Posted in New Orleans, Public Housing on January 2, 2008 | 2 Comments »
BW Cooper, originally uploaded by tempey.
[Note: This is more or less a cross post with the MLK BLVD blog, a spinoff of one of my other projects, the MLK BLVD Flickr pool. Because public housing was the subject of one chapter in LfNO, I've written before on this site about the spate of housing [...]
Posted in New Orleans, Public Housing on February 2, 2007 | Comments Off
Back to one of my hobbyhorses: project teardowns.
Some of the best-known razing of public housing has been in Chicago. Less widely understood is that while Chicago did tear down some notoriously bad-for-living projects, it renovated others. In light of this, a thoughtful op-ed in the T-P asked recently: “Can HANO follow its Chicago counterparts in [...]
Posted in New Orleans, Public Housing on November 26, 2006 | Comments Off
The housing project teardowns in New Orleans remain in limbo for now because of a lawsuit. Here’s the T-P story. Some excerpts:
The Housing Authority of New Orleans said this week in court papers that the lawsuit threatens the estimated $681 million redevelopment of what it calls the “Big Four”: C.J. Peete in Central City; [...]
Posted in New Orleans, Public Housing on November 19, 2006 | Comments Off
Today’s New York Times has an article about the project tear-downs in New Orleans, something that I’ve mentioned here before, and is of interest to me in part because of things I learned while writing the piece in the book called “The Desire Line.” The article is by Nicolai Ouroussoff. An excerpt:
Billed as a [...]
Posted in New Orleans, Public Housing on July 23, 2006 | Comments Off
NPR gives its report on the project teardowns in New Orleans. The blueprint is apparently the St. Thomas / River Garden — a controversial development when it happened, to say the least. Pres Kabacoff is quoted pointing out how that area had lagged behind and maybe even weighed down surrounding neighborhoods back when it was [...]
Posted in Letters From New Orleans book, MLK BLVD, New Orleans, Public Housing on June 15, 2006 | Comments Off
Calliope (Post-Katrina)
I have a really bad feeling about the news that four New Orleans housing projects are now slated for demolition. I don’t have any illusions about the problems of the projects, but when I was researching the long piece in LfNO about the Desire projects, I got pretty familiar with the extremely bad history [...]
Posted in Friends, MLK BLVD, New Orleans, Public Housing on April 28, 2006 | Comments Off
1. Pal Marc Weidenbaum (proprietor of Disquiet) hosted a panel about making instruments and making music with them — his panelists were Tom (Univac) Koch, Krys Bobrowsk, and Chachi Jones — at the recent Maker Faire in San Francisco. He’s posted a recording of the 45-minute panel, and it’s very cool. Check it out.
2. New [...]
Posted in Friends, New Orleans, One song / one album, Other Music +, Public Housing on April 14, 2006 | Comments Off
1. Pal Karen Schoemer talks about her new book on the radio show On Point. She’s joined by Nellie McKai (who reviewed her book for the NYT), Patti Page, and Fabian. The book is called Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with ’50s Pop Music. Here’s an excerpt on the NYT site, which I guess [...]
Posted in Letters From New Orleans book, New Orleans, Public Housing on December 28, 2005 | Comments Off
When I visited N.O. in October, I drove over to the Desire projects, which I guess have a new name now. These were the projects in the piece called “The Desire Line” in the book. Apparently the teardown was completed, and some new construction had started, but now it’s a bit of a shambles again. [...]
[Or: The Point of this Site]
A couple of years ago I did some research into the song "St. James Infirmary," wrote up what I found, emailed that essay to friends and posted it on my web site (as part of a series of "Letters From New Orleans," as I was living in that city at the time). Based on the feedback, I wrote a second version of the essay, and asked for more feedback. Based on that, I wrote a third version.
And now, this site: A place to collect some of the links, leads, thoughts, and suggestions relating to the song that readers (from Finland, The Netherlands, Australia, Spain, England, Sweden, Canada, and all over the U.S.) have sent me. This may lead to a fourth and significantly expanded version of the essay, some day. Also on this site: Plenty of tangents.
Never heard "St. James Infirmary"? Start here.
The most recent version of my "St. James Infirmary" essay is now a few years old. But it's still a fairly decent overview of what I know about the song, and why I'm interested in it. You can read it either in the book Letters from New Orleans (see below), or in the archives of The Gambit, the New Orleans weekly that published the piece as a book excerpt when LfNO came out.
This site is a partial spinoff of the book Letters from New Orleans, published by the unstoppable Garrett County Press. My interest in "St. James Infirmary" is the subject of one essay in the book. All author proceeds from the book still go to post-Katrina relief efforts, so I think it's okay for me to say: You ought to buy it.
