For further coverage of the Barge, check out Adam Peltz's Bargewatch.

Bancroft Drive: My Flirtation with the Power that Swamped the Ninth Ward
 
In the late 70's I was in the renovation business and doing a lot of kitchen installations for a store called Lagarde's. They specialized in Quaker Maid, probably at that time the most expensive cabinets made in America. Quaker Maids are tricky to install because the sides miter into the faces with no reveal, so when you screw them together they make a perfectly square and straight installation, no matter what the conditions of the walls or the rest of the house.

I got a call one day from a carpenter named Roland who said he was working on a house on Bancroft Drive and they needed someone to install the cabinets. I needed work so I went right over. Even in the rarified Quaker Maid market, one seldom gets to work on a renovation as high-class as this one. There were marble floors, custom mahogany woodwork and giant crown molding throughout. All the doors were "invisible," mounted on Soss hinges with the baseboards running through them, an incredibly difficult installation. Roland told me he'd been working here for almost a year and the owner was finally getting impatient and was making him hire some help, or else he would install the kitchen himself.

He didn't want a price. I gave him an hourly rate and he said just a minute, disappeared down the hallway toward the back of the house, came back seconds later and said "great-- can you start today?"
 
I got my friend Charlie to help me and we started the next morning. We got there early, about 7, and just walked in and began unboxing the cabinets and checking the walls. About 8:30 Roland came walking out of the back of the house with a cup of coffee and said "How's it look guys?"

I had a couple of questions about the layout, like if we were going to have to build the reinforcement for the uppers over the island, and then I said "Do you live here or something?"

"Nah," he said, "I just sleep over sometimes."
 
Sometime that afternoon the owner came out from the back of the house and Roland introduced us to her, Carol Ingram. She was a comfortably shapely forty year old, with just the tiniest bit of hangover sag to the eyes and a big billowy head of blonde hair. She gazed around her at the chaos of the construction with resigned lassitude. "What do you think of my kitchen?" she asked me.

"I think it's gonna be great," I told her. "Electric ovens with gas cooktops are the only way to go. You've got plenty of pantry space, Corian tops, the glass doors over the island... very nice."

"So what's her story?" I asked Roland a few days later, after it became obvious he was sleeping with her.

"She's married to Fritz Ingram," he told us, "you know, Ingram Oil, Ingram Tankships. He's doing time in the minimum security joint in Florida for tax evasion or something, so she's running this job by herself. I think it's mainly her place anyway. He calls a couple of times a week to check progress. Sounds like he's got a regular office set up down there, runs the whole operation from his cell.... or I guess it's really more like an apartment."

"Is he OK with you fucking his wife?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure if Carol told him or not. I don't think I'm gonna bring it up with him, if I ever meet him, though."
 
We got to know Carol a little bit. She seemed to like hanging around with the guys on the job. She paid everyone on Friday from her bedroom, the only room in the house that was finished. The subs would line up outside the door as if for a gang-bang and were admitted one by one.

The first time I did it I went in with our hours calculated on a scrap of sheetrock. The room was pretty magnificent, with a entire wall of glass looking out onto Bayou Saint John, mahogany crown molding and woodwork, and invisible doors all over the place, one of which led, to my surprise, into a bath and closet suite that was bigger than the bedroom itself.

She was lying on the king sized bed propped up on pillows, with her checkbook on her lap. I tried to give her my bill on the scrap of sheetrock, but she waved it away. "Just tell me how much," she said. I glanced at the scribbles, rounded it up to the next 50, and she wrote the check.
 
I quickly learned to round the bills up to the next 100, or 200, as she never checked them and had no interest in math. She had some of the best craftsmen in New Orleans working on that house, and some days there would be 20 people working. I can’t imagine what it might have cost her.

I asked Roland about the family coffers and he said it didn’t seem to matter how much she spent, but then one day we heard the phone ring and she came out of the bedroom screaming for everyone to be quiet. So we shut down our saws and drills and sanders and put our ears to the bedroom door.

“I don’t know what to do, Fritz,” she was saying, “I know it’s taking forever. I think it will be done soon. OK. OK, I’ll tell Roland, yes, to whip them into shape.”

We never heard anything more about it.
 
Carol had two cars, a Caddy and a Jaguar. One day she went out and I noticed she seemed to pause, deciding which car to take. She took the Caddy. But then she returned about two hours later in a new Excalibur copy. She had the top down and her blonde hair waving behind her, grinning like a little kid. She came in and told all the workers to come out and see her new car.
 
When the kitchen on Bancroft was nearing completion, Carol asked me if I wanted to do some work at her store in the French Quarter. Until that mention, I had no idea that Carol had a business. She told me to call her down there and come look at it, but not to tell Roland. “Roland thinks he should get all my work,” she said, “but I can’t give him any more until he finishes this fucking house, so let’s just keep this between us.”

The store was called C. Ingram, at the corner of Royal and Toulouse, as I recall. It sold Ralph Lauren only, mostly Polo shirts. Or rather, it stocked Polo shirts. I never saw a customer in there. When I looked it up in the phone book, I had to look through all the Ingram Oil and Ingram Tankship listings, 25 or 30 numbers in One Shell Square, before I found the tiny “Ingram, C” with the Toulouse address.

She wanted me to cut a door (invisible, of course) into a storeroom, to use as a fitting room. We started working on it right away, alternating days between there and Bancroft, and when Roland would ask me where else we were working I just told him I had another job. Then one day we went down to the store and Roland was there skimming the sheetrock. “Just floatin it out a little,” he said, “I can’t stand wavy walls. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything to Carol.”

As far as I know, she never knew he worked down there.
 
One Friday morning when we got to the house Carol announced that she would fix us all breakfast to celebrate the kitchen’s completion. All the other subs stood around and ooed and ahhed over it. The cabinets were red Cherry. The Sub-Zeros had matching fronts. The Corian sink joined seamlessly to the top. Total cost of the room: about a hundred grand.

For breakfast that day she took a package of sausage biscuits out of the Sub-Zero and put them in the double combination conventional/convection/microwave oven and nuked them for 90 seconds. They were cold in the middle and hard on the outside, but pretty tasty. Then she asked us if we wanted coffee. Everyone did, so she got out a jar of instant Maxwell House and made it up in styrofoam cups from the boiling water dispenser on the sink. Cream and sugar? Out came commercial dispensers of Cremora and sugar.

Just then the newly installed recessed wall phone in the kitchen rang. Carol answered it. “Oh hi Fritzie! We’re having breakfast in the new kitchen!”
 
That was about the last day we worked on that job. There was no punch-out to do because Roland was so picky he did it all himself. I didn’t see Roland again for years, then one night ran into him in a bar in the Quarter. He looked a little the worse for wear, but still spunky. When I asked him if he’d seen Carol lately, he said “Carol who?”
 
After Katrina, when we were finally back in town and doing a little sight-seeing and scavenging, we took a drive down Bancroft. The street and the houses were empty except for Mexican contractors. Though the houses had taken only a few inches of water, they were throwing everything out-- furniture, clothes, electronics, plumbing fixtures, everything. It was a scavenger’s dream. We got so much stuff we had to go unload the truck and come back. There was so much stuff we got sick of hauling it. I talked to one of the demo contractors and he said he had so many big screen TV's he didn't know what to do with them.

I looked for Carol’s house but couldn’t remember which one it was.
 
Later, when we toured the Lower 9 we saw some houses that had had more than a few inches of water in them. In fact, we saw houses that had been washed away. And we saw some more houses that had a barge sitting on top of them. The number on the barge, ING 4727, gave me pause. Could that ING stand for Ingram? And I started to wonder what might be up with Carol and Fritz.
When you look in the New Orleans phone book now, all you find listed under Ingram is Ingram Barge Co., and that's in Nashville. This, it turns out, is the company that owns the barge that has become such a popular tourist attraction. It's chairman, now, is Fritz's nephew Orrin.

Fritz, apparently, was actually in jail for bribery, not tax evasion, as Roland (and probably Carol) thought. He was released in 1980 by virtue of a pardon from Jimmy Carter. What, after all, are campaign contributions for? He eventually emigrated to Ireland and renounced American citizenship. If you read between the lines of the history you might suspect the family that initiated that huge shipping, book distribution, and electronics distribution conglomerate, whose sales hit $11 billion in 1994, sold old Fritz down the river.

As to Carol, I couldn’t find any mention of her in the Forbes Magazine articles, nor anything else on the information superhighway. Could she have just disappeared? Could this be her? Or this?

ING 4727: Could a remodeling job 2 decades ago have been the butterfly's wing that killed the Lower 9?

The Carol Ingram, or merely Carol Ingram?