Alan Gutierrez

For New Orleans. By gathering information from questionnaires, I’ll be able to build a knowledge base that is much easier for the citizens of New Orleans to construct.

Squandered Heritage is a project of Think New Orleans that is focused on the issue of preserveration. Since hurricane Katrina, the city’s office of Saftey and Permits has been overwhelmed. They’ve been issuing permits for demolition without real notification. Property owners have taken advantage of this to demolish homes, historic homes, that were not damanged in the hurricane.

There have been a lot of demolitions in dry neighborhoods that would have been hotly contested before the storm, but now, people are to preoccupied with the recovery of the city to notice.

The first phase of this project is to organize people to take photographs and write posts about structures on the demolition list. The next phase is to place these homes on a notification map.

Karen Gadbois and I went to the Lower 9th Ward to visit the community center established by NENA, a neighborhood organization. While we were there we went past this home. It is a block off of St. Claude.

A foudnation and a roof survive, and will continue to survive. The home is reframed. The the neighborhood is deluged, but not destroyed. People are continuing to find their way home, despite everything that has stood in their way.

Finally finished the leftovers from my visit to Father Luke’s church on Sunday, Our Lady of Vietnam, in East New Orleans. I went with Karen Gadbois, and their had lunch with outgoing NPN board members Renia and Calvin. Father Luke cooked this wonderful fried rice. We talked about levee politics with Patti Lapeyre, who’s been campaigning for a unified levee board.

After we’d stuffed ourselves, Father Luke filled up to go containers, and we all went home with at least five pounds of food.

Father Luke’s neighborhood is coming back strong. It is like an island in East New Orleans. The drive to the neighborhood goes past the Six Flags Jazzland amusement park which rises out of the wetlands in tinker-toy glory. The rippled and cracked road cuts through the marshes.

Then you drive right into suburbia. Most of the homes are occupied. There are people riding bikes in the street. It’s a neighborhood.