Jane's Walk 2009: Learning a Charismatic City One Step at a Time
The gods of urbanism were smiling down on New Orleans’ inaugural Jane’s Walk this last weekend. Dozens of people — a mix of former and current New Orleans residents and visitors in town for Jazz Fest, joined the laid-back Saturday morning celebration of the walkable, diverse neighborhoods advocated by the late great Jane Jacob, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
As one of the ten or so locals who chose to lead a walk in the city, I feel safe saying that the exercise is pretty much foolproof in a city with the naked charisma of New Orleans. ( When you think about it, doesn’t this city kind of remind you of a charming, incorrigible lover that one can’t resist seeing again even after he drinks all the alcohol in your house, puts his hand on your best friend’s knee and then wrecks your bicycle on the way home…)
The diversity of the Bayou Road triangle where I live defined my walk. We ogled the soaring gothic tower of shuttered St. Rose of Lima Church and listened to a fellow walker reminisce about attending Sunday school there in the 1950s. (The same former resident of the neighborhood also recalled a theater on the corner of Bayou Road and N. Dorgenois Street, in a lot now occupied by a fenced parking lot for trucks belonging to discount tree removal service.) We studied the Church of I Am That I Am for clues on the building’s future — the church never reopened after Hurricane Katrina; neighborhood old-timers say they haven’t seen its pastor or the owner of the building since.
The morning’s longest visit was at the Community Book Center, where the lovely Momma Jennifer Turner, co-founder of the African-American education center and community anchor, explained the store’s ethos of it-takes-a-village participatory education to the group. In a show of multitasking brilliance, Turner spoke while cutting a swath of colorful African Kente cloth to fit the body of a customer who needed the eye-catching getup for a performance later that afternoon at Jazz Fest.
Other stops included a blighted house that belongs to Orleans City Councilwoman Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, my favorite rasta pagoda 
and The House on Bayou Road. The Japanese fish pond in the bed and breakfast’s lush backyard garden entranced my seven-year-old neighbor CeCe. Wide, curious eyes fixed on the luminescent, darting goldfish, CeCe confessed he had never seen so many beautiful fish at once. “We can’t let the roosters or the dogs back here. They might eat them,” he warned me, referring to the stray animals that roam our neighborhood, playing dual roles as slightly scary, possibly dangerous nuisances and really adorable playmates.
CeCe, though raised less than two blocks from the the stately Creole mansion, had never before ventured beyond its imposing metal gates. He appeared completely shocked by the existence of such grandeur so close to the ramshackle shotgun he calls home. ( The tiny cottage he shares with his grandmother, uncles and brothers still bears stains from Katrina, most startlingly the faded remains of a rooftop call for food and water. The ask, printed in white spray-paint, seems to sink deeper into the crevices of the sagging roof with every passing day.)
CeCe left our group before our final stop at the home of architect Andreas Hablutzel and artist Robin Klimach. The couple is in the midst of a painstaking historic renovation of one of the Seventh Ward’s long-neglected architectural gems — a wood-framed Creole Cottage built by a German immigrant in the early 19th century. 
I was disappointed CeCe missed a chance to see behind the porous bargeboard walls of a house that like his own has lived through so much.
The walk reinforced a lesson I learned soon after moving to New Orleans: a parade depends less on the musicians leading it than the people in the second line, the folks who, moving to their own instincts, transform the wail of brass instruments on an open street into a full out performance of place.
Or as Jane Jacobs said:
“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.”
Here are some pictures of other walks.
Feel free to email reports or photos! We’d love to post other experiences.
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COMMENTS
That rasta pagoda is one of my favorite buildings – such an imposing roof on such a small building. I’ve often contemplated something like that in my back yard.