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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Meat connected my family and so many Black families across the South – really across the world. Now, by embracing Meatless Mondays, I am weaning myself from it, for my health – and to help save Planet Earth.
Though an SUV caused a recent injury to the historic burial ground, a preservationist found that the biggest risks to public safety in the cemetery came from some of its most magnificent structures: tombs built for now-dissolved society groups. Now, a five-generation master plasterer is determined to repair them.
“People tell me they’re tired of working for minimum wage and not being able to afford the basics. Elected officials beg for their votes, promising this-and-that, and then disappear to serve the interests of the powerful.”
