[StBernard] Bulldozers to sweep New Orleans homes away

[Westley Annis]

Bulldozers to sweep New Orleans homes away 
Residents fighting mass demolition project of hurricane-ravaged houses

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
The Washington Post
Updated: 1:56 a.m. ET Dec. 24, 2005


CHALMETTE, La. - Ronnie Nunez bought the weird pink house in the
Battleground Subdivision to entice his daughter and baby granddaughter to
come back to Louisiana from out of state. But they didn't stay with him
long.

He thought he'd patch up his marriage there. That didn't work either.

The house is a bad renovator's jigsaw puzzle, with three roofs stitched
together and an inexplicable interior bay window connecting separate wings.
To tell the truth, he never much liked the place.

Soon it will be gone.

A bulldozer is likely to arrive before the new year to scrape away Nunez's
house, the first demolition in one of the first large-scale government
bulldozing projects in the New Orleans area since Hurricane Katrina's Aug.
29 assault. Someone told Nunez that Katrina means "cleansing," and though he
never bothered to look it up, he decided to believe it. The bulldozer will
be his personal cleansing agent.

"I have a chance to start over," Nunez, a 61-year-old trucker and former
Marine with a penchant for mirrored sunglasses, said one recent cloudy
afternoon. "I said, 'Here I am. Take me down.'"

Bulldozing, with its crushing note of finality, is an approach heavy with
emotions in post-hurricane Louisiana. It is so emotional that "No
Bulldozing" campaigns are being waged to save the sodden homes in parts of
New Orleans, where several thousand houses may be demolished soon. The
battle over bulldozing is most fervent in neighborhoods such as the
predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward, where skeptical residents fear that
their communities will not be rebuilt.

Overwhelming number of homes ruined
But here in suburban, working-class, mostly white St. Bernard Parish, where
the destruction was so complete that just 10 of 25,000 houses are
inhabitable, there is a headlong rush to the wrecking ball. More than 300
houses have been tagged for a mass demolition project that will begin in the
coming weeks, as soon as a monumental tangle of paperwork is unraveled. Yet
that's just the start in a parish where the water rose so high- 17 feet in
some parts- that nearly every house is considered a candidate to be knocked
down.

Oil refinery workers and fishermen and suburban commuters line up each day,
offering their stucco and brick and wood frames to be pulverized. Parish
officials that aren't involved in demolition have grown so tired of
interruptions that they post signs on their office doors to divert people
who want the local government to wipe away their homes.

Requests by homeowners who want to memorialize their houses' final moments
on videotape are piling up. The homeowners' enthusiasm is bolstered by
assurances that they will be allowed to rebuild, a contrast with the
situation just upriver in New Orleans, where leaders of the city's
rebuilding commission have discussed abandoning parts of the city that
suffered the worst flooding.

St. Bernard Parish- known simply as "da parish" in Louisiana because of its
inhabitants' syllable-blurring, Brooklynesque accents- lives in the shadow
of the irresistible charm of New Orleans. The parish touches the New Orleans
line at the Lower Ninth Ward. The parish- industrial to the east and marshy
to the west- always felt like "the bastard stepchild" of New Orleans, said
Parish Council member Joey Difatta, who lives in one of hundreds of trailers
clustered around the St. Bernard government complex.

Residents still bristle because St. Bernard was intentionally flooded during
the Great Mississippi River flood of 1927 when the aristocrats in New
Orleans dynamited a levee to save the city. "There's a lot of malice that
went with it," Difatta said. "We know we were sacrificed for the sake of New
Orleans." More recently, St. Bernard gained a measure of infamy during
Katrina because more than 30 elderly people died after allegedly being
abandoned in the St. Rita's nursing home there.


Parish settled by the French
The parish was settled in the early 1700s by the French, who produced indigo
used to make blue dye, and were followed late in the century by Isleos,
immigrants from the Canary Islands who flocked there when Spain ruled
Louisiana. The Isleos' descendants fill the parish now with names such as
Fernandez and Perez and Rodriguez, though some of the pronunciations have
taken on their own special "da parish" tenor. Here, Ruiz is "RUE-ez."

Nunez's family came from Portugal. An older cousin- Sammy Nunez- was once
one of the most powerful members of the Louisiana legislature before being
defeated after brazenly handing out casino campaign donations on the Senate
floor. But Ronnie Nunez rose from a hardscrabble background. His father was
a master barge pilot, whose skill with heavy loads was blunted by his
affection for the bottle.

Nunez thought the pink house at 2707 Jackson Blvd. would be the perfect
place to reinvent his life five years ago. There was enough room for him to
live in one wing and for his wife of 33 years, Beverley Nunez, to live in
the other when they weren't getting along, which was often. He kept his side
dark, with thick curtains. "I like dark," he said.

The neighborhood is modest but historic, lined by graceful live oaks planted
as part of a Works Progress Administration project during the Great
Depression. It took its name, the Battleground Subdivision, because part of
the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 was fought there. The developer
was the towering figure of modern St. Bernard history, an all-powerful
sheriff named Joseph Meraux who was "a despot, but an enlightened despot"
with progressive ideas and a love of education, according to parish
historian Bill Hyland.

Nunez's house in Meraux's subdivision is a wasteland now, a nasty repository
for soggy pink insulation and overturned tables. He offered it to the parish
as a guinea pig for its demolition project, helping officials determine
exactly how long it will take to scrape away a house and how much it will
cost- probably about $5,000 per house, reimbursable by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, parish officials say.

Katrina's 'Superman' 
Nunez was too busy after Katrina- earning the nickname "Superman" because he
set up a camp for the displaced on a levee, subsisted on cans of tuna and
shrimp from the Bumble Bee plant and made supply runs in his big rig- to
bother with any salvage work at his house.

"Y'all's problem is that y'all try to do everything legally," he said he
told officials. "Just tell me what y'all need and get out of the way."

While he flitted around the parish, mold crept over the walls of his house
and infused his record collection with a musty grime. His wife's room became
a fashion warehouse turned upside down. "Look at this," he said, pointing at
a lumpy pile. "Eighty-four purses and 200 pairs of shoes. Never could buy
one of anything."

In the living room, he paused to marvel at a delicate curio cabinet,
miraculously upright without a crack in its glass panels. He won't bother to
save it. He wants everything to go. Still, he can't help but find something
hopeful in its survival. Inside, he said, were shelves of figurines. Noah's
Ark on one shelf and on the other, a row of angels.

C 2005 The Washington Post Company

C 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10592441/