Holy Cross Neighborhood, Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans

Since Hurricane Katrina devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in August 2005, recovery efforts continue as state and local authorities work to restore basic services and rebuild infrastructure and property owners struggle to repair their homes and their communities. During this prolonged period of recovery, decisions are being made about the region’s historic buildings and neighborhoods – which conditions can be treated and as a result, which structures will be salvaged and rehabilitated and which will be demolished. These decisions about the built heritage will have a great impact on efforts to rebuild the physical and social fabric of the Gulf Coast’s historic communities.

In New Orleans, the shotgun houses and cottages that make up neighborhoods like Bywater, Tremé and the Lower Ninth Ward are as much an integral part of the culture of the city as are its celebrations, music and food. These modest neighborhoods of vernacular wood buildings retain a genuine sense of place and were home for now displaced populations that occupied them for generations; they anchor local community life as well as serve as a context for the more celebrated French Quarter and Garden District. These neighborhoods are also the most in danger of being lost. The forces hampering recovery and reoccupation include: plans to demolish structures without considering alternatives; failure of insurance companies to compensate for losses; ongoing delays in restoring utilities and infrastructure; damage to historic properties caused by well-intended, but ill-informed volunteers gutting homes; and lack of access to information and resources for residents who want to repair their homes and return to New Orleans.

As part of a larger initiative to assist with the restoration of the Gulf Coast’s built heritage, PTN and the World Monuments Fund are focusing on the historic community of Holy Cross in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward – one of the oldest and the most intact of historic communities to be affected by the flooding. WMF and PTN are working closely with the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association to help address immediate needs identified by residents and to plan for sustained community reoccupation and rebuilding.

Bounded by the Mississippi River to the south and St. Claude Avenue and the Lower Ninth Ward to the north, the Holy Cross Neighborhood is a largely African-American community of approximately 5,500 low- and moderate-income residents who owned (42%) and rented (58%) the mostly nineteenth- and early twentieth-century wood houses that contributed to the neighborhood’s designation as a National and Local Historic Landmark District.

Although not as severe, Holy Cross, like the Lower Ninth Ward, was flooded by the breach in the Industrial Canal levee. More than 3,200 homes were inundated by as much as six feet of water for up to 30 days. Today, most of the buildings suffer wind and flood damage ranging from leaking roofs to mold to structural destabilization.

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