Saving the neighborhood

Feb. 24, 2006 | NEW ORLEANS, La. -- A 15-foot banner hangs outside Virginia Saussy Bairnsfather's house in New Orleans' Broadmoor neighborhood, proclaiming, "Broadmoor Lives." The words are bracketed by a fleur-de-lis, symbol of the crescent city. Just before Hurricane Katrina, Bairnsfather, vice president of a local jewelry company, and her husband, Christopher, an artist and musician, finished a two-and-a-half-year renovation of their Mediterranean-style house, which was built in 1915 and is filled with Mardi Gras paraphernalia and canvases by local painters.

When the levees broke, their home flooded with 7 feet of water, yet they never thought of giving it up and starting over somewhere else. The couple returned the moment they were allowed back into the city and used wheelbarrows to cart out their destroyed possessions: 15,000 records, 1,000 books, and the ruined equipment from Bairnsfather's home music studio. In November, they moved back in, living for over three months without gas -- meaning no cooking or hot showers -- or phone service. They are now the only people living on their block, but Bairnsfather talks about the future of Broadmoor with an infectious confidence that makes it impossible to believe that the neighborhood's destruction will be permanent.

"We're going to bring the neighborhood back," says Bairnsfather, as she drives through Broadmoor's darkened streets on a recent evening. She points out the few houses on each block to which people may have returned, her ears peeled for the hum of generators, a sign of life.

A 39-year-old with long blond hair and black-framed hipster glasses, Bairnsfather is a die-hard partisan of her native city. The great granddaughter of John Parker, a former governor of Louisiana, she's one of the founders of Muses, the city's first all-women Mardi Gras Krewe. So passionate is Bairnsfather about the parade that before Katrina she traveled to the Canton Trade Fair in China to find the most interesting trinkets to toss from the Muses floats. Now she's bringing that same dedication to her quest to restore Broadmoor. Determined to reinvest in their neighborhood, she and her husband had just signed a contract to buy a nearby apartment building whose owner had lost hope and decided not to return.

Yet if the city of New Orleans follows through on its reconstruction plan, hatched by Mayor Ray Nagin and his Bring New Orleans Back Commission, Broadmoor, like many city neighborhoods, may never be coming back, and all the money and energy its most committed residents are pouring into it will amount to nothing.

Broadmoor, a national historic district, is charming and diverse, exemplifying much of what makes the city magical. Just north of the Garden District, its architecture is distinctively New Orleanian -- there are shotgun houses, Mediterranean dwellings, and mission revivals. Home to just over 7,000 people before Katrina, Broadmoor mirrors the demographics of New Orleans as a whole; according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, its pre-storm population was just over 68 percent African-American and just under 26 percent white.

Residents, black and white alike, speak lovingly of the sense of community. "This is the best neighborhood I've ever lived in in my life," says Lesley Smith, a bearded black man who works as a relief captain on a tugboat and wears two small hoop earrings in one ear. "I've been in this neighborhood over 27 years. The neighbors are superb. When I leave [for work], I never have too much of a worry about my wife being taken care of. Everybody looks out for everybody."

For all its soul, Broadmoor is also at the bottom of the geographic bowl of New Orleans. In the early 1800s, it was a 12-acre lake, and the commission's urban planning report -- widely accepted as the blueprint for the city's future -- envisions much of Broadmoor returning to nature as parkland or drainage canals. On the commission's map, Bairnsfather's house sits in the dead center of a circle indicating future green space.

Now a battle is being fought for Broadmoor, one replicated in damaged neighborhoods all over New Orleans, including parts of Gentilly, the Lower 9th Ward and New Orleans East. Suffering a steady population decline since the 1960s, New Orleans now has less than a third of its pre-storm population of 485,000, and there's a broadly shared sense that the entire city cannot be rebuilt as it was. Yet New Orleans is a place where people are ardently attached to their neighborhoods and many are unwilling to cede the dream of resuscitating their homes. Throughout the city, groups of citizens are organizing, hoping to restore enough of their areas to make it politically impossible for urban planners to force them out.

Next page: Even if residents save their homes, they could still face bulldozers