It was a perfectly beautiful day in New Orleans–slightly cool, slightly breezy, clear as a bell. I hopped on the Surly, clipped in, and zipped up to work. Man, there is just nothing like riding that bike, skirt flying in the breeze. It reminds me, every time, just how perfect the bicycle is. I mean, it’s such a simple machine. I just move my legs up and down in a circle, and I’m really speeding. I feel it especially when passing pedestrians–man, they’re moving slowly. Every once in a great while I’ll walk (like if I have a flat…), and I’m reminded that what I see every day is what I see on a bike; walking gives whole different views. Slowing down means seeing things very, very differently. But I want to be on my bike, so that’s where I was this afternoon when out running those annoying errands of daily life. I stopped at the corner of Louisiana and St. Charles to take a picture of this giant crane reaching in to the sky. I couldn’t even get the whole thing in frame. They are breaking ground on a bank branch here. I assumed the proposed bank was a remnant of pre-Katrina life since the “Future Home of ____” sign had been up since I moved here over two years ago. But no, the bank is coming. I thought to stop and snap a picture when I remembered waking up to the gentle crash-pings coming from this machine this morning. I don’t even like all that close to the site, but that’s one loud earth-moving machine. Some folks like the looks of construction under way, especially in places like this one, but they don’t usually have to hear it, too. I’ll be listening to the slow and steady clank for weeks, I suppose. Best train my attention elsewhere. Hope I can do it on my bike.

Oh, this delightful fall weather! I put on pants! and a sweater! and rode my bike to work in the clear and sunny morning. I had a frustrating day–rather Kafkaesque, to be honest–but riding home in this weather let me work out some of the niggling irritations of copy machines that don’t work and mail that seems to be lost. I then rode over to the grocery store to get food for the week. I stopped to take this picture of some new houses in the final stage of construction on Annunciation between Marengo and Milan. Annunciation is just three blocks toward the river from Magazine, but it feels like a different world. This is the highest part of the city, so it didn’t flood when the levees broke, but there’s a lot of general blight here. These houses, though, are brand new. They definitely match the architecture in the neighborhood, with their iron fences and shotgun windows and porches and fancy eaves. But they just smell new. I appreciate new construction that blends in to the neighborhood, as this surely does, but it still doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe it’s the way they match each other so perfectly, or the part where they aren’t quite finished, that makes their imitation so glaringly draw attention to the fact that they are imitations. This is, of course,  just idle thought. New, clean, attractive homes are just what Annunciation needs. And I need a lot more days like this one to ride out the petty frustrations of a petty day.

It has been raining like crazy and I’ve been crazy busy preparing for a trip to Los Angeles this week, which has been seriously putting a crimp in my riding and blogging. It was pouring rain when I woke up, but it let up just enough for me to ride to work, raincoat, plastic bags, and extra shoes on board. I missed a number of downpours as I moved about my day at work, and by the time I was ready to head home, it was a veritable sauna out there. I rode back downtown along Freret and stopped to snap a picture of this new construction near Jena. I’ve been watching this place go up. It looks like it’s made of giant foam legos stacked on top of each other, slipped over those steel rods poking out the top. It’s some kind of green building–I’ll have to wait for D. to weigh in on exactly what it is. *Actually, I found out today that it’s ThermoBlock–the website has a nutty soundtrack, just like the nutty look of this building.*But it looks cool, apparently stays cool for less, and it has gone up incredibly quickly. There are so many ways to build, but I found myself staring at this thing, pretty sure there’s no way it’ll hold. I think it’s time I get used to seeing new kinds of buildings. We need them. I pedaled the rest of the way home, wondering how I can get a hand on a bike for a few days in southern California. Because I don’t think I can do without one.

It was another warm and humid fall day in New Orleans, and it was my Friday, making the ride to work all the more pleasurable. At an impromptu lunch with R. and N., we talked about the pleasures of watching change happen in this city. I mean, I ride my bike along the same streets, day after day after day. But it is always different. Take, for example, the public housing rising all of the sudden up on Louisiana near Claiborne or that leak on Freret Street that has finally been repaired; the thing is, for all the decay and blight in this place, there’s also a lot of rebuilding and change. Take this house at the corner of Pleasant and Constance, which I passed on my ride home from a lovely dinner with K. I have been riding by this house for a couple of years. It is still in disarray, but it has new siding on one side, and the permit that used to be stapled to the front in gone, and some clearing of debris has definitely happened. I don’t know what’s currently going on with the place or when the house might be livable again, but riding my bike around this city, I can watch happens on this corner, and many, many others.

Today was one of those days when my bike is my transportation. I commuted up to work for my morning seminar and then back home for lunch and letter writing. I took my grading down to the Marigny for late afternoon coffee. After a walk and dinner with S. I headed back Uptown via Baronne. I take this route whenever I’m riding back from the Treme. I stopped and took this picture near Felicity. It is amazing to me how quickly this structure is going up, now that it’s going up. The street smells like the two-by-fours that have taken over the street. A security van is parked across the street, with a security guard chatting on her cell phone, on the lookout for troublemakers. I’m not sure what this structure will be, but I’m guessing apartments. They seem too short to me; I’m used to the high ceilings for cooling ventilation in the old shotguns that dominate my neighborhood. In the middle of this wooden structure is a metal stairwell, with two flights, heading to nowhere, waiting for the somewhere to be built around it. Yeah, i think it’s a metaphor. I got back on my bike, turned up some music, and flew through the surprisingly cool and unsurprisingly thick air of fall.

The sun came out again today thank goodness.  I hadn’t ridden my bicycle in two whole days–which is a really long time.  I was getting itchy.  So after riding to and from work today I took Jack out for a long ride around Mid-City.  I first went through the French Quarter to see if crowds were out and about for St. Patrick’s Day.  Bourbon Street already smelled terrible, but there were hardly any peopledrinking.  Yet.  It was a lot more crowded at the Parasol’s Block Party Uptown, but I wasn’t in the mood for anything but bike riding.  I had thought I’d be blogging about another celebration in New Orleans, but I ended up doing circles around Lindy Boggs Medical Center, wondering why it still stands empty and dilapidated so many years after Katrina.  I snapped this picture of the side of the building with a couple of walls missing, so you can see right into the room.  I found myself imagining all the folks who sat outside of here on the landing, smoking, waiting, smoking.  This place was filled to capacity prior to the storm, but now it’s just empty.  Where have all the sick people gone?  It appears that the land has been sold to an out-of-state Victory developers who plan to develop the area for big box stores.  Demolition obviously hasn’t taken place and development plans appear to remain up in the air, but the enormous building remains as an eyesore and a constant reminder of how much is still broken here.  So no picture of drunken faux-Irishmen tonight, though there are plenty out there this evening.  Hope none of them need an ER in Mid-City tonight.

I have had lots of long bike rides in the last few days, but haven’t had time to blog.  Today I was back at work, using my bike for the commute.  When I was riding home this afternoon, I saw this crane moving things in–or out–of one of the campus buildings.  I’m not sure what’s going on in this building, but moving trucks have been blocking this part of campus for awhile.  I like catching the crane in action.  I take so much of my daily physical world for granted, but I rarely ask how things turn out the way they do.  Many Tulane buildings are old with doorways and stairwells built for the kind of environment at the time.  I guess today we have bigger stuff that needs bigger access points, and so we have to be creative about how we move our contemporary stuff into old spaces.  My classes are currently learning about how social categories of race, gender, sexuality, and others are not natural, but made, produced, by and through the social systems and relationships that just appear to us to be prior to those social processes.  Today, as I rode my bike home, I thought about how space itself and the objects we surround ourselves with are also changing social constructions.

I was itching to ride my bike today in the lovely weather–overcast and a touch windy, humid and thick–and decided to head down to the CBD to run an errand or two.  I passed this building after taking a right on Poydras, headed to my first visit to the Riverwalk mall.  The building is collapsing on itself but displaying a picture of its future “redefining luxury in New Orleans.”  Most cities I’ve lived in lately have some version of this futural luxury that in the present seems exceedingly unlikely.  In Hartford, CT, the decimated downtown is home to new condominiums that don’t make any sense given the depressed surroundings.  In Boise, ID, part of the downtown has been rebuilt as BODO (BOise DOwntown) and condos are for sale on top of the parking lot that serves the shopping center.    In Emeryville, CA, some developers actually put condominiums on top of a new pedestrian mall.  I never could understand how anyone could live at the mall.  But perhaps this is the final realization of the American dream?  Oakland, CA  hosts luxury condos around Lake Merritt, with the motto, “Live Above It All.”  I guess somebody–I have trouble imagining who–will live “above it all” here in the still-partially decimated CBD.  Is it really true that if you build it they will come?  I guess we’ll find out.  In the meantime, given strict historical preservation rules, this building probably can’t be torn down, but it can be allowed to fall down.  We’ll just have to wait and see, those of us who make up the all whom will be lived above.

I took a day off from riding my bike yesterday because my knees were begging me.  Fine, I told them.  Fine.  But today we’re going out again.  It felt great to ride today, especially after a seat adjustment that has me sitting up higher.  So I took my bike with me on a task ride–to the drugstore, the post office, coffee, bike store, and home again, in the rain.  I rode through Central City again on my way to coffee.  This neighborhood is like so many in New Orleans: full of incredible contrast.  In other cities I’ve lived in (Boise, Hartford, Berkeley, Oakland, NYC, Paris, DC, Portland) the decay is studiously kept apart from the new.  Not so here.  This picture captures a bit of what I mean.  The house on the left is habitable, looks well kept.  The house in the middle is literally falling down.  You can see the lean and the roof has caved in, falling down I mean.  The house on the right is under construction, soon to be fancified like the houses across the street which you can’t see here.  There’s a clothesline running across the scene, tying all three together.  Some parts of this town aren’t like this–the “private” streets in Uptown, Nicolas Cage’s neighborhood in the Garden District–but most of this place is a study in precisely these contrasts.  Or perhaps this is just the honesty of southern poverty.

I rode my bike down to a new coffee shop in the Marigny this afternoon.  On my way I passed this construction site on St. Charles and, I think, Louisiana.  This is where the new Borders store will be.  It is easy, by the way, to be critical of these sorts of big box stores when you’ve got them in easy reach for those “emergencies,” as in, “I need a Scrabble dictionary and it’s after nine!”  In this town, though, a big box store, especially a bookstore, would come in handy on occasion.  There is much more to say about this debate (particularly given that the terrible Walmart was the saving grace for tons of folks during Katrina–sometimes Things Are Complicated), but what interests me about this particular building is its construction–which it has been under for at least the year I’ve been here.  The building itself is a beautiful old mansion, or courthouse, or similarly regal place.  But all that was left of it was the facade.  I used to pass the building, confused that it was nothing but a front.  They are preserving it, building up around it, though when finished they will certainly try to hide this origin.  And why shouldn’t it?  Historical preservation, especially of architecture in a place like this, is vital.  But it is funny, too, to think about how much of this city might be built around facades like this one, how much this place is hiding.  Best to take notes.