Local author loves and lives by the bayou

Photo: Rusty Costanza

By Diana Pinckley
Times-Picayune

New Orleans author Constance Adler knows exactly where she belongs. And it's right on the banks of Bayou St. John. In her first book, an evocative memoir titled "My Bayou: New Orleans Through the Eyes of a Lover, " her subjects range from voodoo to pelicans, from the sweet mud of the bayou to the cracked dirt that paved the city in 2005, from loyal and personable dogs to somewhat-less-trustworthy humans.

As a blogger devoted to the work of Emily Dickinson, and a contributor to national magazines, Adler has a sharp eye for detail and a poetic voice. Here's how she responds when two pelicans sail over the bayou while she is cleaning up litter:

They float low in the air, gliding on their huge wingspans just inches above the water's surface. It's a great gravity-defying trick of aero-engineering that still looks like pure magic to me. The pelicans make the ducks and herons and cormorants look like they are still practicing flight. These local birds, who appear just as harried and spent as the people, seem to belong here, pecking and paddling around in this citified waterbed while the pelicans make great sky circles with their wings... The pelicans offered an invitation to descend into this place. To deepen my relationship to my bayou and the city it flowed through.

Adler grew up on the water in southern New Jersey, so the flow of the Crescent City feels right. "If I close my eyes and just listen and sniff, the humid air along Bayou Saint John stirs me in a place that can't be mapped. I may spend the whole of my life navigating the borders where water laps against my thoughts."

Adler first moved to New Orleans in 1995, after she tired of the freelance writing life in Manhattan. She went away for a year of graduate school, and returned to a house on Bayou St. John, where she's been ever since. "I had gone looking for a new life, and I found it. In addition to offering her many delights, this city also taught me that anything at all might rise up from the chthonic (stet) ground of being. New Orleans makes no guarantee of sweet dreams only."

While the book begins well before Hurricane Katrina, more than half of it is devoted to evacuation and homecoming. Adler memorably chronicles those dire days, as she and her family sleep in many beds offered by sympathetic hosts across the country, watching TV coverage of their beloved and drowning city as tears roll down their cheeks.

When she returns to the "honeymoon cottage, " the sweet odor of wet dirt around the bayou segues into the powerful smell left by Katrina mud.

"The scent summoned an instant visceral distaste, marbled with panic, as if I were being smothered in despair, nailed into a coffin before my time. Katrina smelled like wet dirt and mildew, mixed with human dust that has been cooking in late summer heat, a strangely florid and fertile smell that suggested unwholesome life forms brewing in it. ... a smell that signaled penetrating decay, sadness, destruction, loss."

Like her favorite body of water, Adler will recover from trauma, helped by Lance ("a muddy trickle of a dog") and her own distinctive points of view. "My Bayou" reflects a life open to experience, inspired by a beloved place.

NOW, see the movie - filmed by local photo/videographer Jackson Hill.

Read another review in "Blackbird."

She also hosts writers' workshops: Bayou Writing Workshop

New Orleans gets first-rate levee system

Big bill for levee upkeep comes to New Orleans

By By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press – 20 hours ago  

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In the busy and under-staffed offices of New Orleans' flood-control leaders, there's an uneasy feeling about what lies ahead.

By the time the next hurricane season starts in June of 2013, the city will take control of much of a revamped protection system of gates, walls and armored levees that the Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $12 billion building. The corps has about $1 billion worth of work left.

Engineers consider it a Rolls Royce of flood protection — comparable to systems in seaside European cities such as St. Petersburg, Venice, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Whether the infrastructure can hold is less in question than whether New Orleans can be trusted with the keys.

The Army Corps estimates it will take $38 million a year to pay for upkeep, maintenance and operational costs after it's turned over to local officials.

Local flood-control chief Robert Turner said he has questions about where that money will come from. At current funding levels, the region will run out of money to properly operate the high-powered system within a decade unless a new revenue source is found.

"There's a price to pay for resiliency," the levee engineer said from his office at the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East. "We can't let pieces of this system die away. We can't be parochial about it."

On Nov. 6, New Orleans voters were faced with one of their first challenges on flood protection when they voted on renewal of a critical levee tax. The tax levy was approved, meaning millions of dollars should be available annually for levee maintenance.

Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California, said the region must find additional money to keep the system working properly. "If you try to operate it and maintain it on a shoestring, then it won't provide the protection that people deserve."

Many locals remain uneasy, even though Turner's agency is a welcome replacement for local levee boards that were previously derided.

"It's scary," said C. Ray Bergeron, owner of Fleur De Lis Car Care, a service station in the Lakeview neighborhood where water rose to rooftops after levees collapsed during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Before Katrina, Bergeron said the local levee boards were complacent. "They told everybody everything was fine, 'oh yeah, it's fine. Let's go have martinis and lunch.'"

After Katrina, the locally run levee boards that oversaw the area's defenses were vilified, and quickly replaced by the regional levee district run by Turner.

Congressional investigations found the old Orleans Levee Board more interested in managing a casino license and two marinas than looking after levees. Though the Army Corps of Engineers had responsibility for annual levee inspections, the local levee boards were responsible for maintenance. Still, the boards spent millions of dollars on a fountain and overpasses rather than on levee protection. And there was confusion over who was responsible for managing the fragmented levee system, U.S. Senate investigations revealed.

Still, experts generally agree the old levee board's failings did not cause the levees to collapse during Katrina. Poor levee designs by the corps and the sheer strength of Katrina get the lion's share of the blame.

Since the Flood Control Act of 1936, the Army Corps has given local or state authorities oversight of water-control projects, whether earthen levees in the Midwest or beach walls in New England.

"That's been the eternal problem with flood-protection systems," said Thomas Wolff, an engineer at Michigan State University. "You build something very good and then give it to local interests who are not as well-funded."

New Orleans is an unusual case because the area is inheriting the nation's first-of-its-kind urban flood control system.

"We've given a very expensive system to a place that may not be able to afford it over the long term," said Leonard Shabman, an Arlington, Va.-based water resources expert. Letting the Army Corps run it isn't much of a solution either, he added. "It's not like the corps' budget is flush."

The nation has spent lavishly on fixing the system in the seven years since Katrina flooded 80 percent of New Orleans and left 1,800 people dead.

"It is better than what the Dutch have for the types of storms we have," said Carlton Dufrechou, a member of the board of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, which monitors local environmental issues.

Ensuring it remains that way could be tricky. The biggest headaches are several mega-projects with lots of moving parts, all needing constant upkeep. The corps is building them across major waterways that lead into New Orleans.

Take for instance the 1.8-mile-long, 26-foot-high surge barrier southeast of the French Quarter that blocks water coming up from the Gulf of Mexico across lakes and into the city's canals. Water from this direction doomed the Lower 9th Ward and threatened to flood the French Quarter. Maintaining this giant wall alone will cost $4 million or more a year.

"You have to get out there and do exercises, do the preventive maintenance, change out equipment over time on a particular schedule," Turner said, enumerating the challenges. "There are a lot of cases where a single thing goes wrong and that can create a failure, a complete failure where you can't close the system."

There is a mounting list of to-dos.

Already, lightning has knocked out chunks of wall. Grass hasn't grown well on several new stretches of levee. Louisiana State University grass experts have been called in to help seed them.

There are recurring problems with vibrations and shuddering on a new floodgate at Bayou Dupre in St. Bernard Parish. The corps has plans to overhaul the structure in the spring before handing it over to local control. And there will be the inevitable sinking of levees and structures, as always happens in south Louisiana's naturally soft soils. Over time, levees will have to be raised.

Col. Ed Fleming, the New Orleans corps commander, said his outfit will work to ensure the transition to local control is smooth.

"This happens with corps civil projects all over the country. That's the way it works in Iraq, Afghanistan," he said. "We have authority to build, but we have no authority to do operations and maintenance."

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

On Thanksgiving, New Orleanians go to the track

A woman wearing a live pet rooster.

In most American towns, people go to the dinner table on Thanksgiving, but in New Orleans, a great many go to the racetrack. Instead of eating sweet potatoes, they down bloody marys and wear fancy or fanciful hats.

I thought the occasion would be upscale and so wore a silk suit.

But I forgot this is New Orleans and any event is an opportunity to costume.





The races were fun and the horses beautiful as were the hats.

Burgundy Street

I had to make a detour this morning when a driver crashed into a cement light pole on St. Claude Avenue, pulling it and the power lines to the ground. Good work on Thanksgiving morning!

I detoured onto Burgundy Street and here's what I saw:

Pretty cool, eh?

New Orleans is everybody's favorite!

Intelligent people, classical music and luxury stores would ruin New Orleans!

Blackbirds fly, blackbirds fly

Several of us girls were driving through the Bywater and making a U-turn to go to the Country Club for cocktails, when we saw this house covered with blackbirds.

Of course, we stopped the car to take pictures. The owner came over and tried to explain it.

You have to admit, it is novel.

Volunteers still arriving

Yesterday, I was taking a walk along the top of the levee all the way to the Domino Sugar refinery in Chalmette. It was a gorgeous day with warm sunsine and a refreshingly cool breeze. The day before I had seen two blue herons, a white pelican and a bunch of monarch butterflies. It's still a habitat for wildlife.

I walked briskly past a man who was wearing an apple green "Sustain the Nine" T-shirt. As I passed him, I said:  "Like your shirt." I assumed he was a 9th Ward neighbor. But he told me he'd bought it at the office of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, an agency located at the back of the Greater Little Zion Baptist Church on Chartres Street.

He was here helping to rebuild a woman's home, which was toppled seven years ago in the flooding after Katrina. A volunteer from Virginia, this is his first time in New Orleans. Others in his work group have come to the 9th Ward seven times to help.

A college friend asked me last week how the 9th Ward was coming along. Not too good, I said. If you drive from my house to Claiborne Avenue a short distance away, you pass many abandoned homes still with the marks left by the National Guardsmen searching for bodies. The land slopes down from the river and the homes were submerged deeper and deeper the further north you go. If homeowners did not have flood insurance, they probably evacuated and never returned. Some people waited years for help from FEMA and didn't have the resources - jobs where they continued to receive paychecks - or other places where they could temporarily live. They worked service jobs that went away when the tourists and conventions stopped coming.  All their family members' and friends' homes were also destroyed.

Another friend who lives in Palo Alto, Ca., asked why people live there? Well, they are poor, for one thing, and it was a solid community. Also, the area wouldn't have flooded if the Corps of Engineers hadn't first dynamited the Industrial Canal and then rebuilt the walls improperly. That wasn't the residents' fault.

It is interesting now to listen to news reports about Hurricane Sandy. Journalists confidently say that other cities have rebuilt after such disasters - take New Orleans, which is better than ever. That is true to some extent as many aspects of the city have improved over several long, slow years. But some neighborhoods are just the same. Sure, there are a few enclaves of rebuilding. My little Global Green development, for example, Habitat for Humanity, Brad Pitt's "Make It Right" and Preservation Resource Center homes. But most of the 9th Ward is still struggling along with pot holes in the streets, no grocery store and limited public transportation.

I don't know why people don't get what happened here in the 9th Ward. Maybe the events were too complex or too gruesome to want to understand. Maybe it is too difficult to think about like those poor Haitians who get hit every year - if not by hurricanes, then an earthquake.

New Orleans still needs help, y'all. It's a special place and deserves your support.

Couple grew up in the same neighborhood

By: R. Stephanie Bruno, The Times-Picayune

Richard Kuntz and Sweetie Pie Voebel grew up just a couple of blocks away from each other in Mid-City and have known each other almost their entire lives. "My mother used to send me to Canal Street to pick up things at the florist shop owned by Sweetie Pie's grandmother, Emma," Richard Kuntz said. "I was 12 years old when Sweetie Pie and her sister Cookie were born, but I think I had my eye on her even then.


"Sweetie Pie" is not just a nickname, it's her given name. Her birth certificate says "Doris Sweetie Pie Bottinelli Voebel." Likewise, the name "Cookie" is on her twin sister's birth certificate.

"I don't know myself by any other name," she says. "Even my credit cards say Sweetie Pie."

Richard Kuntz's romantic fortune took a positive turn when Sweetie Pie bought the North St. Patrick house in 1970, immediately next door to his parents' house. They wed in 1974 and raised their children there. Their grown children haven't moved far: One lives in a house on Bienville Street catty-corner to the Kuntz home and the other nearby on Canal Street.

"We are only the second family to own the house," Richard Kuntz said. "It was built in 1910 as a home for the two Bertoniere sons who married the two Montanet Sisters. The two couples shared the house. Each had two separate bedrooms and a bath, but they shared the kitchen and dining room."


Sweetie Pie and the Colonel made a few respectful changes to the house when they got it, to better suit their lifestyle and to afford their family more privacy. A doorway connecting a parlor to one of the bedrooms was eliminated, a stair was hand-built by Richard Kuntz to reach the second floor (formerly the attic), and the bottom of the raised house was enclosed. There is one room, however, that has remained virtually unchanged.

"One of the Montanet sisters died in childbirth in the house," Sweetie Pie Kuntz said. "We acquired her bedroom furniture when we bought this house and keep her room in near-original condition."

Throughout the decades that the Kuntzes have lived in the house, its expansive front porch has been an integral element in their lives.

"I decorate the porch for all holidays," Sweetie Pie Kuntz said. "Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mardi Gras and Easter. I always have. I think it was in my blood from growing up around the flower shop and then running it after my grandmother, mother and uncle died."

Holiday time or not, the couple likes to take advantage of good weather in the fall and spring to sit on the front porch in the afternoon, sipping Pimms Cups and Mint Juleps as they keep each other company.

"It's such a delight to talk to people as they pass by," Richard Kuntz said. "That's how I was raised. When I was growing up, everyone knew everyone else's business, and if you got into mischief somewhere in the neighborhood, the news reached your home before you did."

 The proliferation of dog owners in the area has provided the couple plenty of opportunities for afternoon chats with neighbors.

"It seems like everyone has one or two dogs these days, so there are always people out walking them," Richard Kuntz said.

Porch-sitting has its own recreational merits, but the Carnival season in particular affords the couple additional opportunities to socialize from the porch. It's a tradition that started nearly 80 years ago, when the Bertoniere/Montanet families still lived in the house.

"In the 1930s when the Krewe of Mid-City formed, Charlie Bourgeois, the captain, talked to the Bertonieres about letting the court sit on the front porch like a grandstand so that the king could stop and toast them," Richard Kuntz said.

More recently, not long after the couple moved into the house, another krewe would pass the house.

"Way back in the '70s and '80s, Crescent City, the truck parade, used to pass the house, and we'd watch it from the front porch," Richard Kuntz said. "We miss it."

And even though the Endymion parade follows a Canal Street route two blocks away from the Kuntz home and its storied porch, Sweetie Pie Kuntz says that her favorite night of the year is the Saturday before Mardi Gras when the mega-Krewe rolls.

"We stay on the front porch all night long and have fun with the people going to and from the parade," Sweetie Pie said. "We toss them beads, and sometimes they toss beads back to us. Everyone is in a happy mood."

Not all porch-oriented events involve Carnival parades or interaction with strangers: The porch often hosts family celebrations, such as a party the couple gave recently for a granddaughter who had just graduated from Mount Carmel Academy.

And though the family's annual Easter egg hunt takes place in the couple's expansive backyard, everyone ends up on the front porch at one time or another throughout the course of the day.

As alluring as the porch is for sitting, street-watching and celebrating, there is something additional that makes the Kuntz house the center of family life: Sweetie Pie's genius in the kitchen.

"Sweetie Pie is such an amazing cook," Richard Kuntz said. "My mother knew how to cook seven meals that she would rotate through every week. She cooked them well, but she never strayed from the path. Every meal that Sweetie Pie makes is a surprise, because she is always experimenting with recipes. There is no repetition."

A pantry filled with more pans than a professional restaurant kitchen testifies to Sweetie Pie Kuntz's culinary passion.

"I know what every pot and pan is for, and when to use it," she said. "I just love to cook."
Sweetie Pie's delicious meals are served inside at the dining table and occasionally on the back porch, overlooking the backyard, but never, ever on the front porch.

"The gourmet meals take place on the back porch," Richard Kuntz said. "But we save the front porch for our evening libations."

Death celebrated in New Orleans

By Doug MacCash, The Times-Picayune
Day of the Dead altar dedicated to musician'Uncle' Lionel Batiste is on display in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art through Nov. 9. The colorfully macabre installation was assembled by Southern University art professor Cynthia Ramirez, who has a special relationship with the Mexican memorial tradition.

As she added tissue paper flowers, small toys and other finishing touches to the altar, Ramirez explained that though she has Mexican roots, she grew up in Virginia, far from most traditions such as Dia de los Muertos. But she’s forever bound to the Nov. 2 holiday since that’s also her birthday.


Learning about the Day of the Dead, Ramirez said, was “kind of like a journey for me to find me, you know; to find my cultural background. What I’ve found in this tradition is something very unique and wonderful. So it’s become an everyday part of my life.”
Ramirez said that Day of the Dead altars have typical elements such as artificial skulls and marigold flowers that can be traced all the way back to Aztec times. Somewhere in history, the pre-Columbian traditions blended with Catholicism to produce the altars known today, which are decorated with comical skeleton sculptures, skull-shaped candy and other death-defying touches.

Every altar, Ramirez said, should have components that symbolize the elements of life. Vegetables and fragrant substances, such as coffee represent the earth. Fluttering tissue flags indicate the wind. Candles symbolize fire – though actual candles aren’t allowed in the museum. And water is always provided, Ramirez said, to slake the thirst of the departed.
Photos and possessions of the recently dead are included as well. Ramirez said that when building altars, she chooses subjects who have contributed to New Orleans culture. At the last New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, Ramirez created an altar for Coco Robicheaux, who died in November 2011. For the Ogden altar, Ramirez chose to honor 'Uncle' Lionel Batiste, who died in July. A selection of photos of Batiste, plus Treme Brass Band CDs and a toy drum represent the musician, who Ramirez described as a “passionate, prominent and unique individual.”

“To me,” Ramirez said, “he just embodies a cultural worker in New Orleans; what New Orleans is about.”

As Ramirez explained, the somewhat celebratory tone of a Day of the Dead altar is different from the somber tone of most American memorials.
“You’re not remembering their death; you’re remembering their life.”

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