September 12, 2005
Trompe L'Oeil in New Orleans? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 08:55 AM EST When you take a train north from Grand Central Terminal in New York, the tracks of what I still think of as the old New York Central emerge from a tunnel running under Park Avenue into the daylight at 97th Street. If you look up from your reading a little north of that and gaze eastward you will see a good number of abandoned buildings. The sight is not unusual for an inner city, but something about these buildings is. The windows are painted with bright curtains and blooming flowerpots and other trompe l'oeil scenes of a flourishing community. At least they were a year and a half ago, when I last took the train north.
I have been thinking about those windows a great deal as I have watched the tragedy unfolding in New Orleans and listened to the reactions from the rest of the country. This cannot be America, Americans say over and over again, with shame and heartbreak and disbelief. I share their shame and heartbreak. I wonder at their disbelief. Have they not sat in front of their televisions repeatedly in the past few decades watching American cities erupt in violence? A hundred years ago this summer, New York City suffered a record heat wave. In that pre-air-conditioning era, many died. The heat was democratic, but man-made conditions skewed the odds. The death toll was much higher in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side, where a single bathroom might serve an entire building, a breath of air never entered, and entire families slept in one bed. Those tenements no longer exist, partly because reformers like Jacob Riis forced Americans to see them. The tragedy in New Orleans has forced Americans to see misery and inequality not in some safely distant third-world country but in our midst. As just about everyone has pointed out by now, the preponderance of citizens trapped in the rising waters and locked in the Superdome were black. Without money or a car they could not get out. Like the heat wave a hundred years ago, Katrina was democratic. Our society is less so. The stories and pictures coming out of New Orleans have shown us that. The question now is whether as the flood waters recede we will continue to see, or merely go back to looking at the pretty trompe l'oeil paintings that celebrate the richest country in the world without noticing its poorest citizens.
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