Nathaniel Rich, "Jungleland,"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/magazine/the-lower-ninth-ward-new- orleans.html?_r=1&sq=jungleland&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all Jungleland The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans Gives New Meaning to ‘Urban Growth’ By NATHANIEL RICH Published: March 21, 2012 “We have snakes,” Mary Brock said. “Long, thick snakes. Kingsnakes, rattlesnakes.” Brock was walking Pee Wee, a small, high-strung West Highland terrier who darted into the brush at the slightest provocation — a sudden breeze, shifting gravel, a tour bus rumbling down Caffin Avenue several blocks east. But Pee Wee had reason to be anxious. Brock was anxious. Most residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans are anxious. “A lot of people in my little area diedafter Katrina,” Brock said. “Because of too much stress.” The most immediate sources of stress that October morning were the stray Rottweilers. Brock had seen packs of them in the wildly overgrown lots, prowling for food. Pee Wee, it seemed, had seen them, too. “I know they used to be pets because they are beautiful animals.” Brock corrected herself: “They were beautiful animals. When I first saw them, they were nice and clean — inside-the-house animals. But now they just look sad.” Nathaniel Rich, Jungleland, NYTSM, 3/21/12, Page 2 The Lower Ninth has become a dumping ground for unwanted dogs and cats. People from all over the city take the Claiborne Avenue Bridge over the Industrial Canal, bounce along the fractured streets until they reach a suitably empty area and then toss the animals out of the car. But it’s not just pets. The neighborhood has become a dumping ground for many kinds of unwanted things. Contractors, rather than drive to the city dump in New Orleans East, sweep trailers full of construction debris onto the street. Auto shops, rather than pay the tire-disposal fee ($2 a tire), dump tires by the dozen. The tire problem has become so desperate that the city is debating changes to the law. (One humble suggestion: a $2 reward per tire.) You also see burned piles of household garbage, cotton-candy-pink tufts of insulation foam, turquoise PVC pipes, sodden couches tumescing like sea sponges and abandoned cars. Sometimes the cars contain bodies. In August, the police discovered an incinerated corpse in a white Dodge Charger that was left in the middle of an abandoned lot near the intersection of Choctaw and Law, two blocks from where Mary Brock was walking Pee Wee. Nobody knew how long the car had been there; it was concealed from the closest house, half a block away, by 12-foot-high grass. That entire stretch of Choctaw Street, for that matter, was no longer visible. It had been devoured by forest. Every housing plot on both sides of the street for two blocks, between Rocheblave and Law, was abandoned. Through the weeds, you could just make out a cross marking the spot where Brock’s neighbor had drowned. It is misleading to talk about abandoned lots in the context of the Lower Ninth Ward. Vast sections of the neighborhood have been abandoned, so it’s often unclear where one property ends and the next begins. (An exception is the sliver of land on the neighborhood’s innermost edge, where Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation has built 76 solar-paneled, pastel-hued homes — though this seems less a part of the neighborhood than a Special Economic Zone.) To visualize how the Lower Ninth looked in September — before the city’s most recent campaign to reclaim the neighborhood — you have to understand that it no longer resembled an urban, or even suburban environment. Where once there stood orderly rows of single-family homes with driveways and front yards, there was jungle. The vegetation had all sprouted since Katrina. Trees that did not exist before the storm are now 30 feet high. The cartoonish pace of vegetation growth resembles something out of a Chia Pet commercial, but it is hardly surprising to New Orleanians long accustomed to roads Nathaniel Rich, Jungleland, NYTSM, 3/21/12, Page 3 warped by tree roots and yards invaded by weeds. The soil in the Lower Ninth is extraordinarily fertile, thanks to centuries of alluvial deposits from the Mississippi River, which forms the neighborhood’s southern boundary. From the river, the neighborhood descends, like a long ramp, down to an open-water, brackish marsh called Bayou Bienvenue. This back part of the neighborhood, which, at its lowest point, is four feet below sea level, was the most devastated by the storm and remains the least inhabited. Its population has decreased by 85 percent since 2000. Many of the ruined buildings have been cleared away, and most of the old foundations are obscured. The inhabited lots, about one per city block, are the exception. With their dutifully trimmed lawns, upright fences and new construction, they stand out like teeth in a jack-o-lantern. But wilderness encroaches from all sides. “My neighbor just saw a little family of coons parading across the street,” said Don Porter, who lives south of Claiborne Avenue, in one of the more occupied areas of the neighborhood. There are four houses on his block, and only two are vacant. “And you see rabbit,” he said. “You see egrets. Pelicans.” “A raccoon climbs on top of our roof,” said Terry Jacko, 23, who stood with his brother Terrence, 19, in the front yard of their Reynes Street house. “It’s huge. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a dude.” “I saw a possum in the backyard the other day,” Terrence said. “Its teeth were about this big. I killed it with a stick. It was coming toward me, so I hit him. He just flipped over. I stayed inside after that.” There have been sightings of armadillos, coyotes, owls, hawks, falcons and even a four- foot alligator, drinking from a leaky fire hydrant. Rats have been less of a problem lately because of the stray cats and the birds of prey. But it’s not just animals that emerge from the weeds. “Sometimes I see people coming out of there,” Terrence said, pointing at the ruins of two houses, shrouded in weeds, across the street. “They’re trying to get in my home.” Johnny Windsor, who lives with his wife in a rebuilt house nearby that is surrounded on every side by forest, has seen even more disturbing things. “They drag bodies in there,” he said, pointing to a thicket across the street. Bad things have been happening in the Nathaniel Rich, Jungleland, NYTSM, 3/21/12, Page 4 abandoned lots. While walking home from school one evening, a 16-year-old girl was dragged into a blighted house and raped. Now Windsor and his wife take turns sitting outside, keeping watch. “You never know,” he said, “if someone’s lying in the grass, ready to shoot.” For six and a half years, the neighborhood has undergone a reverse colonization — nature reclaiming civilization. Residents have fought with hatchets and weed trimmers to rebuff the colonizers: Southern cut grass, giant ragweed, Chinese tallow trees. But the effort has been largely futile. The lots require constant vigilance. A lot left untended for three months will be thick with knee-high weeds; after five months, saplings begin to rise. By last August, the sixth anniversary of Katrina, it was clear that nature had triumphed. In September, the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, announced what amounted to a troop surge in the battle for the Lower Ninth. He called it the Nuisance Lot Maintenance Pilot Program. It was the city’s third attempt to clear the overgrown lots in the Lower Ninth. The first contractor chosen for the job was revealed to be a convicted felon; the second contractor, hired a year ago, was asked to clear each lot only once, which was not particularly helpful, because the vegetation grew back within months. This time, the city decided to handle the job itself, using municipal agencies to hire workers and oversee the project. The pilot program consists of a single crew of 12 men — all residents of the Lower Ninth or ex-offenders. They have waged a block-by-block campaign to reclaim the land. The program concludes at the end of this month. At that point the cycle will begin again. To understand why New Orleans ceded an entire neighborhood to nature for six years, it’s necessary to revisit a chapter from the post-Katrina era so painful that few in the city have the stomach to discuss it. The Tulane geographer Richard Campanella has called it “the Great Footprint Debate.” With most of New Orleans in ruins, the city had to decide how to rebuild: which areas should receive priority and which should be redeveloped? The problem, as some saw it, was mathematical. In 1960, the population of New Orleans peaked at 627,525. To accommodate the boom, the city expanded into low-lying marshland that was previously considered unfit for human habitation. These newer, Nathaniel Rich, Jungleland, NYTSM, 3/21/12, Page 5 lower-lying neighborhoods were hit hardest by the storm. (The Lower Ninth is higher, on average, than New Orleans East, Gentilly, Broadmoor and Lakeview, but it suffered the most damage because of the two breaches of the Industrial Canal levee, which serves as the neighborhood’s western boundary.) A year after Katrina, the city’s population plunged to about 200,000; meanwhile, the street grid, since 1970, had increased by more than 10 percent.

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