Room Five: Legacy and Memory
What legacy beyond spatial and institutional racism can the infrastructure projects on exhibit in Global Highways claim? Did new expressways and boulevards solve the transportation problems their boosters promised they would? The working class neighborhoods of Paris have shifted even further away from the center of the city, past the original railway stations around which Haussmann designed his Paris. The boulevards of the nineteenth century remain an integral component of the transport system in the French capital while the ever-peripheral working class neighborhoods suffer lack of services, utilities, and amenities taken for granted elsewhere. In Rio de Janeiro, the major Carnival processions still parade on the Avenida Presidente Vargas to the sound and step of samba but in the Sambadrome, a stadium purpose built for the occasion. Those taking public transit to these parades likely disembark at the Praça Onze Station, located beneath the birthplace of the samba schools. In Sophiatown, tsaba-tsaba and echoes of American jazz waft through the streets but not the same streets. Since 1994, the post-apartheid local government has rebuilt the neighborhood from scratch, seeking to remedy the worst injustices residents faced when the area was razed during the 1950s. In all these cites, spread across all four continents, residents continue to navigate the fallout of decisions about urban infrastructure taken without input from the entire community.
Claiborne Avenue Design Team
In early 1970, less than a year after the completion of the interstate, the negative impact was apparent in such a way that a community-based movement was already in place to seek change within the system. The Tambourine & Fan (T&F) Club, "a black, neighborhood based education and cultural organization working in the 6th and 7th Wards of downtown New Orleans," galvanized a movement to revamp much of the new interstate to better reflect the needs of the community. Over the next six years, T&F partnered with a team of architects, engineers, and planners, notably Rudy Lombard, Robert H. Perkins, William B. Conway, and Anthony J. Gendusa, Jr., on the Claiborne Avenue Design Team (CADT). With funding from the United States Department of Transportation, the CADT held neighborhood meetings, engagement sessions, and produced a major report with recommendations for a better Claiborne Avenue. None of the recommendations were followed.
Music Adapts to the Interstate
New Orleanians have adapted to the elevated Interstate 10 expressway, especially the generations of brass band musicians who never knew Claiborne Avenue before the interstate. Benny Jones explains, “They get the feedback. Plenty times when they going up Claiborne, when they comin’ back, they like to get under the bridge. They call that pumpin’ the volume.”[1] The cacophony of a brass band letting loose its sound beneath the concrete and steel bridge counters the monotonous roar of the traffic above it.
Michael White’s history of New Orleans music sums up much of the reason why the loss of the musical traditions on Claiborne Avenue had such a detrimental effect on the city and its musicians. At the same time, however, White explains why traditions tied to specific places have the ability to transcend and survive the destruction of those places. “Jazz filled two needs,” he argues, “One, the traditional need for celebration and danceable music but also it was a metaphor for the type of American democracy, democratic ideals that African Americans were fighting for in the courts and in everyday life. So the music emphasized both individuality and collectivism. And in a way was a means of combatting the socially imposed invisible status of black people.” White’s recollection turned personal, seamlessly bridging not just 2019 to 1896 but the 1890s to 1865 and to 1850, 1787, and 1619. “It came together for me after I kept hearing over and over from the older musicians,” who told him, “‘The most important thing is to develop your own sound and tone."[2]
[1] Benny Jones interview.
[2] Michael White interview.
Memory of the long history of African American culture along Claiborne Avenue persists in the form of murals painted onto the support columns of the interstate.