Life On The Levee

I have to apologize for not posting here for some time. I was being productive: I have a new CD coming out in just a few weeks, and a new book of my poetry, lyrics and photos has just been released, and is for sale as an e-book on Lulu dot com and on Smashwords. I'm getting ready to leave in just two days for my summer tour, a little torturous excercise I put myself through every year (see my schedule here). With all of this going on, I just haven't had time to post until now. Sorry.

Last time we took a tour of the French Quarter, looking at some of the lesser known sights. Today I want to talk about an area that is essential to New Orleans life. We are constantly surrounded by it, constantly aware of its importance in our world. It stands guard over us, nurtures us, and gives us recreation, economy and beauty. The one time it failed, 11,000 of us died. I'm talking about the New Orleans Levee.

A levee is a dam that holds back a body of water that is higher in altitude than the land around it. The New Orleans Levee is part of a system of levees that runs pretty much the entire length of the lower Mississippi River. Here in NOLA we have levees around the river itself, and around the various canals that were dug in the late eighteen and early nineteen hundreds to allow shipping from the river to enter Lake Pontchartrain.

I live just a few blocks from the levee (the part near my house held up during Katrina, thanks), and it is a pretty fascinating location: a combination of industry, recreation and wildlife, all functioning together in a sometimes uneasy partnership. It even contains a few mysteries...

Let's take a bike ride along the three or four miles of the levee closest to my house.

Nearly the entire length of the levee, from the French Quarter upriver to Metarie and Lake Pontchartrain, features a bike/jogging path. In the above shot, I set my bicycle beside the path to take a photo of the path and my bike with the river and the Huey P. Long Bridge in the background. As you can see, several bike riders passed through the scene as I was shooting, making for a dramatic pic.

Right in the spot where one enters it from my street there are 11 houses on the river side of the levee. This is the only place in New Orleans where houses sit on this side of the structure: while very romantic and picturesque, they are also in constant danger of flooding. I know them by color: the Blue House above, the Red House below, and the Natural Wood house somewhere down there.

Last year, after heavy snow melt and intense rain up north, the river rose about fifteen or twenty feet. Below are the same homes seen above, back in May of 2011. You can see that the Natural Wood House had flood waters inside the house, coming just over the floor, while the Red House was a little luckier (or a little higher): its yard was completely submerged.

Just across from the levee houses we find a working horse stable. Riders use the wide green lands on either side of the raised levee to ride, work and to graze their horses.

There are several beaches along the river. The largest one is just downriver from the levee houses. On the day I was there, there were sunbathers and people fishing, both pretty common activities (although this was the first time I saw a levee sunbather quite as bold as this one...take a close look at the photo below).

These two guys were fishing on the other end of the beach. A homeless guy walked by and told us he'd just seen an alligator a few yards away in the forest.

A lot of homeless people set up tents in the thickets along the levee. Here's a glimpse of the forest where the homeless and the gators dwell together. On my way to take these I passed through a tent village, but I didn't want to disturb their privacy: I shot a bit of the forest just beyond their camp.

I never did see the gator (though I know he's there---I can feel their presence on the levee). But wildlife abounds on the grassy structure: here's a little guy who was grazing just outside the forest.

Industry is everywhere on the river and the shore. While New Orleans has a booming tourist economy, like the rest of Louisiana our major industries are maritime: oil tankers, fishing and freight. I caught this oil tanker sailing upriver, passing under the Huey P. Long Bridge.

On the shore we find various shipping yards and salvage yards, like Bertucci, a salvage yard just on the other side of the levee houses. Here's a scene from that yard...

As I biked further upriver, a few miles past the salvage yard, I found a patch of forest. I locked the bike up and walked into this grove of cypress and oak, where I discovered a mystery that occupied my simple mind for several hours. Here is the forest that lured me in, with leaning cypress and tangled oaks. You can see from the marks on the cypress trees just how high the river has flooded in the recent past.

Deep in the forested area I found this stagnent, muddy course of water. The ground around the shallow murk was thick and wet, and had turned to quicksand (quicksand is sandy soil with water running beneath: it will suck you down pretty deep, as seen by the deep tracks left around the brackish water, but it's not like in the movies; you won't sink all the way in. it just kinda sucks for your shoes and your pants. Literally!).

Just to the side of the drying water flow, I found these structures. Obviously unused for many years, the forest growing into them, I wondered what they could be. My initial guess was that they were docks for barges or for tugs, unused because the river had once reached this area and had somehow receded. I even wondered if they were barges that were left aground when the river dried, and that became embedded in the silt and sand.

My girlfriend Lauren is much smarter than me, and every once in a while she has to remind me of that. She looked at these photos and solved the mystery. Can you guess? I'll give you one more look, and then reveal the somewhat obvious aswer Lauren revealed to me:

Lauren's solution to the mystery: New Orleans is full of canals. In the late eighteen and early nineteen hundreds, thousands of Irish workers were brought here to dig a series of canals. They all died of yellow fever, so Italians, immune to that disease, were brought over to replace them. This little course of mucky quicksand was once a barge canal! And the structures? Locks! Canal locks, to control the flow of water running through the chanel. Lauren is so smart...

So this got me thinking about canals. the following day I found myself in the Lower Ninth Ward, where I took the time to photograph the Industrial Canal that separates the Lower Ninth from the Upper Ninth Ward (built by those disease-free Italians in the late eighteen hundreds). The levee here is very open and grassy. Below is the view from the Levee into Holy Cross, the lowest end of the LNW, where some really beautiful houses stand. Holy Cross was not hit as hard by Katrina as the rest of the LNW, and many people are returning to this area to live. There is a lot of wildlife here too. Beside herons, egrets, hawks and eagles, there are hundreds of feral chickens.

The Industrial Canal unites the river and Lake Pontchartrain, a journey of five-and-a-half miles. Here is the spot where the canal meets the river. We see a tug pushing a barge from the Industrial Canal into the Mississippi.

Up the canal, at the center of the Lower Ninth Ward, the levee is really nothing more than a long, high concrete wall:

Here is the wall, seen from my car window as I crossed the Claiborne Bridge headed back uptown. That's the Florida Avenue bridge in the background, just down from the lake.

This concrete wall is the reason the flooding was so horrible in the Lower Ninth during Katrina. The levees were built to protect NOLA from the river rising. But no provision was ever made for water coming from the other way! On August 29, 2005, the storm flooded the river and the canals so badly that the lake rose and sent water back into the canals. Water coming south from Lake Pontchartrain overran the canals, and these flimsy concrete walls were no protection. They ended up like this:

(Photo above courtesy of this site).

What is being done to prevent this from happening again? All along the levee vacuum pumps are being installed. Here are the ones that stand just up the street from my house:

They're very Steampunk! These pumps can drain water from the river and divert it to flood chanels flowing away from the city. Also, safeguards are being built on the Pontchartrain end of the canals, locks that can be closed if the lake ever rises again (and it certainly will, we all know that). Hopefully the scene below will never happen again!

That placid beach full of grazing horses and lovely sunbathers? This was the same beach in May of 2011.

Wanna see the Levee yourself? To get to my end of the Levee from the French Quarter, just take the Saint Charles Streetcar line to Riverbend (right now it's the final stop until they finish fixing the upper tracks), get out and walk in the direction of the rising green slope. You're there! And don't worry, the beach is lovely right now (though I cannot guarantee nudity...).

From the New Orleans Levee, this is Kenny Klein explaining it all!

What Goes On In The French Quarter When You're Not There?

When people think of the French Quarter, what do they think of? Mardi Gras. Bourbon Street. Bars and strip clubs, alcohol, women showing skin for plastic bead throws. Or maybe French Quarter Fest, Jazz bands playing on stages set up on the streets (Jazz bands, by the way, that are not the bands that play in the Quarter every day that is NOT French Quarter Fest; the one above, playing near the Courthouse, is a band that plays here when it is NOT French Quarter fest). Or maybe people have come here for a convention, or a cruise, and think of the Quarter as a stopping-off point to have a drink on their way to the next event.

I admit that when I used to winter in NOLA, I'd get a place to stay close to the Quarter. I'd play on Royal Street, and when the season was over I'd leave town and head off to Georgia or Texas for renaissance faires. I knew nothing of the rest of the city. It really never occurred to me that there was more of the city. Later, when I worked for Carnival Cruise Lines and we docked near the Riverwalk, I would leave the ship by nine AM and head to Bourbon Street for some French Quarter amusement. Even the Riverwalk seemed like a strange, foreign place, nearly a mile from the Quarter.

So when I got involved with a girl a few years back who lived Uptown, I eyed her with trepidation. “You live in New Orleans...Uptown? You don't live in the French Quarter?” My mind could not even grasp this concept!

Now I myself live Uptown, though I spend a lot of my time in the French Quarter. I know a lot about the whole city. But the French Quarter is, for many people, the gateway to New Orleans. When I speak to people who have come here for Mardi Gras or French Quarter Fest, they are often curious about what goes on in the Quarter when they're not there.

Let's take a little trip through the French Quarter on an average weekday, when no special event is going on. We'll start at Frenchmen Street and Decatur, where stands a French Quarter landmark, the Old U. S. Mint.

This amazing building was a branch of the United States Mint (the folks who bring you the coins in your pockets!) from 1838 to 1861. It closed during the Civil War, but reopened from 1879 to 1909. In the few years before the Civil War, the coins minted here were CSA, rather than USA coins. (Collectors love the New Orleans Morgan Dollars, marked with an "O" mint mark). The building is now part of the Louisiana State Museum. One of its functions is to have brass band concerts on its lawns.

 Down Decatur just a bit is the Old Ursulines Convent, which the Parks Department calls "the finest example of French Colonial architecture in America."

The Ursuline Nuns were some of the first French women to arrive in New Orleans, sent by King Louis XV in 1727. They ran a hospital, taught the daughters of Noble families, and ministered to the native women. They'd built a smaller convent when they arrived, but moved into this incredible building in 1751, and stayed there until the 1820s (the Ursuline Nuns now have a convent and a school Uptown close to where I live). The convent is still used by the Church, and houses Saint Mary Cathedral; the street it stands on is still called Ursulines Street.

Above is a detail of the Saint Mary Cathedral.

The nuns gained a bit of a reputation in the 1700s when they brought French women to New Orleans as brides for wealthy French colonists. The women would arrive after six weeks at sea in an awful state, pale and disheveled, carrying coffin-sized steamer trunks. Word soon got out that the nuns were bringing vampires to the city to drain the aristocratic blood of French nobles! The local bishop apparently led a mob to the convent, volunteered to go in alone, and came out a few hours later claiming he had destroyed the vampires. This story is how the city got its vampire reputation.

Across Charters Street from the convent is the Beauregard Mansion with its stately courtyard. Beauregard was a highly decorated Confederate Civil War general (down here we call it the War of Northern Aggression).

Our most spectacular cathedral is the Saint Louis Cathedral, right up Decatur Sreet in Jackson Square. It has the distinction of being the oldest operating cathedral in the United States.

Here is Saint Louis Cathedral as seen from Jackson Square.

Here are the grounds.

The cathedral is open daily to visitors. Let's peek inside.

Cool, huh?

When we cross Decatur, watch out for the insane drivers. There are plenty of F^#*ing cars driving at any moment up and down Decatur Street. The cabs are the worst. But there are also two other modes of transportation worth noting.

The first is bicycles. Most of my busker friends live farther downtown, in the Lower Ninth ward or the Saint Claude area. They come to work in the Quarter every day on their bicycles, an instrument strapped to their back.

"Wait a minute! I have a bicycle too," you say. "Doesn't everybody?" Well here there is an entire bike culture. In fact we call the downtown females "bicycle girls." We have a store called Plan B: they'll help you make your own bike. It's an identity as well as a mode of transportation here. On any day in the Quarter, every gate, fence and column has a dozen or so bikes chained to it. It's how we roll. Really!

But OK, you're still unimpressed. You have a bicycle too. Maybe you even ride it to work every morning. Maybe you even love your bike with a New Orleanean passion. But do you have one of these?

I didn't think so... Yes, we use mules, all over the city. They draw carriages for tourists. They draw candy vendor carts. They draw floats for parades. They've even been involved in a wedding or two. And they're damn cute! Look at that face... All over the Quarter you find troughs of water for these critters. We love our mules. Next time you come down take a mule carriage tour. The drivers are the best tour guides in the city (aside from moi).

By the way, a mule is male. Do you know what a female mule is called? Maybe I'll tell you some time...

On our way from Ursulines to Jackson Square we run into our first of many street performers. This one has what nearly all street performers around here have: a dog. And his dog has puppies. I made the mistake of calling my girlfriend over to see them. I highly recommend not doing this, by the way...

Stop staring at the puppies. Let's head over to Jackson Square.

We love our history here in New Orleans. This cannon was fired in the War of 1812, the War of Northern Aggression (that would be the Civil War), and the Mexican American War. It now guards the river.

Below the cannon is this cool sign. The first riverboat to navigate the Ohio-Mississippi weighed anchor right here! I knew you would be utterly impressed.

In Jackson Square is a "human statue" street performer. They're pretty much all over the Quarter. I just like this human statue best of them all. I imagine you can figure out why that is...

The day I was down here, there happened to be a Mardi Gras Indian showing off his mask for tips (mask, you may remember from my previous Blogs, is the word for the entire costume). These costumes cost a LOT of money to construct. Some indians show off their current mask to make money to create their next mask. If you read my previous Blog, you'll know that this is a Flag Boy.

Let's head up to Royal Street next, passing the statue of Saint Joan, patroness saint of New Orleans, which we call Joanie On A Pony...

She stands over the French Market. A lot of bands play here. It's the only place in the FQ where bands need a permit to set up and play. I passed this band as I crossed Decatur under Joanie.

By the way, a female mule is a jenny. Let's head up to Royal.

Royal Street is lined with art galleries. Here are my friends playing Old Timey Fiddle outside the Blue Dog Gallery, home of local-painter-done-good George Rodrigue.

The fiddle player, Lyle, is also in a band with myself and singer Stephanie Mitchell. A lot of musicians down here, myself included, play in several bands. That way we work as often as possible.

Royal Street is closed off every day to auto traffic, and becomes a pedestrian mall. For that reason, many busking bands play here, as you can play right in the street and gather a good crowd. Here are my friends the Yes Ma'am Band playing at Royal and Toulouse.

Dizzy is an awesome washboard player, and is in great demand by several local bands. Washboard is our preferred rhythm instrument: easy to carry, easy to play, and with a sound unique to Cajun, early Jazz, and to String Band music. Most bands down here have a washboard (few players are as good as Dizzy though). Note the requisite dog at Dizzy's feet...every busker has one.

Elena is every bit as good a fiddler as me, and I do NOT say things like that lightly. She also dresses to match her bow. Nick on the banjo is also in a band with my buddy Hank. They are about the funniest band I know. I wish I could be as funny as Nick and Hank when they play. Yes Ma'am, while really good, is not very funny.

One bock down from Yes Ma'am, at Royal and Saint Phillip, is the Royal J band. They play early Jazz, and they have professional dancers accompanying them. The male dancer is also their singer.

The banjo player is Joseph, and yea, we're in a couple of bands together. I also used to be in a band with the drummer.

The female dancer also teaches swing dance classes at a couple of clubs around town, including the Spotted Cat on Frenchmen. You should check it out!

Before we leave the Quarter, we should walk down to the river. Here is one of my favorite statues along the river, representing the immigrant spirit. My grandfather came to America in about 1910, at the age of nine. I think of him when I see this...

This is the other end of the statue, the spirit guiding the immigrants to American shores.

And finally, a dog, belonging to a busker friend of mine. Yes, they all have one.

From the French Quarter in New Orleans, this is Kenny Klein explaining it all.