The TURN INTO SUMMER UPDATE 2007
Mac McGill T-shirts for 9th Ward Geo-thermal Project!


 

JazzFest is over.

Hot, humid days are mounting in May.

The sultry blanket of Summer is settling on New Orleans for four months of dawn-to-dawn continuum--92 to 98• High, 74 to 80• Low. It will be again like a steambath with thundershowers

Rebuild Green has begun several projects since our last Update, the day before Mardi Gras Tuesday last February.

You can check them out by clicking on windows under the home-page banner. They are:


Also, we now have T-shirts and posters available to those who want to support Rebuild Green / New Orleans!

t-shirt frontt-shirt backposter

Based on artwork by Mac McGill, a widely known artist from Brooklyn, New York who gutted houses with Common Ground Relief in 2006, the T-shirts come in sizes Small, Medium, Large and X-Large. You can see more of Mac's fine, subtle and evocative work at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/911/911-comics.html. Tax deductible donations can be sent to Rebuild Green through our fiscal sponser, Global Exchange, at 2017 Mission Street / San Francisco, CA 94110. Please visit our donation page.

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1. The first house in the Upper 9th Ward to be made of Structural Concrete Integrated Panels (S.C.I.P.s):

The Legier House At 2521 Piety.

Robert Legier and his wife Eileen have undertaken with Rebuild Green a house that could withstand the next Hurricane and flooding that strikes New Orleans. With walls, floors and roof made of Structural Concrete Integrated Panels (sections of recycled styrofoam enhanced by a latticework of steel bars and anchored by rebar, then encased with 1 1/2 inches of concrete shot onto their interior and exterior surfaces), the house will be identical to hundreds that have already withstood 220-miles-per-hour Hurricanes in the Caribbean. S.C.I.P. housing is also mold-resistant and termite-resistant and offers advantages of about 40% for energy-efficiency and sound-proofing. Using plans drawn by Ivan Mandich of ICS and sub-contracting through Southern Solutions and T & P Plumbing, Rebuild Green has so far completed foundational pilings and plumbing for the project. Panels will be suppled by M2-USA, a new division of Emedue, a company that originated in Italy three decades ago and that now has plants in more than twenty nations around the world.

foudation plumbing

The S.C.I.P. structure will go with other energy-saving features intended for his house by Robert Legier, one of seven brothers raised on this block of Piety in the Upper 9th Ward. Now 69 and very robust, Robert came back to New Orleans in the late 1990s after driving a Public Transit bus in Los Angeles for more than 25 years.

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2. The first multi-residence geo-thermal project in New Orleans.

Piety Street and Desire Street run side-by-side among flood-wracked housing near the Florida Street canal and railroad tracks in the Upper 9th Ward. This part of the Upper 9th received onrushing surges of water 12 feet high when levees broke after Hurricane Katrina. Robert Legier and his back-door neighbor, Margaret Doyle-Johnston, stayed through the storm and helped others survive it. Both were among the first in their neighborhood to occupy F. E. M. A. trailers, manifesting their determination to return and revive their blocks.

Now Margaret and Robert have partnered in a project meant to provide 24 geo-thermal units that will serve ten houses along the adjoining lots of the 2500 block of Desire and Piety Streets (see map below).


Other partners are in the geo-thermal project are Rebuild Green and a new company, Earth-Cool, begun by two one-time Harvard undergraduates, Jeremiah Johnson and Christoph Huguenin. In early 2006 Jeremiah and Christophe left Harvard to volunteer for Common Ground Relief in New Orleans. During their months with C G R's Mid-City Project (the hot Summer months of New Orleans' dawn-to-dawn steamy blanket), Jeremiah and Christophe were part of a team responsible for gutting 17 Public Schools and outfitting a bio-remediation vehicle.

Jeremiah from South Carolina and Christophe from New York City are representative of the wide range of volunteers drawn to this city.

volunteers

Jeremiah Johnson, Christoph Huguenin, Margaret Doyle Johnston & Robert Legier

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3. Investors Wanted: the Danny Barker Place and its Sustainable Building Center.

THE DANNY BARKER PLACE
Another partnership that's recently arisen for Rebuild Green is with the architectural firm Perkins + Will. Perkins + Will employs more than 1800 people in more than 20 offices around the world; among dozens of commissions, they've designed the Medical Center, Hospital, and the Dubai International Airport Last February Christian Bormann of Perkins + Will's New York office contacted Rebuild Green with word that the firm was holding a retreat of its Principals in New Orleans April 23-25. Chris asked about how Perkins + Will retreat participants could contribute to the rebuild in New Orleans through a day of volunteering. Out of this contact and a subsequent visit by Chris to NOLA we agreed that one good way would be for P + W architects to do designs for a multi-use development, the Danny Barker Place, that friends and I had in mind for the 7th Ward.

So, on Monday, April 23, thirty architects from many P + W offices
formed three ten-person Teams (Teams A, B and C. linearally enough) and tackled the effort to fit several components onto the multi-use
7th Ward site, the Danny Barker Place.
These components are:

In the week following that of April 23, Perkins + Will's New York City
office advanced the design into a more completed concept. You can see one part of that concept, a rendering of the Louis and Paul Barbarin Performance Hall, below.


Donny Barker Center

The full set of Perkins + Will renderings--many of them inspirational and beautiful to my eye, like the one above--are available here.

You might also want to check these links to information about Danny Barker and Paul Barbarin and Valmore Victor, musicians and educators
all.

Danny Barker:
http://shopping.yahoo.com/p:Danny%20Barker:1927005224

Louis and Paul Barbarin:
http://shopping.yahoo.com/p:Paul%20Barbarin:1927005219
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=7336

Valmore Victor:
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2007-04-24/news_feat.php

THE SUSTAINABLE BUILDING CENTER
For the Danny Barker Place to work as a financial investment--and for revitalization of the 7th Ward, 8th Ward, the Upper and Lower 9th Wards,
and really all of working-class New Orleans to work in a financially sustainable way--we'll need an economic engine that produces considerable revenue and that employs many native New Orleaneans.

For any mass rebuilding to succeed here over decades of climate-change in the 21st century, it will need to use sustainable architecture, renewable energy-sources, and recycled materials.

Thus the Sustainable Building Center.

A Sustainable Building Center as part of the Danny Barker Place could provide a base for several businesses that could produce hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and that could employ hundreds unto thousands of New Orleaneans.

These businesses would offer for New Orleans' residential and commercial use:

There are more than 100,000 homes in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes, within a 15-miles radius of the Danny Barker Place, that could use these cost-cutting measures.

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4. Survey Upper 9th Ward Residents about Use of Renewable Energy in Homes

By June of 2007 we'll need teams of volunteers to walk the Upper 9th, going door to door, and gather information as to residents' interest in renewable-energy features (such as geo-thermal and solar power) for their homes.


upper 9th ward

Volunteers and/or apprentices may subsequently help to install
renewable-energy features for homes.



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5. Defend the Lower 9th!

During the week of March 12-19, 2007 the City of New Orleans placed notices of condemnation for public safety and welfare' on 187 houses, the greatest proportion of these houses in the hard-hit, long-neglected Lower 9th Ward. The houses faced demolition by the City and the U. S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) within 30 days.

Advocates for displaced homeowners in New Orleans, however, raised
several objections to the swath of posted condemnations.
1. Many of the condemned houses are structurally sound.
2. Home-owners have not been informed of the condemnation.
3. Process to appeal the condemnation is unclear and haphazard.

One home-owner, 68-year-old retired schoolteacher Iris Gladney, whose house at 1743 Lamanche in the Lower 9th received a 'condemnation' handbill on March 13, 2007, three weeks before notice of the condemnation was publicly available via printing in the city's daily newspaper, the New Orleans Times Picayune, said: "I don't want my house torn down... It's completely gutted. It's been treated for mold. And I pay a man every month to cut the grass.... Why would I be applying to the Road Home to rebuild if I wanted my house torn down?"


Photos of notices placed on three houses in a single block, St. Claude Court in the Lower 9th, are below.

notice

You can read more in a lengthy, sympathetic, good article by Michelle Krupa that was printed May 8. 2007 in the New Orleans Times Picayune--
http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/05/demolish_or_save.html

You can register your feelings about the City of New Orleans' and
F.E.M.A.'s procedures by e-mailing these addresses:
Mayor's Office:
http://tinyurl.com/352vsn

FEMA National
http://www.fema.gov/about/contact/index.shtm#general

Senator Mary Landrieu
http://landrieu.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm

Senator David Vitter
http://vitter.senate.gov/?module=webformiqv1

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Senator David Vitter

notice