. I just say, ‘Oh, I did OK.’ ”

The main crescent of land that Katrina’s flood never reached has become known as “the island.” Hugging the relatively high land that abuts both sides of the Mississippi River, it includes Algiers, the French Quarter and much of the Uptown area, including the Garden District. That land is viewed widely as the only viable remnant of a decimated city. But that’s not entirely true, because of isolated outposts such as Sugar Hill.

Little more than 1,000 years ago -- not long, geologically speaking -- the Mississippi River flowed about three miles north of where it flows today. That took it through the heart of the land that would become New Orleans.

Before it sought a shorter, steeper path to the Gulf of Mexico, the river left silt deposits on its banks, creating rare ridges of elevation on a patch of land that is as low as 10 feet below sea level. Today, there are three ridges in New Orleans that were left behind when the river shifted.

The Metairie Ridge begins in Kenner, west of New Orleans, and runs into the heart of the city. The ridge was home to the earliest European settlements here, established by the French in the early 1700s.

The Esplanade Ridge runs from the southern point of City Park to the banks of the Mississippi River.

The Gentilly Ridge, which includes Sugar Hill, stretches roughly from the eastern end of the Metairie Ridge through Gentilly and into Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, above the city’s 9th Ward.

In most places, the ridges are a quarter-mile wide. They are not high -- not by other cities’ standards. At its peak, for instance, in places like Sugar Hill, the Gentilly Ridge is 5 feet above sea level. When the city’s protective levees collapsed after Katrina, enough water coursed through New Orleans that even most of the land atop the three ridges was swamped.

But in a handful of residential pockets -- all of them, like the remnants of Sugar Hill, a few blocks long and separated by two miles or more from other sections of the city that weren’t flooded -- the elevation provided just enough protection to save the houses.

“If you were to walk across the ridge you wouldn’t even know it because the elevation is so subtle. But in this case it was vitally important,” said Tommy McGlothlin, a New Orleans native and Mississippi librarian who studies the region’s culture and geography. “You can’t but wonder why they didn’t get it and everybody else did. At the same time, these little areas like Sugar Hill are going to be the nucleus for the new neighborhoods in New Orleans.”

Indeed, the recovery plan unveiled by city officials last month requires neighborhoods in severely damaged areas to prove within four months that they are viable. The Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which was assembled by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, has suggested that half of the residents in a neighborhood must commit to returning and rebuilding. Otherwise, authorities would impose a building moratorium and the neighborhoods would probably be bulldozed and returned to nature.

If that plan holds, proximity to isolated pockets such as Sugar Hill -- no matter how tiny they are -- would provide an enormous boost to the surrounding area’s drive to rebuild. The majority of Gentilly was flooded so severely that it was the last district in New Orleans to be drained after Katrina.

“Places like this will form incredibly important axes in any kind of redevelopment,” said Craig E. Colten, a professor of geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Colton is the author of the book “An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature.”

“The high ground will be rebuilt and built more densely,” he said. “It’s an incredibly different world they are going to become accustomed to. But this is going to be prime real estate.”

Gentilly is a large district above the French Quarter and below Lake Pontchartrain. Within that district are dozens of smaller, often insular neighborhoods, known in New Orleans by the French term faubourgs. Sugar Hill is one of them.

Most of Sugar Hill’s small brick and clapboard houses were built in the 1930s. By the 1940s it was a leafy, upper-crust black neighborhood, occupied by businessmen, doctors and, in particular, college professors, many of them attached to nearby Dillard University, a historically black liberal arts college.

In the 1970s, authorities plunked Interstate 610 through the middle of New Orleans, cutting through black neighborhoods in the Treme and Gentilly districts. Sugar Hill shrank to no more than half a square mile after homes were demolished to make way for the highway; many of the remaining houses fell into disrepair.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, the houses were renovated, restoring some of the neighborhood’s luster. It became a neighborhood of young professionals and middle-class retirees.

By the time Katrina struck, the 4000 block of Pauger Street was a reflection of many of the city’s older neighborhoods. All eight houses were owner-occupied by African Americans, and three of the houses had been passed down from previous generations. The houses were faded and humble but sturdy and charming, with peaked roofs, colorfully painted in pinks, greens and yellows, and raised porches defined by wrought-iron fences.

Today, three of the houses on the block are occupied. Three other owners are planning to return but are staying either out of town or with relatives in suburbs nearby. Two owners have started new lives in other cities and say they will never come back because living in New Orleans -- even on high and dry Pauger Street -- is too much of a hardship.

The grass on most of the lawns is dead, as it is throughout New Orleans. In front of one of the vacant houses, a floor lamp is bracing an awning that collapsed in the wind and is now draped over the front door.

“My house is here, but everything around it is dead,” Williams said. “You don’t hear anything outside. There are no dogs barking. There are no birds. They’re gone too. You don’t hear birds chirping. It’s very strange.”

Trudeau is tortured by the condition of his neighborhood.

His roof was damaged, and his boat was missing by the time he returned to check on his house; he will never know whether the boat was stolen for profit or commandeered for rescue. But his house is in good shape. Some of his neighbors wonder why he hasn’t returned for good. Some days, he wonders too.

Trudeau said he felt a powerful sense of responsibility to come home -- because he could. At the same time, he’s not quite ready and has been staying most nights at his sister’s house across the river.

When he’s home, the deserted streets on all sides make him feel unsafe, he said. There are no restaurants open in the area. From Pauger Street, grocery shopping means going to Metairie or across the bridge to Algiers -- a drive that can take as long as 45 minutes if you hit traffic. The only gas station open in the area charges 40 cents more per gallon -- $2.59 one recent day -- than stations across the river.

“I’ve been itching to go back from Day One. But it just doesn’t make any sense, not quite yet,” Trudeau said. “I mean, you can walk three blocks down Pauger and see the waterlines on people’s homes. The community is just not viable. Even here.”

The homeowners trickling back to Sugar Hill disagree. All things being relative -- there are still large mounds of sand entombing houses a mile or so to the north, where one of the levees burst -- they say their neighborhood is in remarkable condition.

Even the trash, so ubiquitous these days in New Orleans, seems sweeter on Sugar Hill. On one recent afternoon, the only remnant of the Aug. 29 storm on the 4000 block of Pauger Street was a page of a child’s homework assignment that floated in on Katrina’s wind and wedged itself into a storm drain.

“If I was granted a wish,” it said, in meticulous cursive, “I would wish to become a famous singer because I love to sing and I know how to sing.”

Ebony and Rashad Harold, a couple in their 20s, bought a cream-colored clapboard home with green trim and a carport on the southern end of the block about two years ago.

Six weeks after the storm, they were among the first to return. The shrubs lining the walkway that leads to their front door had wilted and browned. Other than that, the house was fine. So Ebony got to work.

She and neighbors have undertaken several efforts to remind local officials of their existence -- no small task because of their isolation.

Tired of driving to a regional distribution office to pick up their mail, they met repeatedly with postal officials, who finally agreed to set up a common apartment-style mailbox that is bolted into a concrete slab in the middle of the block.

Ebony badgered the power company into restoring electricity to the area. But the gas company would not turn on the gas until she paid a contractor $500 to certify that it was safe to do so. City officials have promised to come by for weeks to restore telephone service, but Ebony said repeated calls to City Hall had been met with the same empty pledge: “We’ll do it, but we don’t know when.”

Every time neighbors return to the area to check on a home, Ebony corners them and asks when they will come back for good. Most responses, she said, are ambivalent at best.

Across town, Ebony found a Head Start program where she enrolled her sons, Rashad Jr., 5, and Justin, 1. Her husband is a pastor at an Uptown church that wasn’t damaged, and he’s already preaching to 200 people on Sundays.

“When we got back, everything was just like we had left it,” she said. “I can look down the street and see waterlines on people’s houses. But when we step inside, none of it seems real.”