The Lens Carnival Edition 2025
Our reporters stayed on their beats, covering how Carnival affects the way New Orleans works - and doesn't work.
Category
In the N.O.
Orleans culture
Taking in parades together, but apart
New Orleanians maintain certain traditions at Carnival parades. We say hello to strangers, tote wagons and folding chairs and blankets. But along the St. Charles parade route, we most often settle in areas with our people.
Two decades of crotches as canvas
Best known for their merkins – pubic wigs – the Bearded Oysters have now been a symbol of feminist liberation for 20 years, within a few local parades, including Muses
Super Bowl planners: ‘Anticipate any features of the [Lower 9] neighborhood which could be used by media to substantiate Katrina narrative’
Though she was an infant when Katrina hit, she still feels its effects today
Her family house has framed her world. With its doorway, marked with penciled hash marks to show her height over the years, the house tracked her growth at the same time she tracked its years of repairs after Katrina.
Thwarted from connecting the Lower 9 to its wetland roots
After Katrina, environmentalists built an overlook on Bayou Bienvenue to give the community access to the wetlands, which had been devastated by salt water from a now-closed canal called MR-GO. Recent construction threatens that key post-Katrina achievement, Arthur Johnson says.
She saw ‘a public-health crisis’ and opened a clinic in the emptied Lower 9
"Alice saved my life," neighbors say. In 2007, Alice Craft-Kerney helped to launch a post-Katrina clinic that was invaluable to neighbors. But it closed its doors after an inexplicably short time.
Planting a flag in the Lower 9 ‘wilderness’
Every year on August 29 – the day that Katrina hit, in 2005 – Green’s family gathers by the place where his mom's house once stood, in shirts that read “Roof Riders." Then they walk the two-block route taken by the floating house, to the oak tree where it stopped.
Embracing Katrina narratives
After an insinuation made by a Super Bowl planning committee, reporters from The Lens asked Lower 9 residents what Super Bowl visitors should see, plotted the points on a map, and documented the Katrina narratives that go with each landmark.
Culturally rich, but unable to rebuild
The night before Katrina made landfall, artist Lionel Milton, who grew up in the Lower 9th Ward, suddenly decided to evacuate, after he experienced what seemed to be an omen.
