{"id":314,"date":"2009-01-17T17:41:24","date_gmt":"2009-01-17T22:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinomara.com\/2009\/01\/17\/central-city\/"},"modified":"2009-01-17T17:41:24","modified_gmt":"2009-01-17T22:41:24","slug":"central-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/?p=314","title":{"rendered":"Central City"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nCentral City gas station<\/a>
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\nOriginally uploaded by Brother O’Mara<\/a>
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Today when I got done with my errands I decided to drive home via Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. And yes, that goes through a run-down part of town.<\/p>\n

Lately I’ve had a thing for driving through run-down parts of town. I’m being safe, of course – I’m not stupid. There’s just something fundamentally different about New Orleans right now compared to before the storm, and I can’t put my finger on what it is. I keep driving and driving to see it all and to soak it in and try to understand.<\/p>\n

There is a street that goes through the Lower Garden District called Melpomene. It’s one of the muses streets – we have a neighborhood in the LGD where nine consecutive streets are named for each of the nine Greek muses. Anyway, as soon as Melpomene crosses St. Charles it becomes MLK. Likewise, St. Charles is the boundary between the LGD and Central City, and Central City is a pretty depressed neighborhood.<\/p>\n

Before the storm Central City was regarded as a great place to get shot at night, though mainly if you were involved in drugs, and that would be pretty much the<\/I> only reason to visit Central City at night if you didn’t already live there. Many people did live there, though – it was cheap because it was a bad neighborhood, or it was a bad neighborhood because it was cheap, or perhaps the two are mutually inclusive. I don’t know enough about the area’s history to say which came first. I do know, however, that the situation worsened after they built the Calliope \/ B. W. Cooper housing project in \/ beside Central City.<\/p>\n

I never used to drive through there before, I suppose it goes without saying. I mean I have<\/I> driven it – I was a delivery driver and sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a straight line even if you don’t necessarily feel like going through that neighborhood. So while I didn’t hang out there I was not unfamiliar with the way it looked and felt.<\/p>\n

Now that I’m back I feel this urge to explore all parts of New Orleans, even (or especially) the parts I never knew before. I’ve driven through Central City now several times, on various roads, and it really affects me every time. Every time I drive through I feel like I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong. It’s not that the area is poor – it was poor before, it will probably remain poor. It’s not a site that is ripe for the gentrification that is occurring elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The area is, to my eyes, just empty. Not in the “look at the lower Ninth Ward and how Hurricane Katrina flattened the whole thing and all the houses are gone” kind of way. Sure, there were houses in Central City that were damaged or destroyed by the storm, but that’s not all of it. They’ve razed the vast majority of the Calliope \/ B. W. Cooper projects, and I know that has a lot to do with it, but that as well is not all of it.<\/p>\n

There’s just this feeling of emptiness and loneliness, of desolation and pessimism that seems to encompass the entire area. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t live there. I don’t see it on a daily basis. It just seems like that between the storm and them tearing down the projects that somehow not only the population but the life itself of this neighborhood is gone. I don’t see as many people out on the street, I don’t see as many cars, it seems like all the corner stores are closed (though it’s hard to tell sometimes without getting out and actually pulling on the door). <\/p>\n

The thing that bothers me the most is that Central City is big – I suppose it goes without saying that it’s right in the heart of the New Orleans metro area. It was bad before, and kind of empty before, but it’s worse and emptier now, and that gives me this almost intolerable melancholy. It’s obviously not intolerable, though, because I keep subjecting myself to it. There’s just this … hole … in the middle of this city and I don’t know what to do about it, or if anything even can be done. You’d have to see it yourself to understand why you can’t just say, “oh well it needs some neighborhood beautification projects” or “we’ll develop some new low-cost public housing”. It’s too big for any one solution, and I don’t see why anyone that has the power to do anything about it would care to.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what I myself could do, or even should do.<\/p>\n

It just saddens me to drive through it, to see this neighborhood that was once alive (though depressing, poor, and troubled<\/A>) to now seem so comatose and suffering.
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Central City gas station Originally uploaded by Brother O’Mara Today when I got done with my errands I decided to drive home via Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. And yes, that goes through a run-down part of town. Lately I’ve had a thing for driving through run-down parts of town. I’m being safe, of course […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tidbit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kevinomara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}