National Trust Volunteer Falls Hard for New Orleans

Detroit contractor Jim Turner explains the plans for Mildred Bennett’s home in the Holy Cross National Register District to Mrs. Bennett’s granddaughter Donna Duplantier.

National Trust volunteer Jim Turner was driving up Magazine Street, a six mile stretch of small shops and homes in New Orleans that was spared serious hurricane damage, when his son phoned from Washington, D.C. This was the second time Turner had traveled 18 hours from Detroit to survey damaged neighborhoods and advise overwhelmed residents after Hurricane Katrina, and his son was curious how things were going.

“I’ve fallen in love,” Turner confessed over his cell phone. “She ain’t pretty, but she has something that keeps pulling me back.”

“Can she cook, Dad?”

“She cooks. She sings. She smiles, even when it’s bad, and it’s real bad.”

If Turner could figure out a way to operate his renovation business in Detroit and also set up a window restoration shop in New Orleans, he’d be lucky in love because this battered and feisty Mississippi River town has captured his heart.

Athletic and handsome, Jim Turner in his round spectacles looks like a contemplative man. I ask him why he left his job and drove back to New Orleans after he had already put in a week as a National Trust volunteer in the city. A moment passes while Turner removes his glasses and wipes the tears. Then he begins explaining why he decided to come back after his first trip.

“I grew up on welfare in the projects,” he says. “My parents and their friends worked to the bone to get out of there, to buy a house, get some equity, to get their kids educated. Everything they had they put into their kids and their homes. When I see these people in the Lower Ninth and other hard-hit areas of New Orleans who are so much like my own parents, who put everything into their one shot of getting ahead – when I see them wandering in shock around the ruins of their homes or standing dazed on their front porches, it’s too much. I have to do something.”

Turner, who has 20 years of hands-on experience in historic preservation and is a Michigan advisor to the National Trust, saw the pictures that Preservation Resource Center Executive Director Patty Gay brought to the Trust conference in October. He knew there was a need for professionals to evaluate the homes and offer advice on water and mold remediation, so he joined one of the Trust’s team of specialists rotating into New Orleans every week.

He arrived the same week residents were first allowed to “look and leave” the remains of their Lower Ninth Ward homes. With other volunteer architects and engineers and Preservation Resource Center (PRC) staffers, Turner traveled in silence through the dismembered quarantine site that, just two months earlier, had the highest percentage of owner-occupied homes in the entire city, exceeding even the Garden District. In the emergency response to the cataclysm caused by inadequately constructed floodwalls, most of the prostrated Lower Nine had been triaged out.

Most, but not all. The Holy Cross National Register District in the opposite end of the ward was hanging by fingertips to the levee along the Mississippi River. Noxious water had fermented in many of the 100-year-old raised wooden homes, leaving mold and a thin brown telltale line about six feet up the walls. Wind had ripped through tall windows and cleared shingles from the narrow roofs covering hundreds of shotgun homes, but the strong cypress beams, the solid lath-and-plaster construction and the wide plank pine floors held tight.

Turner visits the flooded Mid-City home of Leonard Lewis to advise him on remediating the mold and salvaging the wood and plaster.

Here is where Turner and his colleagues would begin the rehabilitation; here and in other humble, historic neighborhoods where teachers, truck drivers, clerks, cooks, dock workers, and policemen own homes; where corner stores sell packets of tiny dried shrimp and Hubig coconut cream fried pies at the checkout registers; where uniformed girls and boys wait for the bus to take them to the nearby parochial school; where the music on the front stoops is as good as any club in the French Quarter. Where over 100,000 citizens lost all they own in about three hours.

On Turner’s first trip to New Orleans there was so little rebuilding activity that the Trust assigned volunteer teams to reconnoiter the neighborhoods, talk to the people who had returned or possibly had never left, leave messages at empty houses about mold remediation and restoration advice available at the Preservation Resource Center, and distribute free tarps, generators, and buckets of cleaning supplies.

The volunteers listened while glassy-eyed residents talked nonsensically, like the traumatized old man who claimed he had walked to Rhode Island and back since the hurricane. They waited while an amazed woman stared through her screen at this mirage of visitors, the first people who had come to her home with an offer to help her rebuild since the storm had hit eight weeks earlier. The volunteers advised owners who were beginning to clean out their houses on how to save the lath and plaster, old-growth pine and cypress floors, and irreplaceable architectural features such as mantles, molding, solid wood baseboards, and siding. At the time, fly-by-night remediation companies were ripping through homes, charging thousands of dollars and gutting them totally. Stacks of hardwood flooring, cypress siding, termite and mold resistant plaster applied by master craftsmen, and slate roofing lined the sidewalks to be carted away by federal workers and unnecessarily fill refuse sites with the equivalent of 30 years of debris in just three months. Most would have to be replaced with inferior modern products approved by insurance companies.

“What I’ve seen here on my trips is preservation advocacy demonstrated in a manner that benefits the whole community,” says Turner. “Preservationists in New Orleans are fighting for the homes of common people who want to raise their children in a sustainable community. You’ve got everything here that people want in a good community. The neighborhoods are different from each other, but all connected. There are affordable homes in Mid-City and grand ones along St. Charles, and they’re not that far apart. In hard-hit neighborhoods like St. Roch and Holy Cross, the homes are still structurally intact and there’s a density that allows you to feel you’re within a community. There’s an atmosphere that wraps you with a sense of belonging even though many of the buildings have been neglected for years.”

Turner pauses to contemplate his native Detroit.

Alarmed by the looting of architectural details from historic homes in hurricane stricken neighborhoods, Turner removes an advertisement for a company that buys mantles, doors, shutters, and other architectural elements.

“I can’t remember when I’ve been able to walk three miles from one end of downtown Detroit to the other without experiencing holes in the streetscape due to missing buildings,” he says. “Just a few days ago I walked from the Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans, through Faubourg Marigny, the French Quarter, the CBD and the Warehouse District to the Preservation Resource Center, and I experienced a streetscape that held me in its embrace: a downtown that’s linked to its neighborhoods without the holes that we experience in Detroit.”

This is what Turner wants to save New Orleans from: pock marks, missing teeth, cracked bones, dangling limbs, and a loss of flesh and blood.

He even loves New Orleans for her insularity. She might act worldly but at heart, she’s a homebody. According to the 2003 census, 85% of New Orleanians lived in the same house they were in the year before, and if they moved they seldom went far.

“When I talk to people and ask them where they live, it’s usually about three blocks from where they grew up, near their social clubs and their churches,” Turner says. “The neighborhood and the old buildings are all part of a cultural dynamic and generational link among families. The preservation ethic is more a cultural ethic than what I see in other cities.”

Before Turner left New Orleans to drive through the night to Detroit, he looked around the Warehouse District at potential sites for his window restoration business. Customers won’t be a problem in a town where rebuilding is the number one industry.

Author: Jim Turner