New Oreans: new visions ALL Edition

New Orleans has a distinctive and unusual urban pattern. It's like a fine grain on a piece of wood. When the French originally laid out New Orleans, they tried to give as many planters riverfront exposure as they could ... and ended up with a city made up of long, narrow lots. That fine grain i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Christian Science monitor (1983)
Main Author Amanda Paulson and Kris Axtman Staff writers of the Christian Science Monitor
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Boston, Mass The Christian Science Publishing Society (d/b/a "The Christian Science Monitor"), trusteeship under the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 12.10.2005
Subjects
Disaster recovery
Employment
Flood damage
Floods
Levees & battures
New Orleans Louisiana
Prefabricated buildings
Redevelopment
Sea level
Social conditions & trends
Urban planning
Urban renewal
United States > US
New Orleans Louisiana
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Summary:New Orleans has a distinctive and unusual urban pattern. It's like a fine grain on a piece of wood. When the French originally laid out New Orleans, they tried to give as many planters riverfront exposure as they could ... and ended up with a city made up of long, narrow lots. That fine grain is very distinctive, and it's critical for maintaining the character of New Orleans. The beauty is that it makes automatically for a dense, urban, walkable city. It's among the better-designed, better-laid-out, quirkier, more humane cities in this country. The worst thing that could happen is a bad 21st-century version of a great 19th-century home. It would be a bad cartoon version of what New Orleans actually is. We should be careful about creating something that not only respects the old city, but learns from it, because it is sustainable. There's no reason a neighborhood of single-family homes can't be replaced by multi- family homes, or multifamily homes within mid-rise buildings, and still maintain that character: a long, skinny, 12-story building that's elegant and beautiful. The thing about New Orleans was its jumble of culture, races, income groups, ages: We all lived in a big jumble that even if you saw a big mansion on St. Charles Avenue, you wouldn't have to go very far and you'd come to a really modest Creole cottage in some stage of disrepair. That kind of mixture is what gave the city its grit... To live in New Orleans was to know your life was very provisional. You can't live below sea level and not understand it could all come washing in over you. It made people in New Orleans very tolerant of each other.
ISSN:0882-7729
2166-3262