Without leaving his chair, Armand Charbonnet can take you back to 1950 in New Orleans for a virtual tour of North Claiborne Avenue with its majestic oaks, teeming shops and lively celebrations.
Planners push to tear out elevated I-10 over Claiborne
New Orleans Times Picayune
by Lolis Eric Elie
Saturday July 11, 2009
Charbonnet calls out the names of the old businesses and their specialties: The Capital Theater. LaBranche's Drug Store. People's Life Insurance. Two Sisters Restaurant. Albright's Sewing Machine Shop, Gilbert's Toy Store, Elite's Drug Store.
"Joe Sheep's sandwich shop used to open up at 6 in the evening and close about 2 in the morning," Charbonnet said. "He had five-cent stuffed crabs, five-cent stuffed tomatoes. The highest sandwich he had was 15 cents for hot sausage. At Moe's pie shop, you had hot pies every evening at 4."
Charbonnet speaks of the businesses with a familiarity born of an era when most of the travel along North Claiborne Avenue was on foot -- at a pace that allowed passers-by to read and digest the signs along the way.
"We used to have big oak trees and azalea gardens out there," Charbonnet recalled. "Carnival day, everybody would be out barbecuing all along Claiborne Street from Canal Street down to St. Bernard.
"That was like black people's Canal Street," said Charbonnet, 78, who was born in the building that houses Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home, his family business at St. Philip Street and North Claiborne Avenue in Treme.
A combination of factors combined to doom the commercial strip. Desegregation, suburban flight and shopping malls all resulted in more retail options for black consumers. But the most visible and painful blow to commercial and residential life on North Claiborne Avenue was the construction of the Interstate 10 elevated expressway.
Now, shifting national trends and looming maintenance expenses have experts talking about the possibility of removing the Claiborne Expressway from the Pontchartrain Expressway to Elysian Fields Avenue. Traffic would flow on surface streets or along Interstate 610.
Removal of the Claiborne Expressway was proposed by the two-year-old Unified New Orleans Plan and is a key recommendation in the city's draft master plan.
"I-10 is something that lots and lots of people complained about, especially in terms of its damage to Treme," said David Dixon, a principal with Goody Clancy, the firm that is creating the draft of the master plan.
Traffic fatality
North Claiborne, like its southern end uptown, was a wide boulevard with a large neutral ground running down its middle. Unlike South Claiborne Avenue, North Claiborne was also home to a magnificent collection of live oak trees.
It was the central artery for Mardi Gras Indian parades and other celebrations that, by the 1950s, were displaced by several federal policies that encouraged the development of suburban communities and highways. Those policies, in turn, discouraged investment in American cities.
"In 1956, they passed the Interstate Highway Bill, which said if a state built an interstate highway, the federal government would give them 90 percent of the money," said Bill Borah, a lawyer who chronicled the local impact of the federal bill in his 1981 book, "The Second Battle of New Orleans: A History of the Vieux Carre Riverfront Expressway Controversy."
"Connecting the major cities of the country was essentially a good idea, but when they got to the edge of the cities, they didn't stop," Borah said.
"It accelerated the exodus to the suburbs and it caused the cities to be homes for automobiles rather than people," he said. "The downtown areas got to be ribbons of concrete and parking lots."
In the late 1950s, a Chamber of Commerce committee proposed several expressways, including a Riverfront Expressway through the French Quarter and the Claiborne Expressway.
Influential activists in the French Quarter were able to kill the riverfront plan. But the mostly black residents of Treme lacked the clout to prevent the destruction of their boulevard. In 1966, the North Claiborne oaks were cleared, many of them transplanted to other parts of the city. Nearly 500 homes were removed. About 70 percent of them were sold and transplanted as far away as Kenner. By 1968, sections of the new highway were open.
"The neighborhoods were angry. But we had no say-so during that time," said Charbonnet. In recent years, many older homes in Treme have been renovated. But blocks closest to the expressway have proven to be the least attractive and most prone to demolition by neglect.
As writer Harnett T. Kane put it in 1969, the Claiborne Expressway had turned the corridor "into something approaching a civic privy."
High costs of maintenance
The drive to remove I-10 has recently gained steam, not only because it has support from professional planners but also because the expressway itself may soon need a major overhaul.
Roads like I-10 generally have a useful life of 30 to 40 years, experts say. Proponents of overhauling the road contend that it might well cost more to refurbish it than to dismantle it.
John Norquist, who served as mayor of Milwaukee when that city dismantled its inner-city highway, is now president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an organization dedicated to, among other things, promoting walkable communities.
"In Milwaukee, it would have cost about $80 million to rebuild the highway. It cost about $30 million to tear it down and put a surface street in its place," Norquist said.
Norquist's organization has compiled a national list of "Freeways Without Futures," the top 10 places that seem ripe for replacing highways with boulevards. The Claiborne Expressway is No. 5 on that list.
Before a decision could be made about tearing down the expressway, a study would need to be conducted to measure the impact of the move on traffic, Norquist and other experts say.
Last month, the Congress for New Urbanism received a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts "to support an urban development and environmental preservation planning process" aimed at restoring North Claiborne.
But the money represents only a fraction of what a full-scale study would cost. In May, for example, Baltimore allocated $60,000 to study a similar issue there.
Such a project is not on the Nagin administration's front burner.
"It's not that it's not a priority," said Julie Schwam Harris, the mayor's director of intergovernmental relations. "It's just that we have some immediate infrastructure needs that we have got to take care of in order to handle what is happening day to day with regard to transportation and streets."
National trend
If New Orleans were to take down the Claiborne Expressway, it would join the ranks of several other major cities that have removed or are in the process of removing the expressways from their centers.
In the 1970s in Portland, Ore., the Riverfront for Citizens coalition was able to close Harbor Drive and create a boulevard.
Boston's infamous "big dig" project converted Interstate 93 from a highway through the heart of the city to a 3.5-mile tunnel.
After an earthquake damaged the Embarcadero Freeway in 1989, San Francisco replaced its double-decker highway with a boulevard, allowing greater waterfront access.
In 2003, Milwaukee demolished the Park East freeway and returned traffic to the traditional street grid.
In cities as diverse as Chattanooga, Buffalo, Seattle and Trenton, N.J., officials are considering removing highways.
"These cities find that you can create a much better quality of life if you don't have these overhead expressways that don't contribute much to economic development," said Al Barry, a consultant with a planning firm in Baltimore.
Big traffic changes
Anyone who has driven along the Claiborne Expressway during rush hour might conclude that routing all the cars along the street grid would result in traffic congestion.
"To shift the traffic -- such highly congested traffic, such voluminous traffic -- and put it into the 610 corridor would require wider lanes and larger ramps," said Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, whose constituents include many eastern New Orleans residents who commute to jobs downtown.
"Taking the truck traffic from an elevated interstate to ground level interstate will create a lot of problems from trucks," she said.
However, experts contend that in other cities, removal of expressways has not resulted in gridlock. This is, in part, because surface streets provide more routing options than overhead expressways.
"The street grid is very rich and complex. There are lots of choices for the people in New Orleans," Norquist said. "With a freeway, the exits are far apart, so if it congests, you're stuck. Actually, at rush hour, the streets tend to work faster than the freeways."
"What you discover is that people will use any shortcut that is provided for them. If you take the route away from them, then the traffic will go someplace else," said Fred Gorove of the planning firm Gorove/Slade Associates in Washington, D.C.
What is more difficult to predict is whether the culture of the old neighborhood will return if the expressway is demolished.
"I think some of it would come back," Armand Charbonnet said. "But it would take a long, hard struggle."
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