By Lynne Jensen TP/NOLA.com 7/6/06
Staff writer
“That was my favorite color for a kitchen,” Bernadette Lation said, standing in her driveway and staring inside her house at bright yellow walls, covered with dark mold. Among 519 families whose Pontchartrain Park houses flooded following Hurricane Katrina, the Lations' ranch-style home sat in roof-high water and muck for two weeks.
Like many people who raised children and grandchildren in the vintage 1950s neighborhood — the first New Orleans subdivision designed to offer homeownership opportunities to middle- and upper-income African-American families — Lation and her husband of 51 years, Raymond, are determined to rebuild. In April, they moved into a government trailer at the edge of their Congress Drive driveway.
“We didn’t come back until the street lights were on,” said Lation, whose neighbors nicknamed her “Little Copeland” because she wrapped bright lights around her house to reflect holiday themes.
“It would start at Halloween and go on to Easter,” Lation said last week. “We did it for our kids and the neighborhood children. And I’m a big kid myself.”
Flood water ruined her holiday lights, but nothing can fade decades of memories that made her Gentilly neighborhood home, Lation said. The slab-based house where her seven children grew up will be replaced with a house big enough for her seven grandchildren and great granddaughter to play, she said.
“There’s a lot of people coming back to the park,” Lation said, pointing to other trailers on her street, a long, winding road facing acres of grass, oaks and lagoons that make up the 18-hole Joe M. Bartholomew Sr. Municipal Golf Course.
Born in 1881, Bartholomew became one of the wealthiest African American men in the city and the first African American to be inducted in the Greater New Orleans Sports Hall of Fame.
The golf course, which opened in 1956 during the segregation era in New Orleans, offered non-whites the opportunity to enjoy the sport. It sits near Leon C. Simon Boulevard, the northern edge of Pontchartrain Park. The subdivision also is bounded by railroad tracks on the west, the Inner Navigation Harbor Canal on the east, and a small, mostly dry bayou to the south.
Pontchartrain Park — also the site of Southern University at New Orleans — has been declared “National Register eligible,” and the process is under way to add it to the city’s 20 National Register Historic Districts.
Pontchartrain Park was created on 200 acres of mostly dredged swampland, under the guidance of philanthropist Edgar Stern. Crawford Homes built hundreds of two-and-three-bedroom homes there, just as the company had built in the neighboring all-white Gentilly Woods subdivision.
In recent years, residents of Pontchartrain Park and Gentilly Woods, now both predominately black neighborhoods, came together to form the Pontilly Neighborhood Association.
Association president King Wells recently thanked volunteers for helping to gut houses in Pontchartrain Park. He said his neighborhood may have to change, but it will come back.
“We liked Pontchartrain Park the way it was,” Wells said. “We want to get it as close to that as possible ... back to being a healthy neighborhood.”
There are few “for sale” signs in the neighborhood as residents wait for grants through the state’s Road Home program to help them rebuild.
Wells said he is concerned that stipulations will limit the number of residents who will qualify to receive state money, “They are going to disqualify three-fourths of the people,” he said.
Wells is hoping that “philanthropic operations,” much like that of Edgar Stern 50 years ago, will come forward and help residents rebuild.
Thursday night, Pontchartrain Park leaders met with officials of Longue Vue House and Gardens, a non-profit foundation that once was the home of Stern and his wife, Edith.
Longue Vue executive director Bonnie Goldblum said the meeting will be “an introduction session” to discover ways in which the non-profit group can help with the rebuilding effort.
“Our mission is civic engagement, and it makes sense” to help the neighborhood that Stern helped to develop re-develop, Goldblum said.
The foundation could offer grant-writing and landscaping help, she said.
City Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge Morrell said she welcomes any help that foundations can offer to flooded neighborhoods such as Pontchartrain Park. She said she has heard that actor Brad Pitt is investigating the possibility of helping “one neighborhood in every council district” to recover from Katrina.
“It looks like Pontchartrain Park may be getting his assistance,” Hedge Morrell said Thursday. “And we also talked to the PGA about helping with the golf course.”
The Pontchartrain Park neighborhood association is polling residents to determine how many are returning and/or will maintain their property, who is selling their property to private buyers or to the government and who will volunteer to help bring the neighborhood back. The information should be available in about two weeks, Wells said.
Plans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Pontchartrain Park were canceled last year due to Katrina, and the party has not been rescheduled, Wells said.
“Right now, nobody’s in a mood for a party,” he said. “I’m trying to get home. ... We need a better feel for how many people will be coming back.”
Lation, who plans to raise her house, is more optimistic.
“I hope everybody comes back,” Lation said in front of her trailer. “It might be even better.”
When Congress Drive resident Selwah Nabonne moved into her trailer in March, she said she “walked down the block and looked back and said, ‘It’s no longer Pontchartrain Park, it’s Ponchartrailer Park.’ ”
A month later, on Easter Sunday, the Nabonne family joined with the Rudolph Lewis family in the neighboring trailer and held “our first annual Pontchartrailer Park cookout,” Nabonne said.
Nearby Pontchartrain Park resident Inez Green has a yellow ribbon on the mailbox outside her special-needs trailer, and a sign that says “We’re Home.”
Green has lived in the subdivision since 1955 and said she will find a way to rebuild a house for her and her son Nat, 50, who was 15 when he suffered permanent paralysis after a high school wrestling accident.
“I was the first on my block to come back,” Green said, pointing to houses where neighbors stayed for the storm and drowned. The saddest incident, she said, was a woman found near her front door in her wheelchair, clutching a suitcase in each hand, she said.
Whether the memories are sad or happy, Pontchartrain Park has been home for half a century, Green said.
“I’m 73 years old,” Green said. “I raised 8 children here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Inez Green lives in Pontchartrain Park, the historic black enclave many have written off post-Katrina.
