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Katrina mindset

Folks who have returned to New Orleans neighborhoods devastated in the flooding last year  are not waiting on the government’s help to rebuild their homes and get on with their lives.

By REBECCA CATALANELLO
Published August 27, 2006

[Times photos: Kathleen Flynn]

Shelia Rainey lives in a FEMA trailer in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. View audio slideshow

	Dominic Crescioni, 14, and his brother Vincent, 13, left, work on pulling off tiles from their garage roof to salvage them before the garage is demolished in the Lakeview section of New Orleans.

NEW ORLEANS — It is Sunday afternoon and Martin Manion is drenched. The 55-year-old has spent the past hour or so erecting a light over his neighbor’s FEMA trailer down the street.

Manion is the only person living on the 6900 block of Gen. Diaz Street in what a year ago were the shaded streets   of Lakeview, a middle- and upper-middle class section of town sandwiched between City Park, Jefferson Parish and Lake Pontchartrain.

His soaked purple LSU T-shirt is evidence of his efforts to rebuild in the year since Hurricane Katrina tore up the levees, flooding much of New Orleans.

When he first returned to 6901 Gen. Diaz St. in March, he dropped to his knees and began working the mud-gray landscape into something greener.

The trailer he lives in fronts the side entrance of his parent’s old house, one of thousands submerged for weeks after Hurricane Katrina. On the outside, the brick home looks normal, with its neatly landscaped yard and trimmed green grass.

Manion calls it his stage set. Beyond the curtains are rotted heirlooms, molded upholstery, disintegrated papers and the destroyed remnants of lives long-lived.

Manion is one of the more than 2,000 people who have returned to New Orleans in what has been a manic-depressive first year since Katrina. Though most are resettling in what some now call the “sliver by the river” — the areas of higher ground uptown and in and around the French Quarter that were largely unaffected by flooding — hundreds of others are quilting a patchwork of civilization amid the ruins, one house-gutting and FEMA trailer at a time.

“There’s no such thing as can’t,” says Janelle Dejean, 46, who lives in the only lighted, habitable house on her block of Flood Street in the Lower 9th Ward, one of the worst-hit areas of the city. “I looked at my house and cried. And the next step, I fixed it up. I said, 'June 1, I’m going to be in my house.’ And guess what? June 1, I was in my house.”

While leaders and elected officials spent the past 12 months discussing how, why, when and where New Orleans should be rebuilt, regular citizens like Dejean and Manion have not stopped to wait for instructions.

Forgoing many conveniences of modern life, these post-Katrina pioneers are plowing ahead on their own schedules. They stare destruction in the face every day and are stubbornly unwilling to forsake the homes, lives and histories that started disappearing the moment hurricane winds crossed the southeastern tip of Louisiana the morning of Aug. 29, 2005.

“If we don’t do it, what’s going to happen?” Manion says perfunctorily, perspiration gathering above his dark eyebrows. Then he excuses himself to get back to his project.

Nine miles away, in a part of New Orleans once unknown to the national consciousness, 6-year-old Darryl Rainey motions for the barreling trucks to honk as they pass his grandma’s FEMA trailer.

The Lower 9th Ward is still littered with the hunchback and sprawling remains of homes knocked off their foundations, some completely washed away.

Still, Darryl and his grandmother, Shelia Rainey, 53, are making a life here. A church is holding scantly attended services down the road. The Magnolia Discount Supermarket opened on the corner. A medical clinic is set to open. School starts Sept. 7.

All the Raineys need now is a house. And electricity. And water. And maybe some more neighbors. Like Manion in Lakeview, Rainey is the sole person from her immediate block who appears to have returned. Today, she and Darryl are living in a trailer pulled up to Rainey’s sister-in-law’s home on Tupelo Street, a half-mile from the house Rainey’s grandfather built two generations ago at 2006 Benton St.

“I had to come back,” she says. “I know how hard my mother worked on that house.”

Roots run deep here. The U.S. Census Bureau says 77 percent of New Orleans regional residents are Louisiana natives, far exceeding other Southern cities. Rainey never considered living anywhere else. “

New Orleans is my home,’’ she says as she fires up a can of red beans on her tiny FEMA trailer stove. “I’ve been here all my life and I don’t feel right being anywhere else.”

Electricity and water are still unavailable on Benton Street, or Rainey would have parked her trailer there while she awaits the home’s demolition. The power company says the Lower 9th Ward is the last remaining section of the city where power isn’t fully available to anyone who is able to receive it.

Despite the inconvenience, Rainey says she’s thankful for what she has. Rainey, a former day care worker, spent four days on the roof surrounded by flood waters.

As the home rocked and bumped, Rainey and her 30-year-old son did everything they could to keep her three grandchildren — two 3-year-olds and a 4-year-old — safe until they were rescued by helicopter and boat.

Most evenings, she sits outside the trailer until nightfall looking for the familiar faces of neighbors she wasn’t sure survived. When they show up, the reunion is like witnessing a resurrection. Arms fling around neck. Long embraces, laughter and joy.

“They didn’t know if we were dead or alive and we didn’t know if they were dead or alive,” Rainey says.
But as darkness falls, Rainey gives up her lawn chair and retreats to her tiny trailer. The new wilderness comes with rats the size of human feet that scurry from home to disintegrated home. Sometimes Rainey half expects Jason from horror-movie fame to come hobbling from the wreckage.

One block north of Manion in Lakeview is the Crescioni compound. It’s the one with two flags flapping from a 25-foot fence post — an American flag and a New Orleans flag.Two adults and two teenage boys have been living here since March 10 in a trailer they bought after three months of arguing with FEMA.“I washed my hands of the government,” says Wayne Crescioni, 52, a New Orleans police officer who has not left Katrina-ravaged soil since before the storm. “I said we’re on our own if we’re going to do it. We’re here by choice and we’re moving forward with our own future and our children’s future.”

“Project 822” they call it, for the number of the house that fronts Conrad Street at the corner of Gen. Diaz.
For the first three weeks, the Crescionis ran a generator from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. They watched the demolition of their home after allowing Dominic, 14, and Vincent, 13, take spray paint cans to the brick exterior and throw rocks through the windows to help them vent their storm frustrations.

This family has become a neighborhood touchstone. Families blocks away were strangers before the storm. Now, they are the Crescionis’ closest allies in the battle against their city’s stagnation. Everyone knows Wayne. Just the fact that they are there has provided hope to families still struggling to decide what to do.

During the body-recovery phase after the storm, the 25-year police veteran was assigned to his own community, finding 10 neighbors dead in their homes.

He still wanted to come home to Lakeview.

In the time since they’ve moved in, Stephanie Crescioni has stopped jumping at the sound of every car that passes. The boys have gotten used to riding their bikes through the desolation, jumping over dirt piles on the lot where their house once stood and another is soon to be built — bigger and higher.

This week, a mother and her toddler were seen walking down Gen. Diaz Street on the kind of evening stroll that used to be common. Another neighbor jogged past the trailer window, out for an hour-long run with his girlfriend.
Progress here is measured by houses demolished, Catholic masses held, lawns cut and the buzz of heavy equipment.

When Ace Hardware and a BP station reopened in May, Stephanie Crescioni couldn’t contain her glee.

“I didn’t hug my hardware man before,” Stephanie says with a smile, ending her sentence with the word that everyone here knows means pre-Katrina.

All over the city, power outages are still commonplace. Trash in the city is picked up once a week — if you’re lucky. Mail started a few weeks ago in Lakeview and more recently in the 9th Ward.

Everyday frustrations are high everywhere, but nowhere can life be more intense than in the miles upon miles of decimated neighborhoods of Lakeview, the Lower 9th Ward and New Orleans East.

Lakeview residents who have returned — less than 10 percent of the neighborhood — must drive across the parish line to find the nearest grocery. Cut yourself while doing construction in any of these neighborhoods and medical attention could be slow in coming. With the National Guard patrolling some sections of the city, Martin Manion’s analogy to a war zone feels frighteningly appropriate.

Sometimes Manion looks down the block at the vacant houses, the once-immaculate yards now overgrown, and wonders about the wisdom of his commitment to rebuild this neighborhood.

Yes, he is rebuilding. He loves this city and this community. But what about the Army Corps of Engineers? What about the city government? What about the family down the street with that 40-year-old oak still collapsed on their roof? It’s been a full year, after all, and another hurricane season has yet to pass without incident. Even as the anniversary approaches, Hurricane Ernesto is heading into the Gulf of Mexico.  

“You have your good days and your bad days,” Manion says.

On good days, these pioneers remember why they’re here, why they’re sleeping in trailers, why they put up signs that say “We’re coming home to Lakeview,” or, in the 9th Ward, “No Bulldozing!” even though the house next door looks like a drug den in what used to be considered the bad part of town.

On bad days, they just try to wait for another good day to roll around.

Times news researcher Angie Drobnic Holan contributed to this report, which includes information from the Times-Picayune and the New York Times. Rebecca Catalanello can be reached at rcatalanello@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3383.

[Last modified August 27, 2006, 22:00:40]