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Rangers Meet The Baby Entienne
While I pack a few hours before my first post 911 air travel I worry myself with visions of a federal inspection employee who pauses as his meaty fingers fiddle with my few possessions and yells out for everyone to hear, "hey man, you didn't pack no underwear? I hope you're not going to visit your mother that way?"
There is a USA themed material draping over the eight foot cyclone fence surrounding the entire SuperDome. All area streets have been blocked off for days. The main entrance has higher fencing and US Military guards who are surrounded by their military green vehicles. Fans are being urged to arrive five hours early for the strip searching of Britney Spears. I have looked forward to this SuperBowl spectacle since the last one, in '97. It brings to town things not seen everyday, and the surplus of military/local law enforcement types always cheers me up. I saw uniformed US Army Rangers patrolling Decatur in the French Quarter early this morning, and that guy imitating a meat locker imitating a corner newspaper guy with the Ranger haircut seemed to me a failure as a deep undercover guy while at the same time he imbued his corner with an air of safety. I don't intellectualize often on the overall film of danger that often pervades large blocks of this city. But when you see Rangers on duty in your town and feel cheerful about it it does cause one to pause and question just to what extent you have been shielding yourself from certain realities, one of which is being surrounded by that small number of misdirected youths who are every year killing each other with guns on the streets all around you. And all around the ones the tourists are traveling too. That we all don't just huddle under our beds is an amazing testament, but to what I don't know. Oh yeah, survival. Anyway, I drove around this morning looking for NFL inspired moments because I wanted to have something to think about while I visit my mother in Dallas on SuperBowl Sunday.
Once, a perfectly photogenic French(?) woman and her diplomat(?) husband were preparing to move back overseas. They lived in the Irish Channel neighborhood a block behind Magazine which put them that same number of blocks from an area of fine, historic, monied homes known collectively as The Garden District, a "don't miss" on any standard guided tour of New Orleans.
About six blocks from her location was a notorious, 40 acre area, rich in local culture but occupied by many suffering through poverty and poor education in two story brick buildings that had become maintenance nightmares. They were the St. Thomas projects. Similar or identical in construction to the several other major housing developments in New Orleans. It is on one level the same story becoming trite by repition, the same one Elvis tells in that song "In the Ghetto." And in the story nothing ever changes and the ghetto baby grows up and gets a gun and kills someone.
So you know where I'm going when the French woman straps her baby girl into the car seat and prepares to drive off to an area photographer. The kid steps up with pointed gun and attempts a broad daylight carjack. We all know the woman is not giving away this car with her baby strapped in. So she drives off and the kid stands tall in the middle of the street in the middle of the day and fires off round after round at her fleeing car. The woman is wounded but makes the first two right turns before crashing her car into a live oak tree on Magazine. And of course you know her baby, who was two or three days away from growing up perhaps more safely in some European city, was dead, riddled by the ill intent of a teenager from the St. Thomas projects.
This morning I voted for Ray Nagin, one of the fifteen mayoral candidates, and then did the drive I do, in and immediatedly out of City Park, down Esplanade to Decatur to the St. Peter split, taking either one, and then down Magazine and/or Tchopitoulas, and today was the first day I had ever exited right off of Tchopitoulas onto Josephine and driven straight into the middle of The St. Thomas projects, parking at the corner of St. Thomas, or Chippewa. I looked out over the forty acres beyond that grouping of mature live oaks and seeing what can only be describe as improvement. The land is completely cleared now and is adjacent to a reputed hip neighborhood known as the Lower Garden District on one side and the Mississippi river on the the other. A view of downtown buildings and the Mississippi River Bridge make this new found property a most eye pleasing area. Plans include a rebuilding of residential structures with a percentage of those being section 8 housing. There is a stall in the overall plan for the area because there is serious talk about putting a WalMart store on a large piece of the land. I have back and forth been adamantly against this idea and somewhat for the idea. People against the idea of WalMart are labled most notably either racist or elitist. I don't know. I don't know what they did with all the St. Thomas residents. I have no doubt some of the large number were unhappy about being resettled. But they are resettled I take it because there is not a brick left on the site. I drove to Jackson Ave. and doubled back toward the river and then U-urned into a trash strewn vacant lot which is offered the same eye level view of downtown and the bridge that was for the last sixty years obscured by the St. Thomas. It looks like too good a chance to do something right to give up so easily to the allure of this nation's most successful company. But for me looking at this pristine piece of ground the idea of assaulting it with almost any version of modern construction is repellant. The idea of a park enters and no one would ever even need to know why it was called Entienne's Park.