Thursday, March 19, 2009

Darci's Feild Notes

Irma, Nish, Natalia, and I went to Algiers right after class.  We got off of the highway immediately after crossing the Crescent City Connection bridge.  As soon as we were on surface streets Nish pointed out newly built housing projects that had replaced older ones.  Honestly, this project seemed really nice.
We stopped a block or two later to ask a cop on the side of the road how to get to the police station.  He was friendly but guarded.  Trying to find the station, we drove through some working-middle class neighborhoods.  Some houses seemed a little decrepit while others were in better condition.  There were a lot of mom-and-pop type convenience shops as well.  At the end of the residential area but before the levee we saw Mardi Gras World.  MG World was a bunch of warehouse buildings, a little bit of an eyesore, but probably a pretty big tourist attraction.
We took another detour and drove through Algiers Point.  This definitely seemed like a wealthier part of town.  The ferry port was also in Algiers Point.  Across the street from the terminal was the DryDock bar (I think that's what it was called).  We sat with some really funny guys outside there.  I don't know if they were drunk or just really funny guys.  Either way, these guys were very talkative.  When we asked what they thought the local demographics were like, one of them responded that his neighborhood was almost all black and he "love it!"  In further explanation, he seemed to be describing recent white-flight since the storm.  Another one of the guys kept telling me about the maintenance guy, Kevin, at Temple Sinai uptown right here by school.  Upon waking up to flood water after the storm, Kevin walked over the bridge and all the way into Algiers as many others did before the bridge was closed off.
After stopping at the bar we made a stop at a local public high school school.  Most of the kids we saw were black but school was out so we don't know how fair of an assumption that is.  We were informed that the school's basketball team had made to the playoffs and everyone was driving to the game two hours away in Alexandria.  We sat in a room and waited for someone from the main office to come down and talk to us.  By the time someone came, he was in a huge rush and had confused us for other people so it was pretty uneventful.
Our last stop was finally to the police station.  Everywhere else we'd driven through seemed pretty typical New Orleans looking, urban-residential, until we got the street the station was on.  Suddenly it got very country.  There were houses with more land and horses in the yards.  I also saw a chicken walking across the street.  When we got the the police station there were some nice officers in the lot who told us where to park to go into the office.  In contrast, the lady officer inside was extremely rude and didn't even speak to us.  She just kept answering phones until we left.

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