Architectural soul of the city at stake

"After the storm, the first thing people asked was, 'How's your house?'¤" recalled Tulane University architecture professor John P. Klingman of those nail-biting days almost two years ago, when storm and flood seemed to have destroyed or scarred every structure in New Orleans.

"My house was OK," he said. "But I realized 'How's your house?' was the wrong question. The question was about my city."

Two years later, the question, "How's your city?" is still tough to answer. Architecturally speaking, New Orleans is in flux. The past is not quite over, the present is contentious and the future has not quite begun. As the Neville Brothers might have sung it -- if the Neville Brothers still sang in these parts -- New Orleans architecture is sitting here in limbo, waiting for the tide to turn.



True, most of the city's best-loved landmarks, both historical, such as the St. Louis Cathedral, and contemporary, such as the Louisiana Superdome and the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, stand ready to have their pictures snapped by tourists, as they did before Hurricane Katrina.

The colorful Creole townhouses of the French Quarter are still pressed charmingly cheek to cheek. Most Garden District mansions purse their lips as proudly as they did before the storm. Gilded-era St. Charles Avenue mansions patiently await the return of streetcar-riding admirers.

Preservation Resource Center Director Patricia Gay reports that of the 1,200 buildings in the historic Lower Garden District, only 27 were lost because of the storm. Unlike San Francisco after the earthquake or Chicago after the fire, New Orleans retains much of her long-relied-upon architectural appeal two years after Katrina.

more from the Times Picayune