Super Bowl planners: ‘Anticipate any features of [Lower 9] neighborhood that could be used by media to substantiate Katrina narrative’
1. Fat Domino’s home, 1208 Fats Domino Ave.
2. Site of Lionel Milton family home, 1429 Flood St
3. Bayou Bienvenue overlook, 2637 Fats Domino
4. MLK-Lawless High School, 5300 Law St.
5. Arthur Johnson’s grandma’s lot,1922 Forstall
6. Robert Green’s home, on Tennessee St
7. The oak tree that stopped Green’s floating house, 1617 Tennessee St
8. The Powell family block
9. Site of the Lower Ninth Ward Health Clinic, 5228 St. Claude Ave.
10. Block on Dauphine where 27 people including Alice Craft-Kerney
stayed during Katrina
11. The Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement
and Development, 5227 Chartres St.
(Map by Jeff Tolbert
by NICK CHRASTIL
Last summer, in July, a group of influential New Orleanians gathered, with hopes of preparing the city for a national spotlight ahead of Super Bowl LIX.
Michael Hecht, the CEO Of Greater New Orleans Inc., who was tapped by Governor Jeff Landry to lead Super Bowl preparation efforts, informed the group that the GNO Inc. “internal Super Bowl team” had taken a drive around the Lower 9th Ward, checking out beautification and infrastructure needs in the neighborhood.
The visit was made to “anticipate any features of the neighborhood which could be used by media to substantiate Katrina narrative,” Hecht had reported, according to a slide presentation from the meeting.
The group, which dubbed itself the “Super Gras Subcommittee,” included Orleans city officials and representatives from the French Market Corporation, Downtown Development District, and the Audubon Institute.
The meeting had a broad focus, ranging from potholes to street flooding to dingy-looking surfaces.
Culturally rich, but unable to rebuild
by MIZANI BALL
The night before Katrina made landfall, artist Lionel Milton, who grew up in the Lower 9, experienced an omen that convinced him to evacuate.
She saw ‘a public-health crisis’ and opened a clinic in the emptied Lower 9
by MARTA JEWSON
“Alice saved my life,” neighbors say. In 2007, Alice Craft-Kerney helped launch an invaluable post-Katrina clinic. But it closed after an inexplicably short time.
Thwarted from connecting the Lower 9 to its wetland roots
by DELANEY DRYFOOS
A new project along Florida Avenue cuts off access to the Bayou Bienvenue overlook, a key post-Katrina achievement, says environmentalist Arthur Johnson.
Though she was an infant when Katrina hit, she still feels its effects today
by LA’SHANCE PERRY
With its doorway, marked with penciled hash marks showing Cedrionne Powell’s changing height, the family house tracked her growth while she tracked its years of repairs.
Planting a flag in the Lower 9 ‘wilderness’
by KATY RECKDAHL
Every year on the day Katrina hit, Robert Green’s family, in Roof Riders shirts, gathers where his mom’s house stood and walk the path that it floated, to the oak tree where it stopped.