Nine

On da Ninth day of Christmas, we drove down

Delery, in the

Lower Ninth Ward

ATE by ya mama's.

SEVENteenth Street Canal

Six Pack o' Dixie.

FRIED onion rings.

leave it alone, ya make me nuts!

three french breads

Tujague's recipe

for the crawfish they caught in Arabi.

Ah, the Ninth Ward. First, if you don't mind, a bit of New Orleans geography:

Above is a map of the Lower Ninth Ward. (Delery Street is the dark blue line on the right.) The "Ninth Ward" as a political region encompasses Bywater, which is the "Upper Ninth," on the upriver side of the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal (better known as the "Industrial Canal"), and the Holy Cross District, which is the area between the river and St. Claude Avenue, below the canal. The Ninth Ward has been considered to be a "bad" neighborhood for decades, as white flight took place and the white folks found what they considered to be greener pastures in St. Bernard and Jefferson Parishes. The upper portion of the Ninth Ward dropped all mention of the political ward, becoming "Bywater." The Holy Cross District gets its name from the school that dominated the neighborhood. This part of the Lower Ninth took the school's name to try to escape the perceived stigma of the Ninth Ward. (Holy Cross has moved to Gentilly post-storm, and the school's board has no clear plans for the original location as of now.)

The Ninth Ward is a blue-collar neighborhood. There's lots of industry in the area, along the canal and the river, the sugar refinery, lots of rail operations, and all the port- and marine-related businesses. Before white flight, Catholic boys from Da Nint' went to St. Aloysius, on Esplanade and N. Rampart (until it closed and merged with Cor Jesu in Gentilly in 1969), or Holy Cross. The girls went to Holy Angels, on St. Claude Ave. The public high school was F. T. Nicholls, on St. Claude in Bywater. Nicholls' name was changed to Frederick Douglass in the 1990s.

The upper photo of the street sign is from the New York Times. The Ninth Ward was flooded out by the breach in the east levee/floodwall of the Industrial Canal. The lower photo is Fats Domino's house, before the storm. Fats evacuated with family, but was out of touch for so long that the rumor went around he was dead. After the storm, someone wrote "RIP FATS" on the front of the house. Fats is indeed alive and well, currently living in Algiers.

Post-storm, Da Nint is the focus of a lot of the rebuilding efforts. There are several green-housing experiments going on in the neighborhood, most notably Brad Pitt's "Make It Right" project. (The much-publicized "Musicians Village" project, sponsored by Habitat for Humanity and Harry Connick, Jr., is actually in Bywater, the Upper Ninth.) The biggest problem with rebuilding the Lower Ninth is that so many of the houses there are either rental property or belonged to somebody's mama. In the case of rental property, the landlords have little incentive to rebuild right now. It's back to the chicken-and-egg issues of getting the black working class of New Orleans back home. In the case of houses owned by older folks, a lot of those people are now living with family members elsewhere. They're of an age where it would be a real struggle to be pioneers in their own homes, not to mention that the burden of rebuilding now falls on their children. Problem is, the children are grown up and have families and issues of their own they're dealing with. Mama's house just isn't a high priority when you're trying to rebuild your own life on the West Bank, Jefferson Parish, or (goddess forbid), Planet Hooston.

The Lower Ninth is also where many of the city-authorized house demolitions mentioned by Matt McBride at ThinkNola.com. Matt and Alan are doing some of the best work on the entire housing issue. ThinkNola should be considered primary source material for those not on the ground in New Orleans.