Epiphany is a Christian feast celebrating the ’shining forth’ or revelation of God to mankind in human form, in the person of Jesus Christ
It was especially odd way to celebrate with the novelist Poppy Z Brite getting hauled away in handcuffs along with other parishioners.
After Howard Hunter Jr and Poppy Z Brite were dragged out there was a long period of time while representatives of the Archdiocese attempted to locate Harold Baquet who was somewhere inside the Church.
Because the parishioners had a more intimate knowledge of the Church than the Archdiocese officials they were able to secret themselves away inside the sanctuary.
Eventually Harold, who suffers from terminal cancer came out in prayer and handcuffs.
At the end parishioners stood in front of the police car which took Mr. Baquet to central lock up.
UPDATE
I found this video of Sarah Comiskey, Director of Communications for the Archdiocese..she talks here about social justice.
I originally wrote this as an e mail to a few friends of Marshall Truehill’s
At a time when so many leaders have forgotten how to lead, and people bemoan the lack of leadership I would suggest that we have had among us many great leaders.
Marshall was one of them.
To me a great leader is someone who does not stand above the community but with the community, this does not diminish his or her stature but allows others to gain the knowledge and experience to create consensus and flourish and widen the circle, and for those who may not fully understand an issue to become better informed, not just accede power to those who claim to know better. The mark of a true leader is the leadership he or she inspires.
Discord is part of the process of growth and should be expected not rejected. But in order to have the kind of healthy discord we need our elected officials must first hear us. And that struggle seems to be ongoing. I will never forget Marshall speaking in council chambers and warning of the upcoming influx of homeless New Orleanians who had nowhere to go, his prediction was there for all to see in Duncan Plaza and the I10 underpass.
At least once a week my work takes me by Peete, Lafitte and Cooper. Last week I watched a young mother struggle with her baby carriage in front of the remains of Cooper. The demolition debris left behind forced her into the street, the sidewalk impassable. No one should stand for this.
I will miss Marshall for many of his qualities, his loyalty to the City, his loyalty to the struggle of New Orleanians still struggling for a place in this new New Orleans and his iron fist in a velvet glove.
One of the most inspired and inspirational citizens of New Orleans has passed away. Words are just words unless followed with deed and Marshall was one who was full of passionate word and deed.
I last saw Marshall at the gym, he and his wife Miranda were entering as I was leaving. We spoke about the toll the last few years had taken on us physically. We vowed to take better care of ourselves.
Walter Gallas of the National Trust wrote this of Rev Marshall Truehill:
The sudden death of Marshall Truehill is incredibly sad, and a great loss to the community.
I first met Rev. Truehill as a fellow student at the University of New Orleans College of Urban and Public Affairs about 15 years ago. I had recently arrived in New Orleans to pursue a Masters degree in Urban and Public Affairs. Marshall was working on his Ph.D. in Urban Studies the degree, I understand, he finally attained just days ago.
I followed his career in public service including his tenure on the City Planning Commission, but it was during the battle of the proposed demolitions of the “Big Four” public housing developments in the last few years that I really got to know him better. Marshall was able to eloquently express the plight of the public housing residents whose voices were stilled or ignored by city and federal officials. We attended editorial board meetings together, spoke at public meetings and City Council hearings, and huddled with other community activists to plot strategies. His manner was usually cool, calm and collected, but when he was provoked, an angry and defiant edge would creep into his voice, and those in the room would stop, look up, and listen to the words of this confident preacher.
As the representative of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in New Orleans, I struggled constantly to articulate a message that the public housing debate was more than about saving and re-using old buildings, that it was really about whether housing policies for the poor in our community are humane, inclusive and sustainable. Marshall managed much better than I to get the message across, and maybe he pricked the consciences of some of our local leaders. Alas, they chose not to heed his admonitions, and we are seeing the fulfillment of his forecasts that the City of New Orleans, HANO and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development were pursuing a dangerous and wrong-headed housing redevelopment strategy that essentially locks out the vast majority of the poor.
I will miss Marshall a lot. I hope that we can use him as a constant touchstone against which to check our assumptions, weigh our positions, confront our prejudices, and perhaps eventually reach some of the goals he sought with so much determination to achieve.
Walter W. Gallas, AICP | Director | New Orleans Field Office
Last month Mr. Gettridge came to the NCDC meeting to hear the fate of Sister Gertrude Morgan’s House Mr. Gettridge had purchased her home after she passed away many years ago.
The house had floated off it’s piers after the levees broke. And Mr. Gettridge wanted to save some of the roof tiles before it was demolished. Unfortunately because of a communications error he was told he would have time to save them and that the house would be demolished at a later date. This was not to be.
One has to marvel at Mr. Gettridge and not because of his age, but because of the skill, talent and dedication he has and which he shares with all of New Orleans.
June Cross helps us to tell the story of New Orleans and her craftsmen.
This morning in court extra time was obtained for an elderly man who is facing a city of new orleans house demolition. He is disabled, uses a walker, and will have no place to go if the city demolishes his home, which is what the city is seeking. There are serious legal problems with the pending demolition and it will continue to be challenged.
It would greatly assist the homeowner to have volunteers come over to the house to coordinate some cleaning up and repairs asap. The house has a trumpet vine growing over the roof and down around the house. The homeowner credits the vine with saving the roof during Katrina. He is open to the vine being trimmed especially where it hangs down around the house and would especially welcome assistance from someone who knows something about green things. Other repairs at the home would probably be useful too.
Please let me know if you have ideas for assistance by leaving a comment.
I was listening to NPR this morning and heard this interview with John Patrick Shanley. It made me wonder if the forces behind the demolition of a New Orleans neighborhood have any doubt. At another point in the interview he say’s “certainty is a closed door”
This City has a rich history of mistakes and bad deals. Will they continue to push towards demolishing a neighborhood? And since the LSU portion of the process is situated closer to the downtown will we see a vast urban prairie where once stood a neighborhood? The damage that has been done to that area can be undone. But not if they demolish it.
A mark of strong leadership is to go against the forces of special interests and work for the betterment of the City NOT at the expense of it’s citizens.
I have been reading a bit about the land aquisition in the LSU/VA footprint. The name Pincus Freidman comes up but trying to research him is a seeming dead end. This is about all you can find in a regular Google search. Perhaps he is the Keyser Soze of real estate. It seems that someone heavily involved in real estate would have left an internet trail.
In the meanwhile Indy media has put together some analysis.
There will be a report on WDSU tonight regarding the sidewalk. From what I have heard the City is planning on having them remove the entire length of the sidewalk and if they do not the City wil replace it and charge them for the replacement cost.
I assume this means if there is a sidewalk out there that has craters in it or major damage that makes it unsafe you could paint it and the City will replace it..
I wrote about this house when the City tried to demolish it and later when they tried to make the owners down a fence. And now they want them to take the paint off the sidewalk.
Really? In a City where we don’t have sidewalks or streets for that matter you want them to cover up the paint.
So while Governor Jindal “met” with President Elect Obama the public was refused entrance to a public meeting.
It never ceases to amaze me that the public can be held in such disregard. What are they trying to hide?
Access to a pubic meeting of state legislators was denied to the media and preservationists today. The move appears to violate Louisiana’s public meetings law. Tuesday’s tour had been advertised as a public meeting of a legislative health care subcommittee.
November 29th, 2008 by Karen Gadbois · No Comments
It’s in my hood. It’s been unused since the early Nineties. There’s a big project coming that will save most of the church. The trade-off is that we had to accept enough condos so that they could afford to save the church walls and bell tower.
They took great pains in deconstructing the Church.
But it looks like that is as far as they got in the plans.
The photos of the deconstruction were taken a year and a half ago. With the economy tanking there is no telling when this will be started nevermind finished.
November 26th, 2008 by Karen Gadbois · 11 Comments
In 1988 I moved to a small village in Mexico. The church which is located in the main square defines the town itself. It is a compass and a gathering spot and it is also the manifestation of a dream some say. The original was been built in 1683 and completed by Zeferino Gutierrez in 1880 inspired by postcards from Europe.
My husbands family had moved there in 1968 when there were 6 thousand people. By the time I met him and moved there the population was at about 25 thousand. It was still a small and very personal space. And most everyone at some point in the day met in the park which faced this Church. On Sunday young men and women parade counter clockwise in the square in a courtship dance and each hour of the day was marked with a manual tolling of the bells.
One day the bells began to ring and did not stop. After a full half hour of calamitous ringing I walked to the square to see what was going on. When I arrived I saw a small bobcat and a crowd of furious residents. It seems that the City government had decided that a lower portion of the Church property should be demolished to build a new sales area for the street vendors.
The bells continued to ring and people kept coming. There was no talk about “historic” preservation, instead the talk was about identity and self preservation. It was about ownership and pride and about self determination. It was about a spatial connectedness that would not be destroyed that day. The citizen’s prevailed, the bobcats left and the city officials figured out a way to get the space they wanted and not destroy one tiny bit of the Church.
I always find myself caught in this narrow confine of historical preservation when it is a much larger social and political issue. If we, the citizens, are not given the most basic voice in issues of self determination how will we see ourselves?
These past months as the drone of process took place many of us knew that the day would come when the decision for the LSU/VA hospital would be made public. We knew the day was coming and we knew the endless processes and procedures that took place would have little to no impact on a decision that was made outside of the realm of public input. We were entertained, we were placated and we were lied to. But in the end those decisions were not ours to make for ourselves. The public realm, the private property and the fate of a neighborhood fell to those who will not show their faces, those who seek to make careers, not communities.
Last summer I was in Mexico again. I was a Charity patient here in New Orleans and the care now is so difficult and complicated that I went to the Hospital de Jesus in Mexico City to get my prescription filled. The facade is a pretty ugly contemporary design but the heart of the Hospital is a colonial beauty.
When I asked the nurse about the history of the building she proudly told me it was the first hospital in the America’s and that it had been built by Hernan Cortez. Imagine that, the oldest hospital in the Americas is still a hospital.
Here in New Orleans we pin our hopes on “new” and “state of the art” in the hopes that ultimately it will be our rescue..will this hospital complex be the salvation of New Orleans? Will this lift us out of our economic slump? Will it be the new “pot’s of money”; remember those, the one’s that never materialized? In order to see those cranes we were promised must we go through another season of destruction, demolition and betrayal?
At the end of my trip to Mexico this past summer I went to see some friends in Malinalco. This municipality has about 20 thousand people. It is a small and very poor community. Yet they had this richness of place.
Because the community decided they should save it. And they did.
VA Deputy Secretary to Join Local, State and Federal Officials for Announcement
What: VA Deputy Secretary Gordon Mansfield will join New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and other state, local and federal officials to announce the site of the future New Orleans VA Medical Center.
Who: Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Gordon Mansfield
The Honorable C. Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans
Louisiana State University President Dr. John V. Lombardi
Louisiana Hurricane Recovery Coordinator Paul Rainwater
Jim Stark, FEMA Gulf Coast Recovery Office
When: Tuesday, November 25, at 11:30 a.m.
Where: City Hall (2nd Floor)
1300 Perdido Street
New Orleans, La.
Background:
Deputy Secretary Mansfield is chief operating officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs the nation’s second-largest Cabinet department, providing health care, benefits and burial services to America’s 24 million living veterans and their dependents.
This year, VA expects to spend more than $1.2 billion in Louisiana for the state’s 350,000 veterans. VA operates major medical centers in Alexandria and Shreveport, eight community-based outpatient clinics, veterans counseling centers in Kenner and Shreveport, and a nursing home in Alexandria.
Last Friday I went the Budget presentation that was scheduled for 9:30. The Chambers were about 3/4 filled with people there to hear the budget presentation for ORDA
At around noon Councilwoman Clarkson left to attend a luncheon which begs the question who schedules these things and did they not look at a calendar to see if there may be a conflict? The small crowd began to dwindle as people scurried to fill parking meters, call work and figure out if they had time to stay and speak.
By 1 people were exchanging cell phone numbers and asking those who were staying to call them when the time was right.
Finally at 1:30 Councilwoman Clarkson returned with a bouquet of roses and Blakley reentered the chambers. What followed was a budget presentation like no other. It was a cascade of words unrelated to reality. It seems that Councilwoman Clarkson does not read the paper as she asked where Patricia Robinson was, fired is where she was. Clarkson then went on to loudly ask who was the go to guy for blight. The answer was Troy Body…really? That Troy Body?
whatever..
The presentation churned to a frustrating conclusion and the public was invited to comment. 3 minutes is the norm but not today. On Friday at 3 the people in the audience who had subsisted on chips and popcorn so as not to miss the 3 minute chance to speak where told they now had one minute. The group of women from New Orleans East had cleverly bargained for 3 by pooling the comment cards. Those of us who came to speak and listen had not thought to play this civic softball game. We had not thought to stuff the comment card box and then trade out minutes to each other. We had expected the same sort of half assed democracy that normally passes for public comment in City Council chambers. Instead we got one minute.
When one of the attendees got up and asked where the money was tucked into the budget to fund the demolition of lower Mid City Mr. Blakley shook his head no in response to the question of would they take questions
So much for transparency. Speaking of transparency here is a portion of an e mail I just received.
An important parallel which members of the New Orleans City Council are justly complaining about is the lack of transparency and access to public records from the administration of Mayor C. Ray Nagin. A key document which we managed to acquire through a Louisiana Public Records Act request of a state agency in Baton Rouge November 14th uncovers why the public hearing process on the VA / LSU project profoundly has been a sham from its inception. The “MEMORANDUM OF UNDERSTANDING Between the United States Department of Veterans Affairs and The City of New Orleans “was signed over a year ago on November 19, 2007. Effectively it has contractually bound the city to the demolition of Lower Mid-City, in advance of required public consultation under the National Environmental Policy Act [NEPA] as well as the National Historic Preservation Act …making months of public hearings as well as exploration of real site alternatives moot.
I had attended the NEPA hearings and I can only describe them as a tortured day spent negotiating verbiage and protocol. The outcome like most public events is predetermined by people not in the conversation. People who walk the fringe and and have the inside track. People who don’t live in the Neighborhood but rather see it as an economic engine.
