Day 130 - Guerrilla Benchmaking in New Orleans

New Orleans is improving. Plans are coming to the fore. There’s still a long way to go, and there are some very tricky questions still to be worked out: how those of the nearly 200,000 residents still displaced who want to return can be repatriated; the wisdom of rebuilding below sea level (indeed the wisdom of levees for that matter); the fate of public housing; the dramatic demographic shift of the city from pre-storm to now and in the next several years. On that last point, Mayor Nagin two years ago famously, if artlessly, said New Orleans was and always would be a chocolate city. And it may, yet. But it is decidedly more dixie cup at the moment.

Money finally is beginning to flow. Governmental and non-profit partners are moving from a hired-gun approach in addressing the most critical problems haphazardly to being more deliberative. Programs are becoming institutionalized; staff are being hired.

But it’s slow. And the seemingly small problems that fall far down on the list of priorities are actually more crucial than they might seem. When I was last here nine months ago, I estimated by a rough count that those areas of the city that were still inhabited were missing street signs at one-third of the intersections. A big deal? Perhaps not when you’re worried about getting your FEMA trailer hooked up to the street’s sewer line in front of our house so your family has a flushing toilet. Or if you have to find the title to your property--which has been passed down for several generations without re-registering with the city’s deed office—in order to apply for a building permit. Street signs are the last thing you might care about. But they do an awful lot to tell everyone—residents, visitors, volunteers—that the city is getting back on its feet.

Virtually every intersection I drove through in the more inhabited neighborhoods have their signs now. But they’re still largely missing from the inundated Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview areas. That is, official street signs are still missing. But local residents have pitched in to help out in a pinch and posted their own. I hear that people who lived in corner houses—if they were still around—did this since they knew what their intersection was. Guerrilla sign painting. My friend Philip pointed out to me that New Orleans is a town that is being rebuilt—such as it is—largely through such guerrilla benevolence. In addition to the signs, there is the guy who owned a couple of hotels in the French Quarter and couldn’t get the city to come pick up his garbage for a good long while after Katrina and so bought his own garbage truck and Dumpsters and now has a side business in sanitation. Truly. (He even recently won a couple of the city’s contracts for waste hauling.)

And then there are the guerrilla benchmakers.

The Bench Women, as they call themselves, were introduced to me by my friend Robin Barnes—herself a Bench Woman. She and two colleagues—all involved in New Orleans’ rebuilding, though in less manual ways—spend some of their weekends building, painting and deploying simple, sturdy benches at bus stops in New Orleans’ Central Business District. Surreptitiously. They don’t do it under cover of darkness or anything like that. But they don’t have permission either. But neither did the folks posting street signs. Nor, at first, the hotelier turned garbage truck king.

The benches are the inspiration of Carey Shea after she noticed people massing at the street corners downtown throughout the day.

“At first I thought something free was being handed out,” Carey told me. “It was just a few months after the storm and there were very few people around at that point.” So large groups were downright noteworthy.

Carey, a former New Yorker and current New Orleanian, is a program officer at the Greater New Orleans Foundation working on affordable housing issues. Her habit is to ride her bike most places around New Orleans. She began to notice—in the way that the slower, more deliberate pace of a bicycle ride through a city allows—that throngs of people were gathering on some of the street corners in her neighborhood.

She realized that they were simply waiting for the bus. These were the 10% of the New Orleans transit ridership that had returned—because they had few other choices—to use the skeletal, limping system of buses that arrived infrequently, if at all. The waits, even now, two years on, can be over an hour on many lines. Carey said she thought to herself that someone—the city, the transit authority, someone—should put benches there for the waiting patrons, many of whom were elderly. But New Orleans was a town of dire infrastructural need even before Katrina. Bus stop shelters and benches are still a luxury that MIGHT be indulged in after new buses are bought, streets are paved, electricity is restored to swamped neighborhoods, and housing is rebuilt.

Then Carey realized that she had her own power tools

Robin Barnes’s sideyard has become the staging area for benchbuilding. Every couple of weeks she’ll arrive home from work to find a half-dozen pieces of lumber waiting behind her gate. She then knows that Carey “made a drop,” and that they’ll be building and painting at the weekend. The team includes the two of them as well as Robin Keegan, a New Orleanian by birth who lived in New York until Katrina and who has since returned. In about 90 minutes, they can assemble a 16” high bench that is 8 feet long. Two of these, bolted together after they arrive at the bus stop where it will eventually be deployed, gives about 10 people space to wait for buses.

While two of them work on construction, the other is painting and varnishing the previous session’s benches just prior to delivery. The most recent one was a deep pink with black fleurs-de-lis stenciled on. It’s at the corner of Loyola and Common, downtown. I wandered over there the other day and found a few folks sitting on it. It’s just used—constantly, it seems.

I asked Joanne Johnson when she first noticed this bench here.

“’bout two weeks ago.”

And what did she think of it?

“They have a lot of old people. A lot of people that be coming home from work they need to be sit down waitin’ on these long buses. It’s hard. It’s real hard.”

Did she know where the bench came from?

“No, just showed up one day.”

I told her about the Bench Women.

“I’m a senior citizen and I thank the ladies very much for the bench.”

And then Ms. Johnson pointed up the street and asked me to tell them which corner she thought the next one should go.