Bargewatch:  All Is Quiet On New Year's Day

Before the sightseers claim the opportunity for themselves and as the city tries to rebuild, I’m considering the possibilities that lie in cleaning up on this mess.  Please don’t misunderstand me; I think it’s good for folks to walk the Lower Nine and gaze into the largely preventable mess, or what cannot only be attributed to the wrath and way of nature.  During today’s sojourn, there were dozens of camera-toting red-eyed disbelievers, speechless, punctuating the decimation with life:  A figure paused in reflection; an open mouth; a weeping woman – probably the only one of the masses who actually had lived there.  And I had the thought that maybe one bunch of the visitors was thinking in dollars and purse.

I first thought this installment of Bargewatch would contain various resolutions.  Consequently, I think we should resolve to make money.  And instead of the rebuild New Orleans mantra, I’m going with this word:  Reinvention.  If progress for certain entrepreneurs looks like a Gray Lines tour bus shuttling visitors through the worst wreckage of the city, charging $20, and putting a small portion of that towards reconstruction efforts, my reinvention idea piggybacks theirs.  Here’s what I propose:

First, like folks who took pieces of the Berlin Wall and the old turf from the former University of Michigan Wolverines Stadium, I think a handful of us can form a conglomerate that corners the Lower Nine market.  Granted, the breaking up of the Eastern bloc city landmarked something different than the sinking of much of the Lower Ninth Ward.  Still, the memory of pain in those building materials ended up for sale.  So, one group can serve authentic parts of the broken levee wall.  We’ll start with a paperweight size piece, good for the office, move to one foot by roughly one foot pieces, then larger.  We’ll not cut or play with the parts, just collect them as they are found or as the Corps and subcontractors left them – authentic.  And for a little extra tagged onto the price, we’ll sell concrete pieces that also have protruding steel reinforcement bars, a powerful addition to the back garden as a lawn ornament.

My foray into the industry will involve a little overhead:  welding equipment.  I was talking with a guy at a New Years Eve party who thought one way to rid the Lower Nine of the barge, partly resting in the bedroom at 1815 Jourdan Street, looks like cutting it into bits.  I hope to handle that myself, a lone figure amid sparks and a nearly impossible one man task – part of the marketability of adversity.  I can melt the steel into medallions, becoming a found metal jeweler, and Gray Lines can pay me for each medallion to be given out as a bus tour souvenir. 

But finally, this cockamamie idea of reinvention lacks something quite important.  When I was a child, I recall a field trip to a kind of pre-revolutionary era settlers’ village.  Are you feeling me?  The conglomerate, at this stage made up of an affirmative action conscious board of shakers and movers, will remake part of the Lower Nine and pay displaced citizens to live there as they did before.  The citizens in their newly crafted village will wave merrily on cue.

And to reiterate, at the tour’s end, the participants have their choice of levee wall paperweight or, for someone special, my one-of-a-kind barge-beveled medallion. 

However, within the past week, a chain link fence has been secured along the length of both levee breaches, and the barge now waits behind yellow tape and do not enter blockades.  In truth, people are probably more enamored of the hulking barge than an item made from it, and they will travel for a glimpse, bringing the unimaginable images back home. 

In a year, I cannot see how the barge will remain where it now sits.  Sadly and moreover, another group of entrepreneurs and investors will probably grab hold of the area, their reinvention in the making.  The tourist industry with its post K strategy – for example, have a round at Molly’s, the bar that never closed – makes me almost believe in this resolution, the one thing we must promise one another:  Try not to smile and wave, playing progress up, or frown and curse, vying for sympathy, or vice versa, at any tour buses passing through.  We do not live in a diorama.  And ironically, those faces pressed to the glass may very well belong to displaced residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, as we watch them en route to the rubble they call home.

My reinvention idea piggybacks theirs.

Thinking in dollars and purse? We do not live in a diroama.