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Under the Freeway by Rob Walker The first time I visited New Orleans, it was on a college road trip from Texas. I remember how Interstate 10 rose as we zagged toward the center of town, and how we seemed to be soaring over the city, looking out at the buildings from 30 feet above the ground. So when we took our exit, it was as if we descended into New Orleans — and it was kind of scary down there. On one side were abandoned-looking buildings, and on the other a weirdly open area underneath the highway itself, shadowy and strange after dark, with a surprising number of people walking around. What on earth were they doing Under the Freeway at night? Then we took a right, toward the French Quarter, and I basically stopped thinking about it, although the image stuck with me. Now I know that the blocks-long stretch of cracked pavement under I-10 along North Claiborne Avenue has a story, and it's one of my favorite things to point out to visitors. Almost any time you drive under I-10 anywhere between say, Canal Street and St. Bernard Ave., there are people hanging around, maybe just on their way somewhere, but occasionally eating, chatting, sometimes even sitting in a lawn chair, or playing dominos. It's bizarre. Because the physical space beneath the Interstate is exactly as appealing as you would guess, which is to say not at all. But this was not always so.  New Orleans has many spacious avenues that are most remarkable for the very wide strip of ground that separates the two flows of traffic. To call this "the median" is inadequate, because it's area that can be thirty or fifty feet across. So here such strips are called "the neutral ground," and I guess the archetype is the neutral ground on St. Charles Avenue. This is where the streetcar line runs, from Carrolton Avenue all the way to the Quarter. Along with the enormous oak trees, the grassy neutral ground is part of what gives St. Charles such a grandiose feeling. During Carnival, most of the important parades follow a route that leads along a chunk of St. Charles, and the neutral ground, by Fat Tuesday, has been completely taken over by virtual encampments of families and friends who set up ladders for better viewing, and barbecue pits for better eating. Also port-a-johns. In another part of the city, the same thing happens on the sprawling neutral ground of Orleans Avenue, where it was pretty common to see couches and other furniture arrayed for parade-viewing comfort, until the city cracked down on that kind of thing. Up until 1966, Claiborne Avenue also had a very pretty and park-like neutral ground. It was about ten blocks long and 100 feet across, totaling thirteen-and-a-half acres, lined with two rows of mature live oak trees — around 250 of them altogether. It so happens that the two neighborhoods bisected by this particular public space were Treme and the Seventh Ward, which were, it also happens, predominantly black. Claiborne was lined with businesses and residences, largely one- or two-story wood-frame structures from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and largely black-owned. In the pre-Civil Rights era, black revelers weren't particularly welcome to the uptown Carnival parade celebrations, and thus many celebrated Mardi Gras on Claiborne. The famous Mardi Gras Indians — one of the iconic images of New Orleans today — were a main attraction. Daniel Samuels, who studied the area as part of his graduate work at the University of New Orleans, wrote in his thesis that North Claiborne was "the locus of cultural and economic life for New Orleanians of African descent." I thought it would be interesting to look back at the newspaper accounts from the 1960s about the pitched battle that must have been fought over the decision to erase a place of vital importance to a community that has done so much to shape the city's character. What I found was nothing. There was no dramatic public battle. I'm sure people objected, but in those days they were easily ignored. It also seems that many area residents didn't know what was going to happen until the demolition and tree "removal" process began in August 1966. The city's planning commission, according to Samuels, had already concluded that the North Claiborne area showed "existence of severe blight" — they should see it now! — and apparently the thinking was that no one would be harmed or damaged by running a highway through here. No one who mattered, anyway. I wish I could pretend that all of this is truly remarkable, but I'm afraid that if you know anything at all about the way cities have developed in the U.S. in the past fifty or sixty years, you have a pretty good idea that the various sacred grounds of impoverished urban-dwellers have been paved over or otherwise obliterated with some regularity. What is remarkable about the former Claiborne neutral ground is that it is still used as a public space. I don't mean in any formal way. And I certainly don't mean to suggest that the area, with litter and broken glass on the ground and the claustrophobic roar of cars overhead, is anything like the "promenade" that long-time area residents described to Samuels. But I myself have been Under the Freeway many times. I've followed jazz funeral parades on routes underneath it (the acoustics, actually, are fantastic), and I've hung around on Mardi Gras day and at other times when the Indians gather. This past Mardi Gras, I watched as a Mardi Gras Indian dance at Claiborne and Esplanade spilled into the street itself, bringing traffic to a complete halt. One unfortunate woman began blaring her horn, and was informed by several onlookers that she was in the wrong place, on the wrong day, to be doing that sort of thing. An area civics organization called Tambourine and Fan has devoted itself to a mission described succinctly on a banner that fluttered from the freeway over the corner of Claiborne and Orleans: "Bring Mardi Gras Back to North Claiborne." Most of the time the space is used in more quotidian ways. The other day I rode my bike down, and the first thing I saw was an older black man sitting on a little ledge around one of the massive columns that hold the freeway up, eating his lunch. Just like a picnic in the park. Only Under the Freeway. Most of the people walking, biking, or sitting under I-10 are black (the demographics of Treme and the Seventh Ward haven't changed much), and many look old enough to remember when this space was grass and oaks. I wanted to take some pictures of a somewhat recent public arts project that aims, I guess, to at least make a public acknowledgment of what this area used to be: A number of support columns have been painted with wraparound murals.
The columns on the outer edges have renditions of oak trees — painted by prisoners, it turns out. Other murals were done by various local artists, with varying degrees of technical skill. Some have celebratory themes — a parading brass band on one, Mardi Gras Indian on another. Some celebrate achievements — the city's first black surgeon, a family that has produced two mayors. And other murals depict slavery, police brutality, and lynching.
I have some copies of photographs of North Claiborne, pre-1966, that I got from The Williams Research Center (they asked me not to digitize these), and I was especially interested in seeing what was still standing from two photos taken at the corner of Claiborne and Ursulines in 1947. In the pictures there are some cool old signs, one for ACME Life Insurance, and another, shaped like a huge paintbrush, for a hardware store. What's there now is a freeway ramp. So I rode on. A lot of this space is used for parking, especially near the corner of St. Bernard, where Circle Foods actually looks a lot like it did in a picture I have from 1954. Except of course that the presence of the hulking freeway, and the dearth of other businesses nearby, makes it seem more menacing today. (Samuels found 130 business were listed on this stretch in 1960, and thirty-five in 2000). I took more pictures. It's a nice thought, I guess, painting these columns, but the net effect is pretty depressing. It doesn't mitigate the loss, it underscores it. Which has value, too, I guess. Not all the columns are painted, and I noticed one that seemed to have newspaper clippings pasted on it in a sort of cluster. They were death notices from the local paper (the Times-Picayune runs at least a thumbnail obit for pretty much everyone who dies in New Orleans). A guy sitting in his car about forty feet away waved and motioned me over. He was older black man, missing a lot of teeth, wearing sunglasses and black cap. As far as I can tell he was just hanging out in his car; maybe he was waiting for someone shopping at Circle Foods, but he was parked an inconvenient distance from there, or from anything else. He rolled his window down and said he'd seen me looking at the obituary column. "Yes," I said. "You know any of the people on there?" "Not really," I said. "Are those all people from the neighborhood?" "That's right. My sister's up there." He was smiling through all of this, very pleasant and friendly. I said: "Oh. Who, uh, who puts them up?" He said someone's name — Chuck, I think — and pointed at a house, as if I would of course know Chuck who lives across the way there, or whatever. I said I thought it seemed like a very nice idea, and he said he thought so too, and that he had enjoyed speaking with me. He rolled up his window. Somehow pasting obituaries to a highway support column says more, to me, than the murals do. My point here isn't to romanticize these neighborhoods, or to condemn the decision to slash an interstate through them. I'm neither sentimental nor angry about North Claiborne. But I am somewhat awestruck.
We all know how a place can have a hold on us, how a patch of earth, a strip of land, a corner, a building, or the most arbitrarily bordered swatch of territory you can imagine, all can have a sort of symbolic meaning. But surely even that meaning has its outer limits, right? If someone knocks down the building or paves over the land, how can the significance of the place where something used to be hold onto its significance? Often, I think, the answer is: It doesn't. But sometimes it does. This not because Symbolic Importance comes bubbling up out of the ground like a hot spring. In fact the meaning doesn't flow from places to people at all — it's actually the other way around. That's the only way the specialness of a place survives the most violent changes in its physical aspect. You can't impose this, but you can't thwart it, either. All you can do is admire it. And you should. |
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