Seven

Cemetery traffic got backed up to Metairie, at the:

SEVENteenth Street Canal

Six Pack o' Dixie.

FRIED onion rings.

beFOUR you drive me nuts.

three french breads

Tujague's recipe

for the crawfish they caught in Arabi.

The cemetery shot is a 1967 aerial photo of Greenwood Cemetery, City Park Avenue at the head of Canal Street, right next to I-10. The shot is from the back of the cemetery looking towards City Park Avenue. It really gives you the feel for why we call our cemeteries "Cities of the Dead." The traffic going into the cemeteries would get the most backed up on November 1st, All Saints' Day. The reason is that New Orleanians made use of the holiday (the overwhelming majority of New Orleans businesses used to close on All Saints' as well as schools, because it's a "holy day of obligation" for the Catholic Church. Good Catholics would go to Mass, then go out to the cemeteries to spruce up the family tomb for the next day. November 2nd is All Souls' Day, which was more important for Yat Catholics. They knew their loved ones weren't Saints, and need extra praying for before they got into heaven. :-)

The 17th Street Canal. Sigh. I've crossed that canal for one reason or another so many times in my life. It's one of the north-south drainage canals in the metro area, and runs along the line between Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. Since most of New Orleans is below sea level, we drain rain water from catch basins in the streets into these drainage canals. Huge pumps then force the water in the canals into Lake Pontchartrain, and that's how we keep ourselves dry.

The drainage canals are not protected by the same high levees that we have running around the perimeter of the metro area. The easement needed to build a 30' levee takes up another 50'-75' of land, and there were already homes whose backyards bump right up to the drainage canals. The public outcry would have been way too strong if city and parish government would have exercised eminent domain to just uproot those homes. So, the Corps proposed an alternative, steel and concrete floodwalls. Their designs were flawed and the floodwalls of several canals, including 17th Street, breached on 29-August-2005.

The bridge you see here is the old "Bucktown Bridge" that connected the Jefferson Parish neighborhood of Bucktown to West End, on the other side of the canal. Originally the bridge permitted auto traffic, but in the 1980s, the city converted the parking lot in front of the row of West End restaurants to a pay lot, so they closed the bridge to vehicles, since it would have been a back-door into the pay lot. It was a foolish thing for the city to do, since it hurt all the businesses at West End. The pay parking scheme was shortly abandoned, but the Bucktown Bridge remained pedestrian-only.

Since the storm, a massive pump and floodgate system has been installed on the lake end of the canal.