Spring Greening

Historic Green Day 8: Green Spaces

The Sierra Club's Darryl Malek-Wiley works with volunteers to build a roof over the information kiosk for Bayou Bienvenue.

Historic Green Day 5: Wrapping Up the Week

Smitty begins his tour of the Lower Ninth Ward with volunteers.

PHOTO: Siri Colom

Watering a brand new rain garden on N. Rampart Street.

Contractor Ryan Haugaard (of Abacus Design Build in Manhattan, KS) describes his work to restore a two-story historic house at 616 Caffin over the last week.

PHOTO: Siri Colom

Curt Rohner and his crew rest up after finishing up a radiant barrier installation and repairs at 1224 Gordon - job well done!

Historic Green Day 3: More Projects!

Working at the Delery Street playground.

Greening up a house on Tricou.



Volunteers from SUNY-Buffalo take a break from installing radiant barriers in the home of Don Edwards on St. Claude.

Attending the Holy Cross Neighborhood Assn. meeting at Greater Little Zion Baptist Church - a true exercise in democracy!

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

Working on the Delery Street Playground

I feel like we have the hardest grouping work of volunteers in the world!! And residents! This is the Delery St Playground - the wonderful group of men taking their first break of the day (lunch!)

Community Gardens in Holy Cross

For days now, Holy Cross has been abuzz with activity.  Volunteers from all over, milling about like hundreds of worker bees.  It's so exciting to witness so much work being done all at once.  As a member of the neighborhood's Garden Committee, I'm especially thrilled to see Historic Green's gift to our current community garden, and the potential site of a future garden!

Last week, some volunteers laid down beautiful white stones along
our two unpaved garden paths.  We'd already paved the front with generous donations of pea gravel, but the two paths were bare.  Now they're not!  It was a welcome surprise.

The Garden Committee's dream is to create another community garden... one that is larger and can provide organic produce for the community.  Well, Historic Green volunteers brought us one step closer to realizing that dream yesterday.  They diligently cleared the lot diagonal from our current garden.  If all goes well, we'll be planting there sooner rather than later.  :)

 

Tuesday, March 18

Our busiest day is now behind us. Christina (our lovely chef-caterer-coordinator) cooked a wonderful meal at her apartment in the Quarter for about 35 of us last night. Curt got on his soap box and started a delightful round of toasting that seemed to leave everyone present touched, moved and inspired – just in time to go out drankin’ for St. P’s Day.

We had a slight snafu with the RePlant New Orleans group, as communication broke down between the several project leaders and local groups involved in trying to make this happen. 5200 Dauphine opens up to our volunteers today, and the house-scraping crews finally get to start on painting and siding repairs. Sarah Meyers has returned at our repeated requests (and combined sponsorship) and will be in charge of the 5200 project site after noon today! There is a lot of excitement about what this project has meant to students, residents, and community leaders alike – I think we are well prepared to do this again next year with a larger steering committee and an event to build on.

by Jeremy Knoll

A Busy Day: Shuttles, CFLs, Historic Homes, Tours, Radiant Barriers, the Playground, and More

Today went very well, considering. Since Hillel pulled all volunteers to other work, we boosted our partnership with Elderhostel to a larger degree. It pretty much meant that I acted as a shuttle all day long: delivering people, supplies, lunches, bathroom breaks, etc throughout the day. The folks we worked with are great though, and really seemed to enjoy themselves with the work they were doing – especially since they got to work with homeowners more directly than they would have otherwise. I think we’ll do a similar run-around tomorrow, though I won’t send any with Greenlight NOLA tomorrow, as mixing volunteers on faraway work led to hungry folks who didn’t get to all of the assigned houses – bummer.

We also had the “Inconvenient Truth” presentation tonight, which was pretty cool, though our volunteer documenter/reporter, Nicollette, was really turned off by the presentation style.

There was a gas leak at 5115 Dauphine – one of our work sites – requiring everyone to evacuate the block ASAP, until Entergy could come and cap it off while a military-police hummer blocked off the road! We got some folks started on the Delery Street Playground reconstruction, and the North Carolina Krewe got up in some attics doing radiant barrier installation (and seemed to love it!).

Marna David, Reverend Scie and I then toured this group around the neighborhood for awhile after they were finished, based loosely on the scheduled stops and according to their time constraints. We had also three UF med-students who we put to work setting up recycling bins at The Village, followed by sending them on the Ariane’s to do some work. Lots more, but I’m exhausted, and staying the night at Charles Allen’s restored shotgun home for the first time.

Goodnight.

by Jeremy Knoll