Went out to lunch with a friend today, and heard words coming out of my mouth I’ve said too often: “I’m trying to get back to being myself again.”

We’d been discussing changes the last years have wrought, including traumas, disappointments, places both literal and figurative that neither of us would’ve pictured ourselves in.

And suddenly the absurdity of the phrase was so clear. How on earth can you “get back” to someone who no longer exists? Who’s gone through fire and flood, been to hell and not-quite-back? Do you pretend it hasn’t happened so you return to being that other person?

Not realistic. And to try would be to deny the lessons learned along the way. Time for a new phrase. And a new phase.

I recently unearthed a portable hard drive from years back. Exploring it has been wonderful, rediscovering photos and documents presumed long lost. Some are bittersweet, as these things always are, and some have snuck up on me in surprising ways. Like this.

What follows is a short piece of writing I did as penance. Working at a preservation non-profit in New Orleans post-Katrina, the demolition requests were never ending. Some had no hope of being salvaged, but many that could’ve been saved weren’t, due to so many short sighted reasons, bureaucracy and greed being high among them. We really did visit each one on the list before every meeting. Documented them, did what we could to save them, tried to find buyers, tried to find an viable reason to stay the executioner’s axe. There were wins, but so, so many more losses.

Meanwhile I was watching my friend and boss fall apart. Too much stress. Too few successes. Fighting and failing over and over was exacting a high price…alienation, paranoia, alcohol were all doing damage and I was losing patience with her. I sat down to do something to try and walk a mile in her shoes. It was a good start, but clearly veered off from exploring my friend to the people who were impacted on the ground.

Finding it hit me hard, though, and brought me back to that place and time.

She sat in the peanut gallery, only half listening to the ongoing hearing and clutching her sheaf of papers. Each of these twenty three slightly crumpled pages represented a house she was here to protest the demolition of.   

To prepare for the hearing, she’d visited thirty two houses, photographed and edited each,  talked to engineers and planners to differentiate between what could be reasonably saved and what needed to be sacrificed. Nine of those houses were just too far gone; these remaining two dozen were worth fighting for, and so she sat in City Council chambers once again, ready to argue for the city’s history and future.  
She’d already lost one of her borderline cases, a cute cottage on Piety Street. Like so many others, it’d taken water in the post-Katrina flooding. It’d all proven too much for the owners; even combining their meager savings, the insurance payout and the help available from the government, the elderly couple who’d lived there for forty years would’ve still needed to scrape up over $75,000 to put it right. There was just no way. They’d moved away, selling the house to the state.  
And once the state had it, what incentive did they have to repair and resell it? That kind of aggravation wasn’t really in their job description, never mind their budget.  So they’d knock it down, keep the lawn mown, hold the property until things turned around and maybe they could sell it to a developer. 

Who could you blame? The people who couldn’t rebuild? The government that hadn’t the money or patience for what could only be done as a labor of love? The Corps of Engineers who hadn’t maintained the hurricane defenses in the first place? Four years on and she had no more answers than she had at the start. All she could do was show up and fight, over and over, hearing the same arguments until she thought she’d scream. Six thousand, five hundred houses had been knocked down, each one ripping out a thread of the city’s fabric, altering the feel of the neighborhood and leaving yet another gaping hole in the streetscape. 

And each time, she heard the same things over and over. Does not contribute to the neighborhood or cost prohibitive, or her new personal favorite: Of little consequence.  

Of little consequence, my ass, she thought, gritting her teeth, looking at a photo of a house further down the agenda. The inspector had included that gem of a comment, and it was a house she was determined to save, come hell or… well, the hurricane had already brought the high water. It was only hell she had to face, then. Good.  

She didn’t play favorites with the houses she fought for; it was something she prided herself on. But this one went beyond favorites, straying into the foggy land of personal history.  

Jackson Avenue cut through the highest and the lowest of New Orleans’ society. It started at the Mississippi River, in the struggling middle class Irish Channel, and petered out in decidedly rough Central City neighborhood. In between the two sat the Garden District, the ultimate in upscale opulence.  

And that was the irony; this house sat, abandoned, just three blocks outside of the Garden District, where it would have enjoyed protected Historic District status and would have been snatched up in a heartbeat and renovated.  

Instead, this house where she had played as a child, when she lived just around the corner, also without that coveted protection of money, of privilege. A minute’s walk and a million miles away, she’d grown up not thinking about it much, instead making the best out of what she had, and the best of the best had been in that house on Jackson Avenue, where Miss Alavada lived.   

When her parents were fighting, or her dad was drunk, or her mother hadn’t had the money to buy groceries, Miss Alavada was an oasis. Her huge slobbery mutts ran amongst the carefully tended palms and roses, greeting her each time with a tongue bath. There was always something on the stove and few questions asked. She was the neighborhood social worker, checking on young and old, making sure everyone was okay.  She’d listened, consoled, advised, and fed three generations out of that house, taking in borders to help make the bills after her husband passed.  

And now, she too, like the couple on Piety was too frail to take care of herself, never mind anyone else, or the property.  Neighbors said Alavada never recovered from her exile, and now the property was up for demolition. The house was already flagged with Fire Department ‘do not enter’ warnings- Let it burn, is what they meant. Save us the trouble of knocking it down.  
 
 

Fast forward few years, and we had been desperately trying to stave off a massive demolition project that was going to destroy 27 square blocks of MidCity, a theoretically protected Historic District. There was a viable alternative to reducing a neighborhood that had fought its way back from Hurricane Katrina- reusing Charity Hospital, a behemoth that was ready for redevelopment and to this day sits abandoned in the middle of downtown- but the powers that be wanted new and shiny. There was so much money flowing. So much corruption. But we fought, along with many many others. Even knowing it was almost certainly futile, we fought.

And lost, of course. In many ways my boss lost herself in that fight, and as far as I know, never quite found her way back.

I still have friends in Preservation, and god bless those who continue to battle against the destruction of our history and heritage. May their successes be many, and be enough to carry them through the inevitable losses.