By Richard Wall
Riding through levee-flooded neighborhoods, Patty Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center in New Orleans, sighs with grief at the sight of one abandoned shotgun house after another. The water-line marks on their exteriors about six feet above ground indicates a mess inside. Thousands of these simple architectural structures, which came to New Orleans from the West Indies in the early 1800s as easy-to-build housing for slaves, make up the character of many neighborhoods.
March is Shotgun House Month for the Preservation Resource Center (PRC). By focusing attention on shotguns as a primary building block of the local architectural vernacular, the PRC shows that historic preservation isn't just about antebellum mansions, but about livable, modest communities for working people.
The shotgun design is a gable-roofed home with all rooms in a line from front to back. To get to the kitchen in the back, you would walk from front porch through the living room, then the dining room, then a bedroom, then into the kitchen. If one opened all the doors and fired a shotgun through the front door, the shot would exit through the back door without hitting anything, or so the story goes. Varieties include the double shotgun, which is a duplex, and the camelback, which has a second story over the back half of the house.
Shotgun houses are typically built close together, and they are raised about four feet on pillars, making them a smart choice in the flood prone area of New Orleans. Their floors dry out well, and their plaster walls usually aren't conducive to mold, which is causing so much damage to New Orleans housing post-Katrina.
No Comeback without Coming Back
This year, though, with the threat of bulldozing whole neighborhoods of New Orleans thick with soggy shotguns, Shotgun House Month has a special urgency.
"Our biggest problem with rebuilding now is that so many people have yet to come back," says Patty, while out examining the progress being made on a few shotgun houses in the Holy Cross neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward. "But it is a very daunting thing to come back and all your personal possessions have been molding for six months. The longer they are kept away, the greater the risk that they will choose not to preserve their historic home."
The city hasn't declared the Holy Cross neighborhood livable yet, even though it received much less flooding than other areas of the Ninth Ward. "They say they won't let people back in here yet because of the levees," says Patty. "Excuse me, there are problems with the levees all over the city. A cynical person might think they aren't letting people back in this area so the homes will deteriorate more, and then they will bring in a developer to tear them all down and put up who knows what."
Patty doesn't waste time on cynicism, however. She's too busy trying to spark rebuilding. The PRC can't rebuild all the shotguns, Creole cottages, and other New Orleans-style houses. In pre-Katrina days, they would buy an old, distressed shotgun in a blighted neighborhood, renovate it, and sell it to an individual, who may also participate in the renovation. That one nicely renovated house shines, encouraging others in the neighborhood to renovate their homes and often drawing in new people to the neighborhood.
It's all private-sector investment, with a little kick-start from the PRC, itself funded by contributions and some grants, particularly from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. This year's Shotgun House Month coincides with PRC's Home Again program, which provides volunteer expertise, labor and gap funding to people who want to return to their historic homes, often a shotgun. (If you have historic preservation expertise and would like to volunteer, the PRC would love to welcome you to New Orleans).
Hopes for an Inner City Revival
Patty stops to visit Adolph Bynum, who has worked hard to get his 22 shotgun houses back in order since Katrina. Some had flood damage, and many had roof damage that resulted in water damage. Most of his shotguns are in the Treme neighborhood, which is next to the French Quarter and is said to be the first African-American neighborhood in the country.
Patty says that by fixing up shotgun houses, Adolph and his wife, Naydja, have been catalysts for more people to move into the area and renovate other houses. It's the come-back effect of historic preservation in action.
While such success stories are welcome, Patty still worries about the neighborhoods of New Marginy and Bywater North, where block after block of historic shotgun houses were already in bad shape before Katrina. Now with the people kept out, the unattended water damage just gets worse and worse.
"I think that will all come back, Patty," says Adolph, "if we can get the proper labor. There are people who do want to stay in the inner city. The people we have housed are all professionals. A lot of these people are coming from New Orleans East [an area of many modern suburbs heavily damaged by the flood]. And now they're beginning to cultivate the character and the culture of this neighborhood and its preservation. They are just overwhelmed when they stay in the inner city."
"Adolph, can we get you to go Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas and get those people to come buy a shotgun house in Bywater North and get going on it?" asks Patty.
Adolph smiles away the invitation, and says no, he's got plenty to do here in New Orleans renovating his own shotguns.
Unfortunately, so does the entire city.
Richard Wall is a writer and producer in St. Augustine, Fla.
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