Why The Humanities Matter
Editor's Column from LCV Spring 2006 (May 19, 2006)

As New Orleans and the southern tier of 16 parishes savaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita tentatively contemplate their future, it becomes compellingly clear that the humanities’ stewardship of our past is more essential than ever to the quality and even the possibility of our future. While to its credit, the Louisiana Recovery Authority has engaged three planning firms of national and even international stature — Peter Calthorpe Associates, Andres Duany of Duany/Plater-Zyberk, and Ray Gindroz of the Urban Design Associates — it has become clear that even with their commitment to planning that respects each community and region’s history and culture, they must draw on the knowledge of Louisiana’s scholars to shape their plans to weave the future onto the fabric of the past.

This was exemplified at the Arabi charrette at the St. Bernard Parish courthouse when Andres Duany assured the assembled citizens that he and his colleagues were not there to impose a plan defining their future, but rather that “the key to your future is embodied in the wisdom of your ancestors.” He went on to explain that where their 20th century slab houses were perpetually vulnerable to the ravages of flooding, future safety lay in the raised masonry-pier construction of 19th century homes, not just due to their height, but because even the mortar and paint were lime based, and lime was a mold inhibitor.

In New Orleans especially, many architectural adaptations of European forms to the tropical climate were imported from San Domingue as the city doubled in population from the influx of immigrants fleeing the Haitian Revolution. Some of the very best adaptations to the flood-prone terrain are embodied in such houses as Madame John’s Legacy on Dumaine Street, built in 1788, or the pair of raised 19th century townhouses (built 1836-38) in the 700 block of Girod Street which today have carports on the ground level, simultaneously resolving both flooding and parking congestion in a dense business district. Architectural historian Lloyd Vogt’s The Historic Buildings of the French Quarter is a compendium of examples of past structures from our Spanish and French heritage which serve as lessons for the future, if only we would heed them.

Cultural Structures and Patterns
In planning the relocation of Erath in Vermilion Parish from a low-lying plot of land — located there for the simple reason that it was a company town and the sugar company put the town where it owned the land — Duany expressed wonderment at the difficulty in locating large parcels of land on which to relocate the town, saying he had never seen such small slivers of plots anywhere else in the country. What he did not realize was that Louisiana was perhaps the only state in which inheritance was not governed by primogeniture, in which land was passed on to the first son, compelling the other siblings to move on to seek their own land and fortunes. After several generations, the most valuable land was consequently sub-divided over and over, resulting in the pattern that initially frustrated Duany’s efforts to situate the new town. In this way, Louisiana differed from the East Coast colonies whose dispossessed sons had to move west, eventually over the Cumberlands and Appalachians, an historic population displacement in search of what collectively became our Manifest Destiny. But Louisiana, with its unique Napoleonic Code was a land apart. Small wonder we lead the nation in residents who are native to the state.

To control our future we must know our past, and here the humanities are indispensable in knowing our architectural, political and legal history, our patterns of immigration and settlement. Our social history, too, is unique and essential in understanding Creole society, Acadian clannishness, the preeminence of the gens de couleur libre, in understanding the racial implications of placage which so impacted the Creole faubourgs, and later of integration and the role of white flight in suburbanization and the growth of formerly rural parishes such as Jefferson, St. Tammany and St. Bernard.

Life is long and memory is short
New Orleanians have a perverse failure of memory. Over our history we have placed too much trust in new infrastructure as if each improvement of the levees or canals, or installation of pumps, would make us forever immune from nature. Since 1718, every couple of decades, builders, and later developers, always with the complicity of government permits and the acquiescence of the population, insisted on building in ever lower and more vulnerable land. Federal policy has made its own contribution, extending levees that shunted land-renewing silt further and further over the continental shelf away from the marshes and adding more and more intrusions into the land: the Industrial Canal and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the very conduits of Katrina’s wrath. John Magill in his seminal essay “On Perilous Ground” in the winter 2005/06 issue of Louisiana Cultural Vistas documents the history of flooding and the development of this civic infrastructure. It is from such scholarship that we must finally take our cues for where and how we need to build, not just for the grace of ironwork and covered galleries, but also for our very survival.

For it is human culture and our accumulated knowledge of this place which makes Louisiana so much more than mosquitoes and high water. If we build on anything, let us start first and foremost with memory and the wisdom of history and the other disciplines of the humanities.

—Michael Sartisky, Editor-In-Chief