Mile 94.7 LBD — Welcome to New Orleans: The Riverwalk

This is a big mall - the kind that you've probably been trying to escape with your trip down the river. It was originally a venue for the World's Fair. On December 14, 1994, a 700-foot ocean-going freighter, loaded with grain, ran askew and slammed into the side of this mall, crowded with holiday shoppers. Luckily no one died. 66 people were injured, and everyone involved was terrorized by the experience. People reportedly jumped into the river in the panic of the accident. Damages along the riverbank reached $15 million. The ship's damage totaled $1.8 million. The cause of the accident was a poorly-maintained oil filter, which caused the engines to fail and the boat to drift with the force of the river into the mall. The name of the ill-fated freighter was the MV Bright Field. As of May 2010, it sails under the Chinese flag, with the name Yong Xu Hai. Look out! Be careful around those boats!!

The skyline of the city, especially if you've arrived at the sundown twilight, is beautiful, backlit, and pulsing with life. You might hear horns blowing towards you from the streets of the French Quarter, and you probably see people feeling the breezes along the riverbanks along the Moonwalk. This scene was not always this way! This scene was a hard-fought fight between residents of the French Quarter, business people, and even the Vatican, and it dates all the way back to the 1700's, when the streets of the Quarter were lined with open sewers, and the 1800's, when factories belched coal dust into peoples' bedrooms, which were shared with eight or nine people, coughing, etc. The French city planners intentionally left the riverfront open. They kept wharves away from the urban riverfront, so that the breezes could blow across the water and cool and refresh the muggy, polluted city. People went to the riverfront to breathe fresh air, to promenade, to flirt, to dig up river sand for their gardens or the construction of the new city.

All of that changed when a New Yorker named Edward Livingston came down and made claims to property along the riverside. People were pissed! They mobbed a construction company that intended to build along this stretch of the river. But eventually, Livingston won, and for over a century, New Orleanians had to travel Uptown or Downtown (upriver or downriver) to even see the Mississippi. The whole scene you see before you was blocked by wharves. It almost got worse in the sixties. By this point, a lot of the marine infrastructure that Livingston scammed into the riverside had been abandoned. All of the supposedly advanced American cities were turning their gloomy riverbanks over to the new, shiny automobile. Boston, New York, Philly all had built riverside expressways. New Orleans lagged behind, as it is prone to doing. But plans eventually came along create an elevated expressway, six lanes-wide, forty feet up in the air, all along the riverfront - from Elysian Fields, past Jackson Square, all the way Uptown. Enter the river. Geologists realized that the river's churning, at its deepest point here was threatening to undercut the wharves and the levees along the French Quarter. Their immediate solution was to demolish the derelict wharves along Jackson Square and the upper French Quarter. For the first time in over a century, New Orleanians saw, smelt, felt the blessings of the river. And they liked it.

When they got wind of the riverside expressway, they revolted. The Archbishop of New Orleans, Philip Hannan, mobilized his well-connected parishioners, calling it the "right thing do to," and, even though Lindon B. Johnson signed an appropriation for the" Vieux Carré Expressway" into law, Nixon came along and cancelled it. When you think about it in the larger scheme, New Orleans was so far behind other cities that it eventually came out ahead: many other riverfront cities are still struggling to remove the layers of concrete that separate the river from the people who need it to stay sane. Imagine the insanity of New Orleans without this access.... On a darker note... while the French Quarter has counted its blessings in the wake of the interstate controversy, another equal and opposite result is playing out less than a mile away. Walk down any of the streets that shoot from the river (Ursulines, Orleans, Toulouse...), and come to The Tremé. Its the neighborhood where Free People of Color and Creoles created an African American equivalent of the French Quarter. Its Jackson Square is Congo Square (visit: corner of Rampart and Toulouse), where slaves gathered on Sunday to sing, dance, party, flirt, and promenade. And up until the 40's, the life of the community pulsated along Claiborne Avenue, where live oak trees, as big as the ones along wealthy St. Charles Avenue, shaded parade-watchers, chess games, family reunions, shoppers, picnics.... But go there now and see what you see. Five-foot-diameter concrete pillars support a forty-foot high, six-lane expressway like some dystopian cathedral. The results to the community have been devastating. (Wolf E. Staudinger)