Spring Greening

Historic Green Day 2: Projects!

Volunteers from SUNY-Buffalo are restoring the bank of windows along the front of the Lower 9th Ward Village - re-caulking, cleaning, replacing temporary plexiglas panes with glass, and then adding solar film to minimize heat gain during the hot summer months.



Ryan Haugaard (of Manhattan, Kansas) and his crew rebuild the back of a two-story double shotgun in Holy Cross - took it all down, reconstructing it greener.



PHOTO: Darryl Malek-Wiley

Working on the rain garden at Delery Street playground - thanks to students from SUNY-Buffalo!

Meet James Lewis of the Lower Ninth Ward. Crews are working on his home (radiant barriers) at 1224 Gordon and the house next door (re-sheathing the exterior) to make them far more energy efficient. Mr. Lewis and his family were able to return to the Lower 9 about 1 1/2 years after Katrina - doing most of the repairs and rebuilding himself.

Historic Green in Eco-Structure Magazine

Check out Historic Green featured in Eco-Structure Magazine here.  Historic Green Chair and Co-founder Jeremy Knoll is interviewed about HG discussing why we exists and where we are going. 

Touring the Armstrong School

The Louis Armstrong Elementary School at St. Claude and St. Maurice is one of our featured venues as part of this year’s Historic Green. Activities at the school included a structure walk-through (led by deconstruction experts and former FEMA inspectors), followed by a design charrette to generate ideas for the use of the abandoned building as a community arts space. Finally, volunteer teams worked on site beautification, to clean up the school’s front green space and landscaping the surrounding area with hardy, native plants.

The Preservation Resource Center provided this terrific slideshow of the building assessment tour on March 11 – and featuring our very own Heather Gay.



In addition, the National Trust’s online Preservation Magazine featured a story on the school’s restoration plans – and Historic Green’s involvement in the cleanup:

“This month, there's new hope for an abandoned New Orleans school that was one of the first to be integrated in the Deep South during the Civil Rights Era.

The Leona Tate Foundation for Change, which incorporates tomorrow [March 18], will raise money to renovate the McDonogh No. 19 Elementary School in the Ninth Ward as "a Civil Rights museum that can attract people from all over the nation," says Rev. John Moore, foundation chair.

The 1929 structure (now called the Louis D. Armstrong Elementary School) was shuttered before Katrina, when floodwaters damaged the first floor. The school district plans to mothball the facility, having concluded that it will cost $8.8 million to repair and $10 million to replace.”

You can read all of “New Life for New Orleans School and Civil Rights Landmark?” here.

Scenes From a Green Rebuild

Thanks to Darryl Malek-Wiley for these excellent photos from across the Holy Cross Neighborhood!
429-31 St. Maurice Street
429-31 St. Maurice Street
5515 Dauphine Street
5515 Dauphine Street
Marquette University students at 5516 Dauphine Street
Redeemer Church volunters at 632 Tupelo

Majora Carter: Greening the Ghetto

Countdown to Spring Greening

I have my flight booked for a December NOLA trip, and I'm looking forward to meetings and touring, and relaxation, and anything else that we can possibly do.  Susannah, are you doing karaoke again? I'll be your cheerleader!

I'm about to get on a call to talk about our outreach for the March Spring Greening event, and as I wait, I started to pull up documents for our planning for 2009.  It's so exciting to think that I was on my first conference call for Historic Green almost exactly one year ago, and now I'm looking at what we did and what we can do for this upcoming year (and for the years to come) and I see such purpose and world changing in the work that we're doing.

For those of you that are thinking about volunteering for Historic Green 2009, mark your calendars: we're on for March 10-20, 2009.  Same place. New faces. New projects. Same outcome.

Presentation at the University of Minnesota

As part of a thank you for the USGBC Mississippi Headwaters Chapter (MN) www.usgbcmn.org for helping to fund the U of M students' trip to NOLA, Jodi Wilson gave a presentation on the experiences the students had working in Holy Cross.  I introduced Jodi and talked about why we felt it was important to help fund the students' trip.  We did our presentation a couple weeks ago, but I thought it would be nice to share, and I've been thinking a lot, especially after Jeremy gave us his "by the numbers" list! Download historic_green_new_orleans_u_of_m.pdf

At the end, one of the professors read some of the students' writings on their trip, and I found it to be so encouraging and inspiring.  One of the things that stuck out to me was the comment that in NOLA, people ask you how you are, and they really want to know.  And twenty minutes later, you're still talking!
The first day I was in Louisiana was October 8, 2005.  I had spent 10 days in Washington, DC, for training, and then I landed in Baton Rouge.  I had no idea where anything was, and I was trying to pick up the keys for the apartment I was going to be living in for the next four months.  I was tired, hot, and lost, and close to tears.  In the parking lot at the Super Target, this woman came up to me and asked me if she could help with anything.  I said I was lost, and we started talking.  She gave me directions, and I was actually able to just walk over to where I needed to go.  When I got back to my car, she had left me a note with her phone number and address, and had invited me to dinner.  This would not have happened in Minnesota or Nevada or Utah - the other states where I've lived.  This experience really helped shape my whole experience living in post Katrina/Rita Baton Rouge, and part of why I feel like I need to keep giving back to Louisiana.

And I can't wait for 2009 Historic Green! 

The Third Place

Why do I have such a connection and tie to New Orleans? My parents, in their late 1970’s dharma bum-ish way, hitchhiked across the U.S., and my mom was pregnant with me when they got to New Orleans. Maybe that’s why. Maybe it is because I read so much (and still do) and truly loved anything I could get my hands on that had to do with New Orleans, be it Anne Rice or Christopher Rice or A Confederacy of Dunces. We had a big beautiful Mardi Gras print in above the piano in our living room. All my friends were shocked because it was so racy!

When I was in college, my Urban Studies advisor, and one of my favorite people, Tony Filipovitch, taught a class on the theory of place and how it is generally accepted that there are two types of places. The first is the home – the private place, your personal sanctuary. The second is the workplace – the public place, where you do your business. But there’s another place, called, not surprisingly, the third place – that intersection of public and private, but where you still feel a sense of ownership. So your neighborhood coffee shop, and it’s your favorite wine bar where the bartender knows what you’re going to order, the park where you take your dog, or go to read your book on your lunch break – those are your third places. It is talked about in great detail in Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place.

For me, New Orleans is my third place. All of it.. Whatever it is that brings me to New Orleans, I feel that sense of ownership and a sense of pride from the people who live there and the food and the music to the architecture and the history.

I think it takes a special sort of person to live in NOLA. I don’t think there are a lot of people as tied to their home city like New Orleanians are. Certainly not so much in the Twin Cities. And I love it in Minneapolis, and I can see that I’ll always live here part of the time, but I am seriously considering a seasonal move to NOLA.

I was talking to my auntie on Sunday and I told her that I was considering moving to NOLA for a few months out of the year – why not, we live in a digital world – I can work from just about anywhere. So I asked her if she had any interest in investing in a property in NOLA. And she said yes. Now, the next trip to NOLA means looking at places to call home, and I am really hoping for the Holy Cross Neighborhood. None of this is going to happen overnight, I know that, but if in two years, we are spending our January through March or April in NOLA, I won’t mind.

It has only been a week since I left NOLA and our Historic Green work to go back to my “real” life and my “real” job – but when I am in NOLA, I feel so alive and so real, it makes the things that I do in Minneapolis, while wonderful and challenging (and the food that I love and the friends and so many other things) seem a little bit pale by comparison. Having said that, I can not wait to take my hubby to the Two Sisters for his first jazz brunch experience, and walk with him down Rue Royale, and take him to the Holy Cross Neighborhood, and try that taco truck that everyone's been raving about! I can not wait to take my friend Laura to Cafe Du Monde even though she doesn't like coffee, and share a bottle of wine with Susannah and Christina again at some restaurant! Or just in some apartment or house.

For now I am just dreaming of our next planning trip for Historic Green.