January 15, 2012
Occupy NOLA works vacant lot into community garden
Earlier in my Occutour I wrote that nowhere in America needs to be occupied more than Detroit. New Orleans, a city equally plagued by poverty and blighted neighborhoods, has no shortage of areas that rival the Motor City’s need for community resurgence.
Today I visited the Seventh Ward, where Occupy New Orleans recently set up its third encampment after police removed them from their previous two. It’s a neighborhood where houses are still boarded up – if not razed altogether – from damage suffered during Hurricane Katrina; where drug dealing is prevalent and murders not uncommon.
And just like Occupy Detroit has re-occupied abandoned homes in an effort to revitalize its suffering areas, Occupy NOLA is occupying a vacant lot here in the Seventh Ward – its first of many, activists hope – in an effort to revitalize this neighborhood.
The Seventh Ward in New Orleans
Occupy New Orleans calls the effort Occupy the Lots.
There are about half a dozen tents and some 20 people who stay in them on an abandoned lot here in one of New Orleans most downtrodden areas. The owner, an elderly woman who wishes to remain anonymous, has allowed the activists to camp in exchange for their help in cleaning up her land.
The occupants, mostly homeless people, all work four days a week for about four hours a day. Since moving here two weeks ago, they’ve cleared the weeds, cut the overgrown grass back, removed 11 bags of garbage and even identified a broken water line that the city had left to form a large pool in front of a group of mailboxes.
They’ve also constructed a small greenhouse and started some seedlings in it with the idea of turning the lot into a community garden.
“We’re doing something for the community,” said Norman Oaks, the spokesman for Occupy NOLA’s new encampment here in the Seventh Ward. “We’re going to grow food here. And when we have enough, we’re going to share it with the neighborhood.”
Not everyone is pleased with their efforts.
Bobbi Ann Lewis, who doesn’t live in the Seventh Ward, stopped by at the same time I was there to tell the campers that she doesn’t think they should be occupying in a black neighborhood.
Lewis berated the activists for “cluttering up the neighborhood” but she seemed most upset that they decided to camp in a predominantly black neighborhood.
The man who cleaned out the storm drain and informed the city of the broken water line is John Lauridsen, who has been serving as the sort of work foreman of the encampment and liaison to the landlord. He’s been camping with Occupy NOLA since they were in Duncan Park, what local Occupy activists are trying to have renamed Avery Alexander Park after one of Martin Luther King’s right-hand men, which is in front of City Hall.
After that camp was broken up by the police on December 12, he joined a handful of homeless activists who occupied another vacant lot in the Second Ward. He told me they began the process of cleaning up that lot but police kicked them out of there on New Year’s Eve. Shortly thereafter, he helped set up the camp here.
He said there are two rules to the Seventh Ward encampment.
“If you stay here, you’ve got to participate in some sort of work,” he said, noting that the activists also volunteer to help others in the neighborhood as a gesture of goodwill and as a way to ingratiate themselves to those who may be skeptical, like Lewis, though he said her reaction was the most extreme they have seen to date.
He’s helped a neighbor fix a fence, and frequently helps carry groceries and other such tasks.
The second rule, he said, is “you have to be good to your fellow man.”
He said he’s already kicked out several freeloaders, and he seems nothing if not committed to the cause.
“This movement hasn’t had a martyr yet,” he told me. “I’m willing. I’m able.”
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Another fine piece by the travellin’ revolution, Bob Plain. After the Super Bowl, and the hurricane, the oil wells and the strangled engorged Mississipi, after Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart and Jefferson Davis, the Klan, the cotton and mint julips, after about 300 years of murderous blind oppression, the Big Easy might finally herald a new day. . . Occupy the Lots just could be a beginning.
Bobbi Ann Lewis go back to your own neighborhood. Or, stop talking and listen. This could potentially benefit the Seventh Ward. Thanks for the update Bob on what’s happening with “Occupy” in my city.
you got so many things wrong in you post that it’s hardly even worth talking about, i.e. the first Lot these idiots occupied was in the *Third*, not Second, Ward, and they got evicted because 1) they were on private property, and 2) it was a violent, out of control death trap.
Try to get at least *some* of your facts right next time?