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Urban highways were never a good idea. Now, as cities all over the world look to
somehow ex-fill the big, tall, hulking roads that ploughed through their communities
fifty years ago, the U.S. faces a reckoning. While the pandemic-stalled re-populating
of America’s largest metropolitan areas has at least temporarily dulled
the lure of city living and working for some and the country is forced to face its
racist past and present, the billions of dollars needed to take a hard, serious look
at getting rid of our worst city highways has, incongruously, appeared. Hopefully,
a torrent of federal dollars will begin the long overdue work needed to address
the harm road building wrought on communities of color and to start the healing
process.
This project takes the position that new building is key to healing, that repairing
the damage from elevated highways or urban renewal schemes can’t happen
without construction. One place where this is particularly true is North Claiborne in
New Orleans. Like many neighborhoods in many cities it saw its business district,
overwhelmingly African American, wiped out by an interstate. Over the decades,
as the full scope of the damage done by the highway became clear, the community
mobilized behind the possibility of removing the I-10 and re-building the at grade
boulevard and tree-lined neutral ground that once ran through Treme and the
Seventh Ward.
Reclaiming the Neutral Ground picks up a this point. Taking I-10’s removal as a
given, the project proposes to turn a series of off-ramps into a campus dedicated
to high skilled, vocational building arts training meant to literally create the
knowledge needed to heal the built environment. A new home for the New Orleans
Notorial Archives, a key resource in the sensitive work of historic preservation and
restoration, and a public market will anchor the site with alternate programming.