Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm [Hardcover]

Richard Campanella (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2006

Geographies of New Orleans integrates hundreds of historical sources with custom-made maps, graphs, photos, and satellite images to explore the intricate urban fabrics of one of the world's most fascinating cities from its fragile deltaic terrain to its striking built environment, from its diverse ethnic makeup to its devastation by Hurricane Katrina.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 433 pages
• Publisher: Center For Louisiana Studies (August 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1887366687
• ISBN-13: 978-1887366687
• Product Dimensions: 12.3 x 9.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #806,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 10, 2006, September 11, 2006

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reviewer (new orleans, la USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm (Hardcover)

As Hurricane Katrina roared into the city, Richard Campanella remembers in "Geographies of New Orleans," he tried to convince himself that his decision to ride the storm out in his 9th Ward home "was not an emotional one, made with a clenched fist and a fanatical dedication to place, but rather a rational one based on data and reason."

He lived, after all, in a sturdy, old, raised house, seven feet above sea level, and by staying he could be present "to minimize structural damage, to mitigate, to respond to conditions before they developed into crises, to take corrective action to protect important papers and possessions, and afterwards, to guard against looters." But when his street suddenly filled with two feet of water, he knew he had made a "big, big mistake." He and his wife were now living "literally in the Gulf of Mexico."

Although the water receded before it became life-threatening, Campanella later recognized that his "ill-advised decision" not to evacuate had never really been as rational as he'd first thought. Instead, as "the big one" approached, he simply could not bring himself to leave. He wanted to be here "to bear witness to the intricate fabrics of this cherished city, at the moment of their terrible shredding." And, after reading "Geographies of New Orleans," it is easy to empathize with his decision.

"Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm" is a big, striking book, filled with photographs, maps, timelines and beautifully written essays on the city's culture, environment and history. Campanella, a geographer at the Tulane Center for Bioenvironmental Research, has made understanding the nuances of New Orleans neighborhoods his life's work. "Geographies of New Orleans" is clearly a labor of love, but it is also a book stunning in its analytical precision. While Campanella knows and appreciates the lore of New Orleans, he bases all of his conclusions about the city's past and present on hard-won data, and it is, indeed, difficult to imagine just how much painstaking research went into this book.

Take, for example, his chapter on the Irish Channel, one of New Orleans' most-storied neighborhoods. Anyone who has attended the St. Patrick's Day block party at Parasol's Irish Channel Bar knows the legends. The Channel, so the story goes, was once filled with Irish immigrants who worked grueling shifts on the docks and then went to corner watering holes at night to drink, fight and sing Irish songs long into the evening. It is a rich and colorful history, and one based, in part, on truth. But, as Campanella notes, there is substantial disagreement as to whether Parasol's is in the historical Irish Channel -- or even whether the Channel of lore ever existed at all.

Some historians and old-timers say the "one and only" Irish Channel was on Adele Street, near where the Wal-Mart stands today. Others claim that Tchoupitoulas Street was the "main avenue of the Irish Channel." And while many maintain that the boundaries of the Channel were Josephine Street, Magazine Street, Louisiana Avenue and the river (the neighborhood that includes Parasol's), the 1938 WPA guide to New Orleans placed the Channel in today's Warehouse District. Father Earl Niehaus, the most famous chronicler of the Irish in New Orleans, rejected the idea that the city ever had a segregated Irish neighborhood. Instead, he suggested that people simply liked the "picturesque, though mysterious" phrase "Irish Channel," and "a myth was born."

Campanella brings a geographer's meticulousness to this debate. Rather than rely on legend, he spent countless hours mining data from primary sources in an effort to determine if there ever was a specific, predominantly Irish neighborhood known as the Irish Channel. His systematic search through old newspapers revealed that the term Irish Channel first appeared in the late 19th century but that the exact location of the neighborhood was rarely defined.

Census data from the 19th century proved to be of little help because census takers often failed to record house numbers or streets for the houses they visited. So Campanella created his own method for determining whether there was ever a neighborhood Irish enough to fit the legend of the Irish Channel. Matching addresses found in 19th century city directories with a list culled from the burial records of St. Patrick's Cemetery No. 1 of unmistakable Irish surnames -- such as Callahan, Flynn, Kelly and those starting with Fitz-, Mc-, O' -- Campanella mapped the old neighborhoods block by block.

What he found was that there was never an intensely clustered, exclusively Irish neighborhood in New Orleans. Although Irish immigrants did settle in particular districts such as the "back of town" where housing was cheap, they invariably lived side by side with Germans, Italians, African-Americans, and "a multitude of other ancestries." Assessing his research as a whole, Campanella concludes that the Irish Channel was once, most likely, a specific street -- Adele Street -- whose nickname came to be applied to a number of neighborhoods where Irish families lived. It is a cautious conclusion, one unlikely to end the long-standing debates, but in reaching it Campanella creates the most detailed account we have of where Irish immigrants to New Orleans settled and why they chose to settle where they did.

The Irish Channel is just one of many New Orleans neighborhoods Campanella explores in "Geographies of New Orleans." In other chapters he turns his expertise to the French Quarter, Uptown, the 9th Ward, Lakeview and eastern New Orleans, and it is fascinating to view the city through his eyes. In old, seemingly unremarkable buildings, Campanella sees the settlement patterns and streetscapes created by Sicilian and German immigrants, former slaves and free persons of color, Orthodox Greeks and Jews, black and white Creoles. In newer buildings he sees the history of desegregation, man's fateful efforts to conquer the environment, and the haphazard campaign to make New Orleans a "New South" city. He makes the architecture and topography of Gentilly and Mid-City as compelling as the famous neighborhoods frequented by tourists. And oft-ignored thoroughfares such as Elysian Fields Avenue become as interesting and worthy of preservation as St. Charles Avenue or Royal Street. "As a microcosm and barometer of two centuries of urban growth," Campanella argues convincingly, "Elysian Fields Avenue stands alone."

Because Campanella wrote almost all of "Geographies of New Orleans" before Katrina, it is also heartbreaking to read. Every page is a reminder of just how much has been lost. Given the amount of destruction the storm wrought, some may even wonder whether we should be spending so much time worrying about the city's past when there are so many questions about its future. Are long debates about the location of the Irish Channel -- and the meaning of the word Creole, and the dividing line between Uptown and downtown -- a luxury we can really afford? Perhaps New Orleanians have always been too focused on the minutia of the past rather than the problems of the present.

"Geographies of New Orleans" is a powerful refutation to such arguments. It is a dazzling book, unparalleled in its scope, precision, clarity and detail, that makes clear that what still survives of the "intricate urban fabrics woven here over the past three hundred years" is exactly what makes New Orleans worth saving.

. . . . . . .

Michael A. Ross is associate professor of history at Loyola University.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Definitive Work on an Extraordinary City, February 5, 2007

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empty pockets (New Orleans, LA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm (Hardcover)

Of all the volumes of print that have been dedicated to New Orleans in the last few years, this book stands out as a masterpiece.

As the discipline of geography is many things so is this book and it chronicles many aspects of this city. To understand the importance of New Orleans it is essential to understand its history, which Campanella explores with loving detail. Perhaps the most intruiging part of the book is the ethnic histories of a city which one hundred years ago was arguably the most multi-ethnic in America.

As a transplant to New Orleans I came to learn much about the neighborhoods and history through conversations with old-timers. Campanella's findings confirm everything that I had learned and much, much more. Even today, the destinies of individual neighborhoods and areas of the city can be explained largely through the histories illustrated in this book.

If I have one criticism it is that many of the illustrations are too small, however it must have been difficult to pack so much information into one book.

Finally, Campanella's often quirky photographs are pleasant aesthetic lagniappe.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from Preservation in Print, November 2006, November 9, 2006

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Alex Lemann - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm (Hardcover)

Perhaps the most eerie thing about reading Richard Campanella's new book, Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm is coming across sentences like this, written before Katrina: "The general trajectory of the region's physical geography is one of an eroding coastline, rising sea level, subsiding soils, and increasing vulnerability to hurricane-induced gulf surges." Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University, has made a literary career of analyzing New Orleans with scientific exactitude, and given his expertise in matters of alluvial deposits and soil subsidence, such prescient assertions are hardly surprising. What is a bit surprising about Geographies of New Orleans is how touchingly human it is. Campanella's work has none of the detached coldness one might expect from his analytical, scientific approach; instead he provides a vivid portrait of the city's organic development over the course of its 300-year history, one that should be required reading for anyone who has ever fallen under its spell.

Covering ground that will be familiar to readers of his previous book, Time and Place in New Orleans, Campanella begins with a look at the site of New Orleans in geological time. This first part, "Physical Geographies," is perhaps the most technical, but it provides an important basis for the historical analysis that follows. In part II, "Urban Geographies," Campanella analyzes how the physical characteristics of New Orleans have come to influence its urban form, from street patterns to land values and ethnic distributions.

The section dealing with the French Quarter, coming early in the second part, is where Geographies of New Orleans veers into the delightfully unexpected. It is here that we find Campanella's scientific methods of analysis applied to the architectural development of a neighborhood. The results are particularly illuminating, especially from the perspective of architectural preservation. Campanella has surveyed every single building in the Quarter by construction date, architectural style and building type, and he presents the results of his labor in a series of fascinating maps. Here we see that the storehouses prevalent in the more commercial parts of the quarter near the river and Canal Street correspond almost perfectly to modern levels of pedestrian traffic, that Creole architectural styles are more prevalent in the back of the Quarter, and that construction of townhouses declined sharply as the Quarter became more working-class after the Civil War. There is even an in-depth analysis of cast-iron galleries in the Quarter, with a map showing the density of their distribution in splotchy shades of green.

This type of analysis is replicated throughout. Elysian Fields Avenue is treated as a historical cross section of the city and is analyzed through its entire history, providing an architectural narrative of New Orleans' expansion from the river into the backswamp and to the edge of the lake. Here too, Campanella has the approach of a scientist. A page showing Elysian Fields Avenue with blocks color-coded by decade of oldest construction next to a topographic map of the same area looks more like a page from a chemistry textbook than a work of architectural history, but that is precisely what makes Campanella's work so provocative and fascinating.

Campanella opens his section on "Ethnic Geographies" with a brief statistical analysis illustrating the fact that New Orleans was, between 1820 and 1850, the most diverse city in the country. The more important question for Campanella, however, is why New Orleans was able to attract newcomers from all over the world in such numbers, and it is an issue that he carries forward into his analysis of each ethnicity, examining how and why each minority group was drawn to the city. Using the deep geographical perspective gained from the first parts of the book, Campanella is able to illustrate with convincing meticulousness why minorities settled where they did and how they were integrated into the urban fabric of New Orleans.

Campanella's chapter on the Irish is presented as a historical puzzle: "where was the Irish Channel?" By looking at distributions of Irish-born New Orleanians from 1840 to 1940 and delving into historical accounts, Campanella is able to provide a map showing various overlapping and conflicting theories of where this elusive neighborhood was actually located, and how its perceived location varied over time. This approach provides fascinating insights into the architectural character of the city throughout its history and in every neighborhood.

Geographies of New Orleans was, of course, researched and written before Katrina washed over and forever disrupted the city that had developed over the centuries. Campanella points out ruefully that his work is now of questionable relevance to the city that has survived and that it stands only as a monument to what was lost. There are short epilogues to each chapter pointing out the effects of the storm, but for the most part, Katrina is restricted to a final chapter in which Campanella weaves together an emotional account of staying in his Bywater home throughout the storm and a cool, detached narrative in which Campanella the geographer begins to take stock of the storm and its impact on his city. One can only hope that he will continue this process and present us with a comprehensive portrait of the new city to complement this impressive and fascinating volume, rendered poignantly out of date by a single storm last August.