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Tampa architect joins Katrina recovery session

By JUDY STARK
Published January 28, 2006

TAMPA - James Moore, an architect in the Tampa office of HDR Architecture, was part of the team that spent a week on the Mississippi Gulf Coast coming up with ideas for how to rebuild.

His group was assigned to Gulfport, a city of 71,000, where the mayor and the development director lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina.

"There were three things we all remarked on," Moore said. "The devastation was pretty extreme. Even folks who had been through Hurricane Andrew were dismayed at how extreme and dramatic" the damage was. Some of the area "looked as though you'd run a neighborhood through a buzz saw."

Second, "there's a lot of really wonderful stuff there: older neighborhoods, traditional architecture, old buildings. There's a lot picked clean but a lot still to work with. And the location along the coast, U.S. 90, is quite dramatic, it's beautiful."

The third point, he said, was that "despite it all, people were very positive about how to come back, make it better, move forward."

It's unlikely, he said, that every idea generated at the weeklong redevelopment forum will be used. "The answers that came out may not be the ones that get implemented, but the issues that were brought to the surface will continue forward. The important thing is to get the talking going."

The renewal forum wasn't just a matter of outsiders parachuting in for a week, he said. Several members of his group were in Gulfport this month working with business leaders on economic development. At the end of February another group will meet there to work on codes to implement the redevelopment local residents said they wanted to see.

"This is not the way you want to initiate redevelopment," Moore said, "but given the turmoil and chaos, certainly Gulfport is coming out of it as positive and optimistic as possible."

[Last modified January 27, 2006, 11:34:03]