In addition to thinking about architecture and design in Louisiana, I’ve been following the crowds the football stadium, and trying to get my head around the sports culture of this fine state.
Best way to do it? Become a sportswriter. My first article for the Baton Rouge weekly, DIG Baton Rouge, came out last week. Appropriately enough, on female fandom.
Read “Fake it til you make it.“
This past week, I attended the Center for Planning Excellence’s 2011 Smart Growth Summit. While most of the folks there were planners or redevelopment people (in battered southern cities, they have Redevelopment Agencies, as opposed to NYC’s Development Corporations), I spent the three days trying to get my head around Baton Rouge.
My first lesson was from Mayor-President Kip Holden. Based on glowing introductions by Boo Thomas (CPEX) and Peter Manship (who seemingly owns 2/3rds of the media in Baton Rouge), it was clear he was a progressive, pro-downtown leader, that was getting checked at most every turn. (Manship’s phrase was “if we could just get some of the people out of the way…”). Holden hailed the new town square going in across North Boulevard, and reminded us that $1 in development puts $7 back in the economy, before handing the mic to former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy.
Murphy, who now works at the Urban Land Institute, spoke in broad terms and Pittsburgh examples about how to turn a city around. (In this context, turning around BR would include bringing people back to the city center to work in live in a district that encourages walking and mass transit. Remediation and redevelopment of blighted or otherwise undesirable urban sites is another key tenet of smart growth.) That being said, it didn’t paint a great picture for BR. There were a couple upsetting numbers in the mix, including that local graduate degrees have remained flat, and there is very, very little start-up money (in 2010, Baton Rouge only had two venture capital firms, and $1 million investments.) There are plenty of government offices in this town, it’s going to take private money and big brains to fill up the rest of the empty offices.
Thursday I ducked into “Going to Seed,” a talk about local community garden movements. It was a promising panel, and offered an opportunity to introduce myself to the president of Beauregard Town, a local landscape architect that’s set up an organic farm in the neighborhood. (I hope to learn a little more about my new neighborhood on a porch, over gin and tonics, in the next week.)
Friday brought more bad stats and dour outlooks: a blight panel highlighted the challenges of a 34% un-occupancy rate in Baton Rouge and higher blight in New Orleans than anywhere else in the country. The redevelopment wonks talked about the process to transfer blighted properties to the RDA’s for the rest of the session, but it took a lunchtime panel with local media to really digest the numbers. They all but chided city planners for their lack of political savvy, bemoaning that it was politics, more than anything else, that hindered BR’s smart growth. The upper class sprawl (“Baton Rouge is a place white people live south of Government”) and the metro council members that represent them wanted to funnel money and resources towards the sprawl. Reps from older in-town neighborhoods, like Old South Baton Rouge welcomed only slight improvement. For instance, if the main route to LSU was redeveloped into a place people wanted to live, new people would ultimately move in, all but breaking their voting bloc. (The take away: gentrification isn’t only scary for poor people, it’s scary for their elected officials.) With those two voices on the Metro Council, what’s left is mayor used to getting shot down and a small population of people (try the 1100 of us living in Beauregard Town) who really want, if not a vibrant, dense downtown, at the very least, a healthy one with less “for rent” signs and more foot traffic.
As The Advocate’s Lanny Keller, himself a walking commuter explained, “If someone’s walking in Baton Rouge, something’s wrong.” I think something’s wrong here, but that’s not it.
I have been to New Orleans exactly three times.
The first trip, with my mother in June, was flawed – we went on a Sunday, when most good restaurants are closed, and the sun was baking Saturday night’s effluvium, to great effect. With nothing else to do, hordes of tourists poured themselves around wrought iron tables at Café Dumond. We went to the airport early and drank Abitas in the concourse, thankful for AC, and left Louisiana.
The second trip my father and I drove into uptown, ate po boys at Mahony’s (my father, in his excitement, ordered 18 inches of sandwich, as consequence we were full for the remainder of the day, requiring only beignets for dinner).
The third trip, last week’s, was a solo venture, to join the AIA New Orleans bus tour of the Lower Ninth Ward. The tour guide, John Williams, is the architect of record with Make it Right. I was the only one to raise my hand to not having been to the L9W. He smiled, and explained for my benefit that it is not actually low ground, but relatively high elevation. It is lower down on the river, which is to say, farther east, than other districts of the city. And so, like any good architect, the somewhat unfocused, but intelligent and insightful narrative began.
The L9W had higher home ownership rates than just about anywhere — modest homes, but their own — and it was a storm surge, not the hurricane itself, that knocked the neighborhood flat. The surge was largely caused by Mr. Go — Mississippi Gulf Outlet, a canal dug straight from the gulf to the industrial canal, parallel to the naturally placed inter coastal waterway — and a 30 foot wall of water pushed over the levee wall, knocked it down, and flooded the neighborhood before the storm had even hit.
The subsequent tour spoke little of architecture. (To his credit, he emphasized green elements of each project, and explained that the architects had a source book of elements in New Orleans residential architecture. However, he did not actually point out these elements to those of us unversed in vernacular architecture.) It was much more of a social justice tour, as related to rebuilding. He spent a good deal of time speaking about the stratification of the neighborhood. One hundred and fifty years ago, the slave owners had lived south, in the Holy Cross neighborhood, then the overseers had lived in the middle, between St. Claude and Claiborne, then the slaves up north, toward the bayou (which had been destroyed by saltwater encroachment, care of Mr. Go). That stratification exists to this day, and even in the rebuilding effort it stands between a unified voice for renewal. We drove by the projects that were built slowly and badly (the Katrina houses, within the Jackson Barracks), the projects still waiting to be started (schools, whose sites could be identified by the chainlink fence around a block-wide swath of well-cut grass), and the slow recovery of the main drag. We visited an Episcopal church that had moved into Walgreen’s, but few other venues had moved back to St. Claude.
Brad Pitt’s project — and to hear Williams talk about it, it really sounded like Pitt’s passion alone made it happen — focused on a few square blocks north of Claiborne, right next to the breach. They are filling in — 74 homes so far, with another 76 on the way — these blocks to get them back to full. They found landowners first, negotiating payment, completing construction, and moving them in; now they are looking for more former residents, with or without property rights, to turn into homeowners.
As has been well documented, MIR hired a dozen or so top-notch architects from around the globe. These firms built prototypes, and then handed the plans over to Williams’s firm to replicate at will. Generally, the clones work – different colors and pier heights go a long way to helping the rythym of a neighborhood — but seeing two of the Adjaye houses in two blocks (emphasis on block — they felt like glacial erratics) was a little jarring. Lofting the houses high – five, eight, ten feet up, made for car ports and picnic tables and shade. Williams took us inside a Kieran Timberlake house and spoke for a long time about how it cost half as much as the prototype around the corner. Whatever the corners clipped, it seems their hearts are in the right place.
Further east, past those few full blocks, the place turns ghost town, chin-high grass in nine-tenths of the lots, a handful of lonely houses in a savannah. Apparently, people came back here and left again, so empty, dark and dangerous these streets had become.
The Make it Right had been so blissful that I almost forgot how strange the constellation was. It only struck me as odd later, when we looped back around to St. Claude. There, little one-story buildings sat on their three-foot blocks, front porches sagging below windows framed with aching wood shutters, hanging on like they were waiting to let go.
When I told New Yorkers I was moving to Baton Rouge, they scrunched up their faces, or bit their lips, and looked concerned. My boyfriend, and a handful of other true sports fans, exclaimed about SEC football. The filmmakers I know all were wistful for the bayou, a seemingly required post-bac after film school. And the architects said, “Oh, isn’t that where that Trey guy is?” Indeed. A week ago Friday, I met with Victor “Trey” Trahan.
He had a corner office that had had a good view, before the fifth tall building in downtown Baton Rouge went up (the Capitol, the Shaw Center, the Court House, the Chase towers and his own, former bank building being just about the only other interruptions in the flat skyline to rise more than five stories above the Mississippi.)
What do you know about me? he asked to begin. That was as good a place to start as any.
Sacred architecture.
Trey has designed two of the more important Catholic complexes in the last fifteen years, the St. Jean Vianney in BR and the Holy Rosary church complex in St. Ament. I have yet to visit them, and I will, but he alluded to the already changing tides around the complexes. A progressive church, with local leaders steeped in the “come all” inclusiveness of Vatican II had commissioned both. In a relatively short period of time, both the congregations and the church have swung back into a more cloistered, conservative place. I sensed he doubted he’d be able to build like that again, and some concern that the buildings would even remain the monuments he’d imagined.
Sports.
Trey designed the east, and later, the west additions to LSU’s football stadium, a structure that can now hold over 90,000 hearts of purple and gold. I was surprised to hear about the extent of his sports experience — football stadiums across the southeast, including the recently re-clad Superdome, in New Orleans. The projects were largely additions and renovations, he qualified, but they were enough to get him to the table to talk about sports venues in Beijing for the recent Olympics. That didn’t materialize, but other opportunities in China have. (It was refreshing to talk to an architect who had not fallen desperately for Asia. There were opportunities abroad, but projects in Louisiana were keeping his lights on.)
I had hoped he’d draw some wonderful connection between the sports and the sacred (I started, and later abandoned, a novel that drew parallels between the baseball stadium and the gothic cathedral), but he shrugged it off. Sports were lucrative and remained on schedule — kickoffs don’t wait. And in Louisiana, they matter more than most things.
What I learned.
I learned a hell of a lot about downtown politics, and building in Baton Rouge, which I will expand on later. I learned that he was able to build a cast-stone and copper museum, with Zaha curves in Natchitoches, Louisiana. (A certain coup, but, “Again, for sports.”) And I learned something about his design sensibility. I had assumed it was international travel, or some prodding professor who had initially sparked him to make forms that look more beautiful and odd than anything else in the seven-state triangle between Dallas, Atlanta and Miami. But he shook it off. “Crowley, Louisiana. Interesting place, real Cajun country…Growing up, I learned how to question everything.”
Seems like I’ve got a lot to learn from Louisiana.
