Scenes from New Orleans

Broadmoor is a residential area in the heart of New Orleans, just a few miles up Napoleon Ave from where I live. It's one of the lowest lying areas of the city, so it was very severely flooded after Katrina struck and the levees failed. The residents are fiercely loyal to their neighborhood, though, and are absolutely determined to recover. "Broadmoor Lives!!" is a sign you see all over.

The predominant style of architecture is not what most think of as "classic New Orleans." Broadmoor was developed mainly in the 1920s, and most houses were built in the Bungalow style, which originated in California around 1910 and became widely popular throughout the country. The Bungalow style emphasized simplicity and comfort, houses that were easy to live in, and was well suited to mild climates like Los Angeles or New Orleans. (The house I grew up in, in Berkeley, CA, was classic Bungalow.)

The original developers were not unmindful of the flooding threat, however, and raised Bungalow houses were common, with a half-floor giving an extra two or three feet of elevation above street level. Since Katrina, some homeowners have taken the "raised" aspect to new heights, determined, like this fellow, that their homes will never, ever flood again:


(As always, you can click on the photo for a better view.) A typical Bungalow house is fairly modest in size, but this one is substantial and clearly worth going to great lengths to save. The bottom of the exterior, where the light colored stucco breaks off, would have been sitting directly on the ground, originally; it's now about twelve feet off the ground. The blue front door probably had three or four steps leading up to it; now it will probably have about fifteen. This example of drastic raising is pretty dramatic, but it's not the only one I've seen, far from it. It's quite a project. You have to cut all the utilities, separate the house from its foundation, and jack it up inch by inch, adding structures of wood pilings to hold it up. Then, with the house hovering over your head, you pour a new foundation and whatever support pillars are needed, eventually removing the pilings very carefully! Finally you build new access stairs, reconnect the utilities, enclose the lower area, and stucco it to match the original.

It's a huge job, but you can be very sure that this house will never flood again.

To illustrate the scale of the task, note this guy working near the front corner pilings: