Wet Bank Guide

St. Francis Cabrini Church, Paris Avenue, New Orleans

Put your nose up to the door, I told my daughter, and take a good sniff. This I tell her is what Katrina smelled like, what the whole city smelled like, in the days after. We were peering through the locked doors into the nave of St. Francis Cabrini Catholic Church, in the Vista Park section of Gentilly along Paris Avenue.

The interior of the church was a ruin of piled pews in the nave, as if prepared for a bonfire, in front of the dramatic sanctuary beneath its flying buttresses. The photograph is taken through thick leaded glass I was tempted to break for a better view, given that the Archdiocese could clearly care less. I was only stopped by the thought of all the Humvees full of National Guard I had seen on Robert E. Lee. There was no sign of them here on Paris Avenue, no sign of life at all, but something stayed my hand.


The nave and sanctuary of Cabrini

My father designed this church. I recall standing as a very small child in the back and watching him climb perhaps fifty feet of scaffolding to reach the top of the buttresses to inspect some work. To a very small child it seemed as if he had ascended the very ramparts of heaven to consult with God about the progress of the work on His house. It is one of the most vivid memories of my childhood, one I can call up clearly at any time.

My reverie is interrupted again by the smell as I press my eye to a window close to the crack in the door. Smell, I tell my own child, smell this. Remember this smell, remember what happened to your new home, to the church your grandfather built, remember it as clearly as I remember your grandfather at the gates of heaven so you can tell your own children some day.

So much of the city is still in danger of being reduced to memory. Sidney J. Folse, Jr., A.I.A. was a prominent architect, a president of the New Orleans Chapter of the A.I.A. at the height of the battle of the Riverfront Expressway. He designed the Rivergate, and I marveled at the model of the Superdome that was central to his office at Curtis & Davis on Canal Street in the 1960s.

The Rivergate is gone, replaced by Harrah's. Beneath it somewhere is no doubt the tunnel dug for the the riverfront expressway to cross Canal, the expressway my father helped to prevent. Given the life cycle of stadiums, it is certain that within my lifetime the Superdome will be reduced to a memory. There will be so little left of my father in this city soon, only the memories of people who knew him, and with each passing year there are fewer to recall his name over a drink or a meal in the way Orleanians invoke our ancestors, with some fond anecdote at the table.

Most of what he built was commercial and only interesting to people who paid for his services. Through an odd turn of career, he became the nation's leading expert on Corrections Architecture, building jails and prisons and courthouses all across the nation, all because one of his first jobs was to draw the Barracks at Angola Prison, an infamous place where prisoners preyed upon the weaker among them.

I believe he spent the rest of his life in a form of atonement for the Barracks. He voted Republican because Republicans built jails, but the facilities he proposed and built were humane and decent, designed to respect the remaining dignity of the prisoner lest they become like rats in a basement.

The only things that will remain in New Orleans from the hand of one of its prominent architects of the 20th Century will be a starkly modern house at 17 Egret Street in Lake Vista, just small enough in square footage to be itself at risk as a tear down in the land of McMansions, and this church.

Ten months after the flood the church shows no sign of any remediation what so ever. The smell is enough to know. The Archdiocese has apparently locked it and left it to rot, the pews piled up like coffins in the oven of a raised tomb. Perhaps they plan to return in a year and sweep the remains into the drawer just as we clean out our family tombs, to make way for the new.

Or perhaps the bulldozers will come, if the neighborhood remains as it appears today, as still and silent and monochrome as a New Orleans cemetery on a hot August afternoon. Someone righted the toppled Virgin behind the church, and placed a small offering of artificial blooms in each of the urns that flanked the statue. Someone has come back, if only for an afternoon. But as I sweep the open ground behind the church and school, the blocks of homes, I don't see them. I don't see anyone.


St. Francis Xavier Cabrini outside the church's rectory

Today, Mother Cabrini stands water stained near the impending ruin that bears her name, a fitting monument to the first American saint in a town thick with saints but abandoned by America, in a neighborhood where the homogeneous brown silence of the flood seems little changed since September, in a place where the water stood so high there are no rescue marks on the front of homes; instead, stroked zeros are marked on the roofs, to show aircraft where homes were searched.

I read Vista Park homeowner Tim's Nameless Blog regularly. I know that people are coming back to the neighborhood that stands across Paris Avenue. Today, I don't see them, even as a few blocks away Tim wrestles a push mower around Pratt Park and other neighbors work to bring the place they called home back from the disaster that stands in stark silence all around me.

If these places are saved, it will not be through the New Orleans Recreation Department saving Pratt Park or the Archdiocese of New Orleans saving Cabrini. It won't be the city or the Corps or even the grace of God. New Orleans will be saved only because people who love these places, this city, insist on saving them. They will do it on their own, whatever it takes. They are the descendants of the immigrants Mother Cabrini ministered to here, people who were not afraid go to into the unknown, into the heat and the funk of this place called New Orleans and make it their home. Their great grand children will do it again.

Mother Cabrini, pray for them.

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