Something positive for a change

Found on the NYT website, this article tells of a meeting nearly three years ago between Nancy Epstein, the chief executive of Artistic Tile, in Secaucus New Jersey and Nancy Biberman, the president of the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit group known as Whedco.

From the article

Epstein offered to donate 120 tons of older and discontinued ceramic, concrete and porcelain tiles to Ms. Biberman for her 128 apartments. Unlike many commercial developers, Ms. Biberman did not need large quantities of similar tiles and could use Artistic’s variety of small lots.

After Whedco placed tiles in bathrooms, kitchens and common areas this summer, 60 tons — worth about $250,000 — remained unused. Much of it sat outside Artistic’s warehouse on pallets, some in open boxes that exposed ceramic moldings, finished crowns and tiles costing up to $30 each. Another load sat so long in a trailer nearby that its legs had sunk into the asphalt.

Serendipity ensued in the form of Paul Eisemann, who refurbishes brownstones in Brooklyn and who volunteers in New Orleans, where he teaches home-building skills. With the hurricane debris largely cleared and the frames and walls of new homes going up, Mr. Eisemann and community leaders in New Orleans turned to outfitting bathrooms, kitchens and other rooms.

Mr. Eisemann learned from Artistic that more tile — enough to fill at least four tractor-trailers — was sitting in Secaucus.

Mr. Eisemann contacted Mary Croom-Fontenot, executive director of All Congregations Together, an alliance of religious groups in New Orleans that has rebuilt 142 homes with volunteer labor and donations. Her group, along with Lowernine.org, another nonprofit group in New Orleans focused on rebuilding homes, was excited about the prospect of getting high-quality tile.

Rev. Scott Sammler-Michael, minister of the Accotink Unitarian Universalist Church in Burke, Va.,had taken some congregants to New Orleans to help in the rebuilding effort. His group offered $3,000 to pay for one tractor-trailer load of tile to be shipped to Louisiana. Before he could write a check, a New Jersey trucking company that did not want its name publicized agreed to haul the first load without charge. Two trailers picked up the tile in October.

To ready the tiles for shipping, three workers at Artistic’s distribution center spent three days repacking the first 47,600 pounds of tile. The tiles were sorted, crated and shrink-wrapped and filled a couple of dozen pallets. “We want to make sure it goes to a good place,” said Gerard Esmail, the operations manager of Artistic’s warehouse.

Mr. Eisemann and Mr. Cramer are now focused on making sure the remaining two-thirds of the tiles end up in New Orleans.

“It seems like it’s been a really long haul, making hundreds of phone calls and e-mails and putting details together,” Mr. Eisemann said. “But big dreams cost the same amount of money as small ones, so dream big.”



Thousands of thanks to these wonderful, caring people.

Finally....

1,195 days after Katrina:

From the A.P.:

Work begins on a 2-mile-long floodwall across canals that funneled Hurricane Katrina's storm surge into New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish.

The Army Corps of Engineers scheduled groundbreaking today for the $695 million barrier across the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet.

It's meant to keep storm surge out of the gulf outlet and the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, which runs into the Intracoastal Waterway.


graphic from the New York Times

During Katrina, the navigation canal carried storm surge into the 9th Ward, washing houses from their foundations. The gulf outlet is blamed for flooding in St. Bernard Parish and eastern New Orleans.



The corps calls it the largest design-build civil works project in its history.

The gulf outlet will be closed; wide gates will let shipping through the Intracoastal Waterway.

Preservation

Karen Gadbois at Squandered Heritage dot com posts about preservation in the light of "the powers that be" decision to build new LSU/VA hosptial over taking what's already in place and rehabilitating that.




These past months as the drone of process took place many of us knew that the day would come when the decision for the LSU/VA hospital would be made public. We knew the day was coming and we knew the endless processes and procedures that took place would have little to no impact on a decision that was made outside of the realm of public input. We were entertained, we were placated and we were lied to. But in the end those decisions were not ours to make for ourselves. The public realm, the private property and the fate of a neighborhood fell to those who will not show their faces, those who seek to make careers, not communities.

Mark over at Toulouse Street holds the opinion that quite a few in New Orleans share:


the announcement that our Betters have come to a decision on building a new hospital complex downtown. Rather than take the advice of the citizens to rehab the historic Charity complex (and some some loot to boot), or perhaps to take the idle ruin of old Lindy Boggs/Mercy Hospital in my own neighborhood of Mid-City, they will instead demolish an entire neighborhood of hundreds of homes in lower Mid-City to build their bio-science field of dreams.

One ignored side effect of this is that the area where I worked for the last year-and-a-half, the north side of the Central Business District, will remain mostly a ghost town of abandoned commercial buildings. All that is needed to complete the hair-brained scheme to convert downtown into some sort of condominium time-share hell is the other bright idea of our recovery leaders to move the civil district courts into the criminal justice complex down Tulane Avenue (adjacent to the new Hospital World), leaving the city’s commercial center a whistling ghost town.

The decision is wrong. Make your voice count and use the link below to
send a letter to the Governor, the Secretary of Health & Hospitals and the Secretary of Veterans affairs via the National Trust for Historic Places website

From their website

"The National Trust for Historic Preservation views this decision as a serious error, as better alternatives that would save the neighborhood around the hospital are available"


Sign the letter at this website and pass this on. It's important.

Kudos to St. Bernard Project

Liz McCartney, dedicated to helping survivors of Hurricane Katrina rebuild their homes, was named 2008 CNN Hero of the Year.



The St. Bernard Project has rebuilt the homes of more than 120 families for free. St. Bernard Parish was leveled after a 20 foot storm surge roared up the MRGO and flooded and destroyed nearly everything.

McCartney, who will receive $100,000 to continue her work, was selected from among the top 10 CNN Heroes after six weeks of online voting at CNN.com. More than 1 million votes were cast.

Here's the background on Liz and her partner Zack:

Scuzzbucket of the Week

Walter Block, who holds the economics chair at Loyola, delivered a lecture a couple of weeks ago at the namesake college in Baltimore on why women get paid a lot less than men and bump into a "glass ceiling."



His conclusion was that women are less productive.

During question time, someone asked why blacks get paid a lot less than whites.

The explanation was the same.

The way Block sees it, women's intellects cluster around the mean, while men dominate the high and the low ends of the spectrum. Thus, while women are much less likely to wind up in prison, an early grave or sleeping on the streets, they are also much less likely to win a Nobel Prize -- except for "wussy stuff like poetry" -- or rise to the top of a corporation.

The entire article can be read at the link above.

Fort Pike Update

I got an email recently from someone who is working on cleaning up historic Fort Pike.
The Fort reopened 2 and 1/2 years after Katrina but was closed again this past September as a result of the impacts of the 2008 hurricane season.

Hurricanes Gustav and Ike caused just as much damage to the Fort as the 2005 season. It is currently closed due to clean up efforts, but should reopen by the start of 2009 season.

Here are some recent pictures showing what Gustav and Ike did to the Fort.
click on pictures for larger versions






Note the marsh grass washed in from the storms.






Here is a photo of the old Rigolets Bridge



And here's a picture of its demolition





This is the bridge that replaced the old, narrow bridge.



The view from the top is very nice. That coming from someone that's afraid of heights. I'd love to be able to stop at the top and look around someday.

Tagged

Swampwoman over at the Mosquito Coast said she usually trashes emails with tags but is playing this time. And she tagged me. So, in that same spirit I'll play along.

Here are the rules:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.



Okay, here are six random things about me:

1.) I'm left handed

2.) Hubby and I share the house with five (count em) felines

3.) I prefer boiled crabs over crawfish

4.) Born a yankee, I've spent more years of my life in S.E. Louisiana than my home state of Massachusetts.

5.) I will never get over my insane fear of cockroaches, dead or alive.

6.) I taught myself html when I quit smoking 10 years ago.

Here are the six bloggers I've tagged:

Wendy at Bayouwoman

Vicky Moos

Slimbolala

Adrienne over at After Katrina

Howie over at Howieluvzus

Greta from Kiss My Gumbo

Camellia City Market

Earlier this year I posted about Slidell's first Farmers' Market opening
after years of the city's residents resorting to travelling elsewhere for fresh produce.



Since its birth in April of this year, the Camellia City Market has grown and is still branching out.

In July of this year the market hosted its first live cooking demonstration
with Slidell native John Besh.



Hubby and I visited the market yesterday in search for wonderful Mediterranean food
from Pinnur Foods.



And we found it!

Lucky for us there was another cooking demonstration starting just as we arrived. The chef this week was Chef Scott Esteve from Abita Springs' Camellia Cafe. He was preparing oyster dressing. It was delicious.

We spoke with the people who run the Farmer's Market and they mentioned that they will have a cooking demonstration by the Redfish Grill in New Orleans. They'll be doing jumbo lumb crab cakes. I'll definitely be there.

On December 13th the market will be offering cookbooks signed by one of my favorite Louisiana cooks Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker from the Times Picayune.



The cookbook being offered is "Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes for Recovery From The Times-Picayune of New Orleans" and has 250 favorite authentic recipes from home cooks, restaurants and chefs, and tells the stories of those who lost the recipes and those who shared them so generously.

So if you're in the Slidell area on a Saturday morning, make the effort to visit the Camellia City Market from 8 am to 1 pm. It's worth the trip.

Rebirth on the coast

The Gulf Coast of Mississippi to a brutal beating from Katrina.

I posted last year about a Mississippi artist who has created some heartwarming art using dead oak trees along Highway 90 in Gulfport/Biloxi as his canvas and a chainsaw as his brush.

We recently took a ride out to the coast to see how things are progressing and found some new works of the chainsaw artist Dayton Scoggin. Called Hurricane Katrina Beautifucation Project he has works placed in Biloxi, Gulfport, and Long Beach centered in the medians and in the Parks.

Here are pictures of what we found.
click on pictures for larger versions








We looked in the grass to find this owl's lost eye, but didn't find it.
:)








this picture warms my heart because you can see growth from what was thougth to be a dead tree at the base of the pelican.

West Bay Diversion

From a Gambit piece in the November 18th issue regarding the West Bay Diversion project


The Corps' attempt to dodge financial responsibility for dredging is another example of its egregious indifference toward Louisiana's — and the nation's — environmental plight. Moreover, the Breaux Act was passed to create, protect and restore Louisiana's coastal wetlands — not improve navigation.

Garret Graves, director of the Governor's Office on Coastal Activities and a nonvoting member of the task force, says the state will pay for the dredging in the short term to keep the West Bay project going. He adds that the Corps should revisit the idea of balancing navigation, flood control and coastal restoration. Like Nungesser, Graves is interested in solutions, and the West Bay diversion is part of the solution to coastal wetland loss. Graves reports that the project produces 3.7 million tons of sediment a year — sediment that builds protective wetlands rather than clogs shipping channels, which the Corps otherwise would have to dredge. According to Harrison of the Environmental Defense Fund, when the Corps dredges a navigational channel, 80 percent of the material is either pumped or dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.

The diversion thus saves money, because it uses sediment productively rather than requiring expensive dredging to expel it from shipping channels and dump it into the Outer Continental Shelf. The Water Resources Development Act of 2007 directed the Corps to implement a program for the beneficial use of dredge material and authorized $100 million for the project. Is there anything more beneficial than using sediment to restore wetlands — while saving the federal treasury money on dredging? "If done properly, [diversion projects] benefit navigation and that is the whole point of an integrated coastal program," Graves says.

Amen


image from Environmental Health Perspectives website

2nd Annual PoBoy Festival

Sunday, November 23, 2008: 12 noon - 6:00pm
Oak Street at South Carrollton

The 2008 New Orleans Po-Boy Preservation Festival will feature two stages with live music, arts and crafts, a silent auction, a children’s section with games and prizes, a "Corner Grocery Photo Experience" photo booth, panel discussions covering the history of the po-boy (starting at 11:00 a.m.) and, of course, the best tasting po-boys in New Orleans.


Food Vendors



Art Vendors



Music Schedule