Gentilly Girl- a part of the 99%

November 3, 2006

Looking back…

Filed under: Civic Blogging,Community Planning,New Orleans — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 3:21 am

Maybe it’s just a melancholy nature, maybe it’s inherent memory of things, but I’ve started looking back at some of my writings  post-Deluge and what has become of my observations. Maybe I’m just searching old ammo to try to stop what I am beginning to see in the UNOP stuffs, especially the limited performance demographically within these “meetings”.

I wrote this to Gentilly After Katrina on Samhain, 2005. These are my thoughts that helped to start the GCIA. Now that all of us in the city are in Phase Two of the rebuilding torture, I hope that this reminds us all of what we aspired to accomplish when we got involved with the recessitation of New Orleans.

Dear Gentilly folks,

In Life, we all must live within the circumstances of
our own individual existences… that’s a given. It IS
the way of the World.

For those who for whatever reason will not return, may
you find peace and prosperity in a new place. May it
bring you joy, and may the hurts of what happened to
New Orleans and yourselves be soothed over the coming
years.

Myself… we’re going back, even if it means that our
little house becomes Imladris, the “Last Homely House”
on the edge of a modern day Dresden. Our lamps will
shine, and yes, I will be heartbroken to not see a
mirroring gleam in the shadows, but we will go back
home.

Many of us shall.

Yes, even with our limited resources and years
remaining, putting our lives into the hole so to
speak, we will return to rebuild this city, and it
will become the wonder of the 21st Century. New
Orleans shall become the example of what can be done
when the Spirit is called upon. It will be a memorial
to the soul of a wonderful collection of people that
the modern world rarely sees: New Orleans culture.

This is what makes up “History”, and anything less is
an insult to the memory of those who built the place
and survived through almost three hundred years of
various misfortunes and Blessings.

I stated this concept before on this list… those who
wish to rebuild must band together in order to survive
the next few years. We need to have the strength that
comes from a chorus of voices in the face overwhelming
odds and modern-day demands. Vox clamantis in Deserto,
(the voice crying in the Wilderness”), will not
suffice in our situation.

Take a look at the banality of what passes for life in
most of our cities… cold, cruel, and cultureless.
Everything is the same, and everyone has the same
nameless identities. They are all exchangable and
discardable.

Does that sound like anything we had here in this
city?

Is this all that Life is supposed to be?

Shall the cheap triteness of Post-Modern civilization
be the only thing that our descendants ever know?

Doesn’t work for me, just as it doesn’t work for many
others.

The problems of Old New Orleans, (graft, corruption,
enforced poverty, segregation.), in many ways have
died with the Katrina disaster. New visions will lead
to a better city, a city where every human being, no
matter who or what they “are”, will be welcomed and
valued. A place that is truly a “City upon a Hill”.

It can only happen if we speak and act, not the fools
and stupid concepts that led us to this disaster over
the many decades…

We are the ones who can create an equitable society.
We shall be the people that control their destinies.
We are the Spirits that will say, “No more”, to those
who just use folks up and throw them away.

All of us, no matter one’s particular situation in
Life, are worth more than that.

Let’s get this baby up and running, rebuild Gentilly,
and help restore the Spirit of the city we all love
and cherish. I’m ready.

Her Blessings!

Morwen Madrigal,
Sugar Hill
TransNewOrleans
TransNOLA_Project 

 

 

October 3, 2006

Know Your District: The Disparate 97th

Okay, a nod to Stephen Colbert is due here or the little “neo-con” poop will probably sue me.

Tonight we start our multi-part series on the 97th State House District. First we will examine the make-up of the area contained within the District. Next will be the current problems each neighborhood faces in the Post-Deluge world. Later we will examine the two candidates in the November 7th General Election and their visions for the District and whether or not this will create improvement for their constituants.

The 97th is a really odd District. It lays across the city from the river to the lake. It contains parts of the Bywater, St. Roch, St. Claude, Gentilly Terrace, Dillard, St. Anthony, Gentilly Woods, Milneburg, Pontchartrain Park, Lake Terrace and Lake Oaks. It’s a maddening example of Gerrymandering, except I can’t understand why any party would want it that way.

Though the majority of the District is residential peppered with small businesses, there is the commercial area along Chef Menteur in the Gentilly area and the light industrial areas of St. Roch Bend and Sugar Hill. The railroad corrider and the Florida canal effectively cut the 97th in half, and it also gives an explanation for the differences between one half and the other.

Starting at the river is the Bywater, haven for Bohemians and fairly prosperous. Most of what is a worry there is retaining the spirit and feel of the area, especially with the coming redevelopment of the river front. Their major battles at this time are to keep rents from spiraling out of control and the possibility of high-rise condos being built. Population Post-Deluge is fairly high there.
Next we come to St.Roch/St. Claude. These areas are predominantly Black (88.2%) and many buildings are in various states of disrepair, blighted being a good term for the worst of them. Except for a smattering of businesses on St. Claude Ave. and spots in the neighborhoods, there is no great Retail presence. Streets are in horrible disrepair. Much of the population has returned.

Lakeside of the railroad corrider things change. The population is mixed, blighted housing is not a major problem, and there were areas of retail establishments unlike the riverside of the corridor. This area was mostly devasted by the Deluge and their population recovery has been fairly slow. It is one of the most heavily organized areas in the city since the Flood and has been singled out as a good test area for the start of the rebuilding efforts.

The 97th has it’s quandries, and our next segment will look at the runoff candidates and their priorities.

September 20, 2006

HouseRaising Thursday Evening

Filed under: Civic Blogging,Community Planning,New Orleans — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 10:41 pm

I’ve mentioned the program used by HouseRaising to help manage building or rebuiilding of homes. The entire concept seems good to me.

At 6 P.M. on the 21st, HouseRaising has put together an event for folks to meet, talk, and learn a little something about what they can do to help New Orleanians. Place: The Royal Senestra, 300 Bourbon St. parking is available for those coming to the event.

August 9, 2006

The Long Strange, Resurrection of New Orleans

Fortune Magazine had a piece today concerning the rebuilding of the city. Most of these details we know, and maybe there’s some eye openers for us. The time that struck me was that the author lays almost all of the blame on the various levels of Guv’mit and not on the people of the affected area.

Excerpt-

Yet it was here, late last year, that Frierson and several women of her acquaintance first planned to attack the powers that be. In this case the powers were the political establishments in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Washington, D.C. – establishments the women believed bore much of the responsibility both for the city’s collapse before Katrina last August 29 and for the paralytic pace of rebuilding.

Thin, blond, and blue-eyed, Frierson bears some resemblance, in her blazer and scarf, to a younger Nancy Reagan. For people who don’t live in New Orleans, her place in society might be summed up by her reputation as the city’s most successful residential real estate broker – the person to see about buying and selling its finest homes. Or one might note that at its annual Mint Julep Party the Junior League anointed Frierson the 2006 “Sustainer of the Year.”

In New Orleans terms, though, her elevated social status is best indicated by a single fact: Louis L. Frierson, her husband of 42 years, is a former Rex, the King of Carnival, the Monarch of Merriment, who headlines the grandiose private ball that officially closes Mardi Gras.

For years the city’s debs-and-dinner-parties set was proudly insular, its attention focused on its own affairs even as the city decayed. Corruption, inefficiency, and crime were the subject of ironic jokes over cocktails, not protests; the city’s disamenities were treated, all too often, as part of its storied charm. When New Orleans almost entirely missed the ’90s boom, it elicited little public dismay.

“We make a joke that’s not a joke,” says Elliott Stonecipher, a well-known political analyst in Shreveport. “Nobody in Louisiana knows what noblesse oblige is. New Orleans is a hotbed of civic apathy – the only city in the country where rich, powerful people don’t have their fingers in everything.”

And another-

It is wholly fitting that safeguarding New Orleans has fallen to its indigenous business class. But the lack of effective response by the political elite – and the lack of public concern about its inanition – is amazing.

Failing to rebuild a viable city would have consequences far beyond Louisiana. New Orleans’ two ports are, by tonnage, the nation’s biggest. They need to be – the region handles a third of the nation’s seafood and more than a quarter of its oil and natural gas. Some 4,000 oil and natural-gas platforms, linked by 33,000 miles of pipeline, spread out along the Louisiana coast. Among the facilities are the four largest refineries in the Western Hemisphere. Southern Louisiana is easily as important to the nation’s energy supply as the Persian Gulf.

And another-

Even as Louisiana politicians fulminated, LRA board member Sean Reilly met with Powell in January at his base in Amarillo. “We went to a luncheon place with a paper tablecloth,” says Reilly, a Baton Rouge executive who with his brother runs Lamar Advertising, the nation’s third-largest billboard firm.

Reilly was a former state legislator who had given up politics to concentrate on his business and his family. When Katrina hit, he jumped back in the fray. Reilly and Powell “pulled out pens and started drawing all over the table in terms of the numbers and categories of homeowners that needed to be covered and the philosophical choices that needed to be made.”

A central disagreement was the scope of federal responsibility. After providing aid for emergency services, the administration wanted to focus on the levee system, which Washington had long ago accepted as its purview, and on homeowners lacking flood insurance outside the officially designated floodplain – who had, at least in part, based their decision not to buy flood insurance on the grounds that the feds had stated their area was not at risk.

Most New Orleanians had a different view of Uncle Sam’s role. In a phrase heard again and again in the city, Katrina was a disaster made in Washington, not New Orleans. In most places water did not “overtop” the levees – the levees were broken by a storm surge they were supposed to withstand. In May a research team sponsored by the National Science Foundation and co-led by Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor, concluded that these breaches, where the levees failed to meet design specifications, were responsible for four-fifths of the water that inundated greater New Orleans.

“The levees were designed incorrectly and built incorrectly,” Bea says. A former chief engineer for Shell, Bea designed scores of offshore oil platforms – “I’ve spent my whole professional life with hurricanes, so I’m kind of blunt about them.” Absent design and construction failures, he says, Katrina would have caused nothing more than “a few wet carpets and missing shingles.” (A forthcoming report by Louisiana State reaches a similar verdict.)

At the lunch with Powell, the LRA’s Reilly argued that “if you live behind a federally warranted levee and that levee fails, you shouldn’t be penalized if you don’t have flood insurance,” because the government has effectively promised householders that they won’t need insurance for those circumstances. Therefore, Washington had a moral obligation to all New Orleanians damaged by the flood, even the un- or underinsured.

We little folks here in New Orleans have some tough choices coming in the near future. This article lays it out pretty straight. The thing is: do we, the New Orleanians have it in us to fight back against those of our leaders that are in many ways ignoring our needs? I think we do.

LINK

August 4, 2006

UNOP is Insane

Oh my yes! The so very “democratic” UNOP Plan… freakin’ B/S!!! I can fuck their voting system 10,000 ways from Sunday.

This is another facet of the screw-job that the people of New Orleans are getting from the State and our local morons in our city guv’mit. These monies were given to the people as part of the Reparations due to the failure of the Feds’ botched levee job, and they are skewing the system for those whom Congress DID NOT INTEND THESE FUNDS FOR.

Alan at Think New Orleans has the story straight on the latest round in the battle:

Outsourcing Democracy

Summary

The citizens of New Orleans have been asked to choose the planners that will guide them through the process of developing a city wide plan for rebuilding. The method to record the response of the neighborhoods is an online poll. The online poll is open to fraud.

  • Suffrage is determined by the possession of an email address.
    • For many residents an email address is very difficult to obtain.
    • For anyone with knowledge of email, infinite unique addresses can be generated instantly.
  • An email address does not define a resident of New Orleans.
    • Anyone can vote without any indication of residency in New Orleans, let alone a specific neighborhood or planning district within New Orleans.
    • Anyone on the Internet can vote, even people living in other countries.

It is a childish implementation of a poll, easily gamed, impossible to verify.

This voting is being conducted under the contract of an architectural firm, Concordia, LLC. It presents and obvious conflict of interest.

Any neighborhood, dissatisfied with the results of a process that hinges upon this poll, can reasonably insist that the results of this poll be discarded.

Link

August 2, 2006

Barbarians at the Gate

Filed under: Aside,Community Planning — Tags: , — Morwen Madrigal @ 3:01 am

I’m in a mood today. Our boy cat had an orchy, and Button dropped her litter. The house is a mess, and I have two containers of food salvaged from the flooded house to put on the shelves. (I’m also running low on alcohol.)

I woke up to a message asking for info about our Mayor’s new pronouncement: over 2,000 “blighted” properties have been offered to developers. The damn city site no longer functions when it comes to the listings. (I’ve used it before when trying to create a Trans-friendly shelter.) I can’t pull anything up.

Later in the day I tried to access the city’s portal for details of their “Katrina celebration”. Same shit… cannot open the page.

Our local gov’mit has to go away. I tried for two years to create a shelter from the blighted housing list, and the ass holes just gave away over 2,000 of the properties? Fuck them. Where is the freakin’ Humanity in that jesture? People in the Lower Ninth might have wanted those places, but they were given to developers? This cannot stand.

Damn it… there are many good deserving people out there. There’s a need for shelters, safe places, and these properties were given to fucking developers? Jerks who make tons of money for a tiny bit of work? Sweet zombie Jezus, I’ve worked my ass off for years, gave time in service to my country, helped folks that the “normal” people wouldn’t get near. All I wanted to do was create a shelter for Trans folks, saving them the indignity of being housed in shelters without consideration of how they Identify themselves, and these freakin’ properties are given over to developers?

The same thing goes for battered women’s shelters. Youth houses, sanctuaries, and the places are just handed over to money pigs. I’m losing my mind over this.

This is the difference between my being a Progressive and those stupid fucks that call themselves Conservatives. I look for ways to make life better, they just want to return to the B&W Eisenhower Era. I know that I’m expendable, they think the world will stop spinning the second they die. I know that I’m not important…. I’m just a player for a time. They think they rule. I live life, and they just exist to pile up the money which they cannot take with them when they are taken to Hell.

Mister Nagin, rescend the sale of these blighted houses, offer them to those who need them.  Stop screwing us.

Sinn Fein!

July 31, 2006

Filed under: Community Planning,New Orleans — Tags: , — Morwen Madrigal @ 8:01 pm

UNOP can kiss my panty-clad ass. I will not deal with money pigs and carpet baggers.

Fuck these ass-holes… they are trying to suck the Federal teat whilst we locals do what must be done. We know what must be done. It’s in our blood.

WE ARE NEW ORLEANS!

Screw these damn think tanks. We have been here for almost 300 years. (Don’t ya’s think we learned a few things?) We know what we have to do.

The way to rebuild New Orleans? Ask the folks who live here. Don’t give us your planning shit: this is our home. Fuck you corporate shits for trying to apply D.C. Beltway sensibilities to our realities, you can’t do it, and most of America cannot stomach it.

Okay, I’m a grassroots gal, but I’ve pegged the shits. Trust me, I don’t fuck around.

I AM one of the ones one that NW Carrolloton need.
Morwen

Walgreens vs. NW Carrollton

Filed under: Civic Blogging,Community Planning,New Orleans — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 1:19 pm

This message is relayed in support of the NW Carrollton Association:

As you all know we have been fighting a bad design for a Walgreens on the corner of Claiborne and Carrollton.
 
We believe the request Walgreens has before City Council to allow a big box developer to avoid the zoning ordinances currently in place
for Carrollton and Claiborne will affect the entire city.  It is a question of whether we let big box developers determine the future look and feel of OUR city
OR
whether we let OUR existing (and future) zoning laws determine the look and feel of OUR city. 
Today this issue has reared its head at the corner of Carrollton and Claiborne.
Tomorrow it could be in YOUR neighborhood.
 
At the last city council meeting our District A Council woman Shelley Midura advised Walgreens that she had studied all sides of the issue and
determined that compromise and alternative solutions were available for this corner.   Walgreens was given until August 3rd to find a win-win solution that adhered to the Carrollton Overlay and to work with the neighborhoods.  So far we have heard nothing from Walgreens. But we heard via the neighborhood grapevine that Walgreens is contacting the other members of the Council in an attempt to do an end run around Shelley Midura’s compromise.
 
We are requesting that everyone email their District council member and both At Large council members asking them
to support Shelley Midura’s demands that Walgreens adhere to the Carrollton Zoning overlay and work a win-win plan.
 
At Large - Oliver Thomas omthomas@cityofno.com 
At Large- Arnie Fielkow   AFielkow@cityofno.com
District B SHead@cityofno.com  
 
 
 
We also ask that everyone call Walgreens corporate (847) 914-2500 ask for Public Relations and tell them that 
You are calling from New Orleans
and that we don’t want a suburban drug store to be built at a critical urban corner in a historic neighborhood that is on the National Register.   
Our neighborhoods are listed by the National Trust as one of the most endangered places.
We want Walgreens development that respects the urban characteristics of OUR city.
Walgreens has done this cities notably Poland, Ohio, population 2,009!  and Seattle, Washington.
There is no reason why Walgreens can not respect New Orleans and New Orleanians and give something back to our recovering city.
 
With Sincere Thanks,
Jenel Hazlett
NorthWest Carrollton

July 26, 2006

The Summer of Our Discontent

This song has been driving me crazy all night… won’t go away:

LAND OF CONFUSION- Genesis 1977

 


I must’ve dreamed a thousand dreams
Been haunted by a million screams
But I can hear the marching feet
They’re moving into the street.

Now did you read the news today
They say the danger’s gone away
But I can see the fire’s still alight
There burning into the night.

There’s too many men
Too many people
Making too many problems
And not much love to go round
Can’t you see
This is a land of confusion.

This is the world we live in
And these are the hands we’re given
Use them and let’s start trying
To make it a place worth living in.

Ooh Superman where are you now
When everything’s gone wrong somehow
The men of steel, the men of power
Are losing control by the hour.

This is the time
This is the place
When we look for the future
But there’s not much love to go round
Tell me why, this is a land of confusion.

This is the world we live in
And these are the hands we’re given
Use them and let’s start trying
To make it a place worth living in.

I remember long ago -
Ooh when the sun was shining
Yes and the stars were bright
We walked through the night
And the sound of your laughter
As I held you tight
So long ago –

I won’t be coming home tonight
My generation will put it right
We’re not just making promises
That we know, we’ll never keep.

Too many men
There’s too many people
Making too many problems
And not much love to go round
Just tell my why
This is a land of confusion.

Now this is the world we live in
And these are the hands we’re given
Use them and let’s start trying
To make it a place worth living in.

This is the world we live in
And these are the names we’re given
Stand up and let’s start showing
Just where our lives are going to.

Phil Collins wrote this during the last days of Detante to reflect his dissatisfaction with the rulers of both sides of the Cold War. I see this as a perfect illustration of what we all here on the Gulf, and New Orleans in particular, face every day. We are in a war, a cultural war, a war of values.

We live in a little part of the world that is very different from the rest of Amerika. Our slice of Life is not exactly like that of the outsiders. It’s not Civic pride (Heaven forbid!), but a sense of what we are a part of: that which is as if the Spanish moss grows upon our limbs, the Delta mud cakes on our feet, breathing the heavy air and stirring a bubbling cauldron of gumbo. The folks in our lives gather around… the buzz of voices is unstoppable. People dance in enticing ways… children run around in circles away from the adults. The smoke from the cook fires drift lazily to heaven.

Is our culture an anachronism? I don’t think so. It’s like so many cultures I’ve witnessed whilst travelling the world. Here in New Orleans, all of us are Creole, a living culture. The world can go to shit and we will still be here.

The oil flow stops and there goes the great cities. The highway system will become unused, people will not be able to reconnect with roots, can’t escape the living hell around them. They will be confronted with having to make real connections with the folks around them. Re-invent the social wheel, so to speak.

That will never happen here. I’ve only been home for four years, no family in the area, and there is so much Spanish moss growing on me… blows my mind. Like most others, I’m stuck in the hot Delta mud. We all are. New Orleans grows on you. It fills you, and then you cannot stop living here. Yes, we are fairly poor, have crooked politicians, but we have each other.

Walk down the streets in most of our towns and watch the little kindnesses, the recognitions that we are a part of our whole: New Orleans or the Gulf. Imagine walking into a bar and seeing a Creole shrimper, a gator-trapping Cajun, a Mexican worker, a Drag Queen, two lesbians, a professor and a transsexual having an indepth conversation about the various forms of Jambalaya or the Blues. Where your bartender answers to Miss Love. And then you can get on a bicycle and speed through the Quarter and the Marigny saying hi to folks you know even at 4 A.M.

Stroll down any street in the city, and you will see a Granny sitting on her porch: “How are you today Ma’am?”, “I’m fine  honey-child. How about you?”, “I’m doing good  Ma’am… take care.” She may invite you to her porch for some ice tea or lemonade, pretty much no matter who you are. I know this to be fact here.

Now this is why this is the Summer of Our Discontent. We are in very grave danger of of being destroyed by benign neglect. We are 35 days from the anniversary of the levees breaking. Our streets are a mess, two thirds of us are still in other parts of the country… many of us cannot start working on our homes yet, and the few others here need reparations for their losses. Most of our Medical/Psych facilities are gone. Same goes for our retailers.

Streets are littered with garbage and construction waste. Little white trailers abound, sans power. Broken trees and street lamps are everywhere. It rains and streets flood. If something catches fire, it takes airdrops of water to fight the conflagration. Schools are fenced off, broken windows and all.

The projects are slated to be torn down, even when the displaced are willing to live there because it means being HOME.

Our levees are still not up to par, and the Corps is falling behind their protection timetable every day. The Administration guts the Corps’ report on the failure of the levees in order to continue their funding of an unjust war. FEMA keeps scaring folks with announcements of ending rental aid in foreign cities. Many of us are going broke trying to restore our lives and homes as the State drags it’s feet. Our local guv’mit plans a freakin’ glittery Gala celebration for the anniversary of the storm and flood while people are in gutted, un-powered homes, in the heat and swarms of mosquitos, hoping to be able to finish the repairs.

All the while, we are entering the danger time for this hurricane season.

This didn’t happen in NYC after 9/11. Same goes for San Francisco post Loma Prieta. (Iknow, I was there.) Why is this?

We are an island of sanity in a B/S sea of Southern conservatism. This is Bush’s back-handed way of fucking us for not supporting him. (The Bay Area suffered a similar fate under Raygun and Daddy Bush for their voting habits.) The PTB want goose-steppers in this town. They can come and “sin” all they want, but we will vote for reprobates and criminals of the GOP persuasion.

My thought on this? ” FUCK YOU!, TWICE!” 

We ARE New Orleans, and this is the Summer of Our Discontent. You have been warned Fuckmooks.

Sinn Fein! 


July 10, 2006

Independance Day in New Orleans- A Film

Filed under: Community Planning,Event,New Orleans — Tags: , , — Morwen Madrigal @ 3:31 pm

I picked this up from TruthOut. Nice little film concerning the bad dealings of HANO over the fate of the St. Bernard projects.

Also, it shows the tenacity of the tenents in getting back their homes in a New Orleans’ style.

Sinn Fein!
LINK 

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »

Powered by WordPress