I am writing this in the hope it may provide some comfort for those grieving the injuries suffered by the City of New Orleans, part of the World’s heritage, as well as working for the relief of the people affected.
The city of New Orleans is in a state of what seems like irrecoverable devastation. On September 2, 2005 the city is covered by a smoke from fires in a paint factory and other buildings in the centre of the city. On another September 2 it was not water but a fire starting in a bakery that caused the razing of a city to the ground leaving a smoking ruin in which beloved buildings were no more.
When the rebuilding of the iconic great church began, a smashed stone was found in the foundations. On it one word in latin was inscribed that became the motto of the building and in many ways the city that was reborn round it. I urge you to take this up as a watchword and example for New Orleans. That single inspirational word was “Resurgam” – “I shall rise again”.
That previous September 2 was in 1666 in London. A small fire in a shop in Pudding Lane spread and levelled most of a city that the previous year had gone through another disaster. Plague had come from the docks and killed huge numbers who were already living in squalor in crowded poverty. The rich decamped the city, ironically spreading the disease as they went. By the time the fires subsided, the city had been sterilised of plague but the symbol of the city, the great medieval cathedral of St Paul was reduced to smoking ruins. The people were very much in the same mental state as those in New Orleans are now. Faced with the ruins, they asked how the city could possibly be inhabitable let alone prosper.
Along with his plans for the rebuilt cathedral, Christopher Wren proposed a whole new layout, wiping away more than a millennium of street layout and planning a new city of straight boulevards and broad roadways so that fire could not leap across the open sewers that passed for streets, from one overhanging upper storey to another. (Open sewers as few houses had “guardrobes” or internal long drop toilets to a cesspit but threw the “nightsoil” out of the window with a shout of “Gardez vous”, corrupted to “gardez loo” giving the British the “loo”). Here comes lesson number one for the rebuilding of New Orleans, those of you who have visited London may have noticed a distinct lack of these designs. They got lost in the post-fire squabbles as owners reclaimed their land and refused to have any part of the plans. What remained were building codes that ensured high risk structures like thatched wooden buildings could not come back. Rather than rebuilding the “shotgun houses” in the lowest part of NO, it may be necessary to have them built on stilts or floatable like some new developments in the Netherlands. Those are built like boats retained by columns that carry the services like water and electricity in flexible systems that minimise damage. If individual buildings cannot economically comply, rebuilding the levees to much higher levels and re-establishing the wetland protection would be an alternative. Remember, if the loss of the wetlands continues at the current rate, the city will be on the coast in the second half of the century.
While they were obliged to rebuild business and houses according to the new code, London was rebuilt “organically” ie as and when the owners could afford and extended or rebuilt as they prospered. But very soon after the fire the people returned. Communities re-established themselves. Lesson two – a city is not only buildings and land, it’s a complex interplay of the communities in them. The city of New Orleans did not invent Jazz and all of that vibrancy, the people of the city did. New Orleans is the mournful/joyful funeral procession of a poor person and the community they came from, not the tourist traps of Bourbon Street.
Wren did not have life easy, his plans for St Paul’s were much changed and criticised and in the end the final version was not what was expected by those paying for it. What he gave was leadership and inspiration. If the Mayor or Governor can rebuild the community that is New Orleans alongside the buildings, they would be worthy to have a memorial with the same inscription as that for Wren. On his grave in St Paul’s is no statue or portrait. There is just another inscription it Latin. “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you”
