Urban History

The following suggested sources about the urban history of New Orleans and the Gulf area have been posted on the academic urban history listserv. The postings give a very good perspective about the disaster.

From: Jacob A. Wagner wagnerjaco@umkc.edu

Re: Joseph Heathcott's statement about "getting things right" about New Orleans.

For urbanists who are responding to calls from the press, let me just suggest the following resources on New Orleans.

Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. LSU Press, 1992.

A good place to start - from a history perspective - regarding "race", urban politics, what "Creole" really means, the African and French roots of New Orleans population (demography), life before and after reconstruction, and the civil rights movement in the city.

Craig Colten, editor. Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs. University of Pittsburgh press, 2000.

An edited collection of essays - some historical, some more contemporary. Generally environmental in orientation.

Peirce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. Center for American Places, (Second Edition, 2003).

Lewis's work provides a basic foundation of information on New Orleans - including important data on the city's history, underlying geology, relationships with the river, and local culture.

Malcolm Heard. French Quarter manual: An architectural guide to New Orleans's Vieux Carre. Tulane School of Architecture and Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1997.

A great analysis of the architecture and urban space of New Orleans's oldest neighborhood, as well as some historical perspective on the city's founding. Well illustrated with tons of historical photos.

Jonn E. Hankins and Steven Maklansky. Raised to the Trade: Creole Building Arts of New Orleans. New Orleans Museum of Art, 2002.

A great resource for the preservation and reconstruction of the city -and why local artisans have to be at the center of the rebuilding effort.

These resources should get people started...

Jacob A. Wagner
Dept. of Architecture, Urban Planning and Design
University of Missouri-Kansas City

From Thomas Campanella tomcamp@unc.edu

With due apologies for plugging my brother's book, I would add to the list Jacob Wagner sent around Richard Campanella's excellent "Time and Place in New Orleans: Past Geographies in the Present Day" (Pelican, 2002).

Thomas J. Campanella
Department of City and Regional Planning
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

From: Lawrence Vale ljvale@MIT.EDU

The week the tsunami hit Asia, Oxford University Press released _The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster_ (New York: OUP, 2005), a book that I co-edited with Thomas Campanella. In it, we attempt to set a global comparative historical context for thinking about disasters of all kinds, ranging from earthquakes and fires to wars, riots, and terrorist attacks. Our observation is that substantial rebuilding of devastated large cities has been almost ubiquitous since about 1800. Perhaps because of the rise of the insurance industry, perhaps because of the rise of the system of nation-states (which provide an unprecedented extensive support network for aid), we seem to have stopped abandoning cities following destruction. Some of the more dramatic examples include the wholesale rebuilding of Hiroshima after 1945, the reconstruction of Warsaw (80% destroyed, 800,000 dead) after WW II, and the rapid re-emergence of Tangshan, China following a massive earthquake that killed somewhere between 240,000-600,000 people in 1976. In view of these past dramatic and willful returns of urbanity, I find myself being the token optimist in this dire week. But that is a long-term view, and one that is clearly tempered by how we collectively answer the question: which New Orleans will we rebuild? or, more precisely, whose New Orleans will we rebuild?

Larry Vale
Professor and Head,
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Brief history of past disasters putting into context what is happening in New Orleans and the Gulf area. Again this was posted on the urban history listserv.

From: Vagel Keller vckeller@comcast.net

I have taught a course called "'Natural' Disasters in American History" at CMU for the past six years, where the students and I explore the material causes of natural disasters (in fact, question the validity of the descriptor "natural"). The course is structured around urban disasters because, just as seems to be the case right now, those make up the "great" ones, and are thus more heavily covered in contemporary sources and modern monographs. So this might be as good a time as any to, ahem, wade in on this subject. As historians, we know that know that past events are never purely analogous to present ones. But we also know that analogies are perhaps the best way to begin to put major current events into perspective. And at this very early stage in what will undoubtedly be a months-long drama (if, indeed, it progresses beyond the current melodrama playing out on "all New Orleans, all the time" cable news), the case of Chicago 1871, especially as Sawislak approaches it is an interesting basis of comparison. I mean this in terms both of comparison and analytical method.

Most critically, as Sawislak points out in the introductory part of her monograph, it is important to view the Chicago 1871 -- and, by extension, New Orleans 2005 -- in the chronological and geographical context of the broader disaster environments surrounding them. In point of fact, Chicago got off lightly compared to the rural community of Peshtigo, WI, a small lumbering community to the north of the city, which was completely destroyed by a wildfire that same night with loss of life and livelihoods far in excess of those suffered by Chicago in real numbers. Of course, the loss in terms of dollars was much higher in Chicago. The "Great Fire" also took place during a drought period during which numerous disastrous and not-so-disastrous fires plagued the entire Mid-West. Chicago, however, being an urban wilderness unknowable to the rising Anglo-American middle classes who were beginning to realize that they had lost political and social control of their cities, got the overwhelming attention of the national press, which focused almost completely on the negatives, ie. human suffering. Nothing about the fire regime that plagued the mid-West, nothing about Peshtigo. Only "all Chicago, all the time" in print and engravings, followed by "instant histories," dime novels, and smarmy sheet music.

Similarly, New Orleans must be seen in the context of the whole disaster area. (It must also be seen in the context of the long history of what I title one of my lectures, "The Corps vs. Old Man River." ) Think about how the national media is covering New Orleans in the context of the 90,000 sq. mile area devastated by Katrina. How many people live in that whole region compared to the Big Easy? How hard was New Orleans really hit compared to the obliteration of residential and industrial property and infrastructure on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Alabama? At this early stage, it appears as though the loss in property and economic functionality will be quite low. In fact, New Orleans seems to have gotten off easier than Chicago because its central business district and the French Quarter -- its heart of tourism -- have apparently suffered little to none of the lawlessness and looting that has plagued the areas surrounding the convention center and Superdome, which seem to be surrounded by the so-called "projects" populated by the immobile poor of the city. In outlying neighborhoods we see roof tops of intact homes, and we can make out the grid of streets even in neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the 17th St. Levee. Once the water is pumped out of the downtown areas and the ground floors and basements are cleaned out, the cities tourism and business sectors will return to normalcy. The damage to the energy-producing infrastructure outside the "stricken" city is what makes Katrina such a huge national catastrophe. New Orleans shrinks to insignificance in practical terms and in this context. But in terms of loss of life, New Orleans may turn out to be the largest disaster since Galveston 1900, where the damage resembled Biloxi much more than New Orleans, if the alarming and purely speculative estimates of politicos are anywhere close to the final tally. And a majority of those dead may very well come from the same class of New Orleans society that wound up trapped in the Superdome and Convention Center.

This is perhaps the most striking parallel between Chicago 1871 and New Orleans 2005, and it was actually invoked by Barbara Bush in trying to respond to a very rude, very persistent off-camera correspondent in Lafayette, LA this afternoon who could not bring himself to use the word "race" fewer than five times in a single "question." Ms. Bush deftly turned the question around by changing "race" to "poor" and observed that it is always the poor who are most at risk in major urban disasters. This is an historically true fact, one that historians of urban disasters have noted for many years. And it is also true that, since the first wave of non-Anglo immigration to the United States, "poor" has equated with "non-White" in discussing urban poverty. Frankly, I found it more than a little disconcerting to hear her put it so blandly. Go back to Chicago 1871 for a minute. In summarizing her understanding of Sawislak's book, Amanda overlooked the fact that the fire first destroyed "Connelly's Patch," an Irish slum in the south end of Chicago before jumping the river to sweep through the Central business district and on into the northside residential district. The Irish of "Connelly's Patch" were the "non-White" ethnic minority du jour in northern cities (to be followed in succession by Italians, Slavs, African-Americans, Hispanics, and more). They were the sociological ancestors of the post-World War 2 red lined urban poor Blacks. Connelly's Patch was the same thing as "the projects" that we heard one women standing outside the Superdome mention, except that the Patch was made up of privately owned buildings and shanties, while "the projects" are built with public funds. And, just like the Irish of Connelly's Patch, the largely Black population of "the projects" has no insurance to cover the loss of its possessions, while the well-to-do will be able to recoup most of their real and personal property losses through insurance policies. So, proportionally, the poor always stand to lose the most in a "natural" disaster, even though the loss in real dollars is negligible and the impact on the insurance industry is nil.

Environmental Historian Craig Colten, who has written extensively on environmental justice, or the lack thereof, in post-industrial urban communities, probably commented along these lines in his interview on National Public Radio this morning. I did not get to hear it and haven't the ability to listen to the online recording. Perhaps it will be possible for the ASEH or this group to publish it on an e-list.

There is at least one important difference between the case of Chicago 1871 and New Orleans 2005. In 1871 the press pandered to the racist prejudices of its rich and powerful subscribers toward non-White foreigners. In 2005 the media is pandering to its subscribers who see racism as the cause of victimization by the rich and powerful of one segment of non-White Americans. The problem with this is that New Orleans has an African-American mayor, and we have heard nothing of what, if any, plan he and the Governor had, and why those plans failed to evacuate or at least secure the collection complexes. This is even more puzzling when one considers that both of these are elected executives from the party in opposition to the President and his cabinet, a party whose Congressional Black Caucus just leveled a race-based broadside at the President and big business as he was flying down there to kick some butts. The Mayor of New Orleans is, himself, almost as vocal a victim as one of his constituents waiting for a bus to Houston. And the Governor, although high and dry in Baton Rouge, has looked like a deer in the headlights since before Katrina made landfall. This is another stark contrast between Chicago 1871 and New Orleans 2005. Of course, the media doesn't come at it from this perspective. As long as our view of Katrina is dictated by "all New Orleans, all the time" TV, we will have only a zoom-lens view of the true scope of this disaster, economic, social, and otherwise. And that zoom lens is more often than not going to be focused on the Convention Center and the Superdome. Same focus, different agenda.

How sad that the national news media has made so little real progress in the intervening 136 years since the Great Chicago Fire. Of course, we can hardly blame them. Just as in 1871, they are showing what their viewers and readers want to see. In 1871 it came down to what sold papers. In 2005 it comes down to what sells Cornflakes, Dodge Hemis, and over the counter drugs. At the end of the day the old adage, "you get what you pay for," holds true in both flood control and news coverage. Americans, it seems, want -- indeed, need -- to believe the worst about any situation. And the media is only too happy to oblige.

Vagel Keller, Ph.D.
Pittsburgh, PA