The Utopian

By Mac McAnulty.

“Blight guts houses and, in the case of New Orleans, whole neighborhoods. Estimates say the city contains over 50,000 blighted properties, battered remnants, most of them left behind during Hurricane Katrina.”

A letter from New Orleans.

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When the Expressway feels too done-up in dust, and the live oaks on “the Avenue” seem to offer too much shade, I pack my things and ride to Back of Town. Back of Town, better known as “back-o’-town,” is at the back of New Orleans. It is a place soaking in blight.

This is the neighborhood with hushed and clear streets—especially in the afternoon. Hushed, but far from dead. Like a body waking up from sleep, on a Monday in June, at the corner of Third Street and Willow Street, a broad older woman bustled out onto her porch, bellowing, shaking her house, shaking me.

“My momma’s not gon’ be dead before you are,” she says.

Her remark skid down the sidewalk and climbed the steps to the two porches of a double shotgun house. Old, old women—old enough to be the first lady’s ever-living mother, with tree roots spreading over their foreheads—arched their backs like disturbed cats. One shifted in her chair; the other, closer to the yeller, stood up and shuffled down her steps, walking the opposite way on Willow.

The yeller yelled still, and she painted the street in loud hues.

A man with a round face and half of his right leg missing was sitting on his wheelchair, on his porch. He had a rocking rhythm going, every so often pushing the ground with his left foot, and these ladies weren’t rattling him. I walked up next to his front steps.

“How long has that been going on?” I asked.

He laughed. “I’ll tell you, she’s over sixty, and she’s always goin’ on. But that don’t mean it’s only that long. That’s her family house, and I guess her mother’s got ta be in there. I guess,” he said.

We both smile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Today she started just now.” A house packed with loud women and the ghosts of loud women.

Opposite that spectacle, I found the Morris Corperation Grocery. It was spelled that way. Better: it once was spelled that way. The building was closed and clearly empty and barred and boarded up. The paint from the Corperation sign had faded under sun like this afternoon’s sun, but underneath the store’s name I could still read the banner, “Chinese Food To Go.” There is not much Chinese population in New Orleans, and none in Back of Town. And on the other painted wall, in peeling letters, “Chinese Food Po Boys.”

I wondered when the last of these loud women in a black neighborhood called to the Corperation across the street asking for a New Orleans-style Chinese Food Po Boy—and when the first of those matriarchal yellers did the same. And that scene I have to enjoy, and I laugh, and, even though he could not have known my precise thoughts, my friend on his porch laughs, quietly, to the beat of his rocking wheelchair.


***


Blight guts houses and, in the case of New Orleans, whole neighborhoods. Estimates say the city contains over 50,000 blighted properties, battered remnants, most of them left behind during Hurricane Katrina. According to the New Orleans Department of Code Enforcement, “a property can be considered blighted,” if it is “chronically vacant,” “unsafe, unsanitary, or unhealthy,” has a “vermin infestation,” is “abandoned,” and/or “has a substantial negative impact on the health, safety, or economic vitality of a neighborhood.”

There are skeletons of refrigerators left in the Morris Corperation Grocery. I could only see them through the bars covering the front door—the rest of the building is boarded solid. The City’s unblemished wood is the least decrepit object on—and, I’m guessing, inside––the property.

Blight again across the street and two houses down, at 2815 Third Street. A once-white shotgun house had its front steps encroaching on the sidewalk, but if the house had once been beckoning, come in, nobody was responding now. The house had two thin, green lanes on each side, and a bigger patch in the back. The parts furthest from the street had not been boarded up. Weeds hugged the sides of the building. Pushing through branches, I found breaks and gaps in the wall. One was big enough to hop through.

I paused at the threshold.To whom does blight belong? Interior space is an issue. Certainly there’s no private owner, not active, not anymore, but it also takes time for the city to co-opt the property, and then––hopefully––to re-sell it without bulldozing. Eventually blight belongs to those who fix it––or destroy it. But in the in-between times, blight is something both public and private.

Thinking that, I jumped in.

The floor was damp and mostly dirt. The sun, so vast outside, only sipped through the window, pooling near the edges of the floor. In the brighter spots, more weedy vines spread out like frayed threads at the edge of a carpet.

A shotgun house is only one room wide, with no hallways—each space bleeds into the next. There was nothing really human-looking in the first room, at the back of this house, only a series of thin columns. They looked like immature trees, unevenly spaced, the empty room like a bad, ransacked orchard, sans food, sans life.

But the next room––the next room was strewn with cloths and chairs, one chair turned over, littered with a little food, centered around a table. These human objects reached almost to the edges of the room—they filled the space—and yet somehow they looked like debris, maybe forgotten, perhaps not. There was a complicated object in the near corner, which had broken glass in it, jumbled and balled tape, and papers, including a folded New Orleans Times-Picayune, with its spidery letters and a photo of the Mississippi on the front page. There were two bottles, intact, placed on the table, and with them a plate, and playing cards. The table stopped me—it seemed to wait, half-set, as if ready for the return of a missing sitter. I walked closer to one of the plates to see if was dusty. It wasn’t. I looked up, and, now thinking for the first time to look at every part of the room, I saw a stepstool in the corner. On it sat a handgun.

I guessed that there was no dust on the gun, either, and I sent my body out of that room in something like a controlled hurtle. I tried to walk quietly in the back weeds, and the branches and bushes battered my legs. The tall grass at the side of the house whipped me along. I flew at the street.

The afternoon air––breezeless and ceaseless as it is––seemed to be pulsing, in, out, and through the blighted house. It should have occurred to me, but of course it hadn’t, that there would be squatters.


***


I kept moving, and the sun rolled under me, on West Carrollton Street at 4 p.m., a peak of incredible, exploding heat. The black road, the brush of passing cars, and the thrill on Third Street, all eventually felt subdued. I’d caught my breath amidst the yawn of a long New Orleans day.

Off of West Carrollton there is Cohn Street, and I found 8612 Cohn Street. Another blighted house, an unoccupied double. Again weed-sprung: six inches of moss on the roof.

But this house was also one of the many Back of Town delivery rooms for the birth of jazz. Sidney Bechet––a French-speaking Creole; the first recorded jazz artist––lived here for one year. This was sometime before 1915, according to his autobiography, Treat It Gentle, which later became a movie with Bechet, Wynton Marsalis, and Woody Allen. This part of Cohn Street doesn’t make the movie; it doesn’t make New Orleans’ landmark or historic status; it barely made the book. Bechet was still a teenager. He was a prodigy on the local jazz scene, which meant he ran around “back-o’-town”––even in print, he doesn’t write the neighborhood’s name any other way––frequenting cabarets, the early jazz halls, and whorehouses. He played wherever he could. Jazz was a dirty sound bubbling up like water.

So Back of Town was at once a bad neighborhood, an empty neighborhood, a crumbling neighborhood, and a place of brimming, moving fervor. As Bechet tells it, he ran and ran from back-place to back-place,

“And New Orleans just bust wide open. They heard the music…It was laughing out loud up and down all the streets and they knew what music it was, laughing like two people just finding out about each other…like something that had found a shortcut after traveling through all the distance there was. That music, it wasn’t spirituals or blues or ragtime, but everything all at once, each one putting something over on the other.”

Today, bullet holes would not be out of place on Cohn Street. There were holes, anyway, at 8612 Cohn Street, though most of them had been boarded up. The boards gave the house a blank face. What happened inside? What will happen inside?

Sometimes a dilapidated place comes alive, or is already, covertly, alive––beneath the bullet-holes, dancers! Walker Percy, in his famous essay, “New Orleans Mon Amour,” describes how he sees New Orleans as a city of “interstices,” which are shared spaces, shifting between public and private. And jazz, “The Negro hit upon jazz not in Africa but on Perdido Street, a lot nowhere place, an interstice between the Creoles and the Americans, where he could hear not only the airs of the French Opera House, but also the hoedowns of the Kaintucks, and the salon music uptown.”

Perdido Street runs up through Back of Town. Thinking of the nowhere places I knew, I turned back to Third Street and its blight.

***


The light turned gray around the horizon, and it hugged every porch on Third Street in a clutch of shadows. People, more people than the afternoon had seemed to hold, took one, two, and three steps out, breaking open the doors of houses, each one of them now looking more and more packed, and all these people, old ladies, young ladies, sisters, or wives, men, children in groups all shorter than waists or kneecaps, displayed themselves at the edges of Third Street and Willow Street. Somebody arrived at the intersection in a car, pulled over, and turned up WWOZ Jazz on the stereo. The big, scratchy sound floated over the street, and it caught at every porch. There was yelling and calling children and day’s-end greeting to mix in.

I leaned on a fence next to my friend, still rolling his wheelchair over and back over his porch. The motion made the hollow space below his floorboards groan. Eventually, I asked his name: “Anthony Hodder,” he said.

“What do you know about that abandoned house down the street?” I asked. I looked towards the white blighted house to specify. I thought maybe he would have some thoughts on the squatters.

“It’s got a history,” Anthony said. He did not inflect the words at all, and they held at a middle level, suggesting many years of overlapping good history, bad history, celebrations, and intrusions. It was even. He was even about it. But then, he brightened,

“And it’s been sold now,” he said. “It’s been sold last week.”
   
2815 Third Street was one of the seven blighted properties to be sold at the first New Orleans Sheriff’s Auction since Katrina, on June 14, 2011. A sheriff’s auction is a new angel for blight. It beats its alternatives: the property crumbles and crumbles, waiting in bureaucracy and tax litigation; or the property gets demolished, and then the site usually just goes to seed. The buyer for the house on Third Street, Una Anderson, who heads the New Orleans Community Development Cooperative, said her organization plans to renovate the house and re-sell it as “high-quality affordable housing.”

This neighborhood, at that hour, was a high-quality place. It lives. The porches were getting fuller and fuller––Third Street felt renovated in the course of a day. From the house that held generations of big-bellied, bellowing women, a comically little girl came running out the door. She jogged around the square intersection of Third and Willow, as if playing tag with each of its corners. She kept this up for laps and laps on the same course, and then she stopped for breath in front of the Morris Corperation Grocery. She was trying to read the sidewall, the one that has faded from offering “Chinese Food Po Boys.” How many times in her life will she paint those letters over?

Mac McAnulty grew up on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans. He studies writing at Harvard.