Back to Tulane: Tearing down a house, New Orleans style
On Saturday I took an ax to the walls of a house. That's the nature of community service in New Orleans these days.
I would be hard pressed to remember the last time I saw the front end of a Saturday, but at 8:30 in the morning, I was sitting in front of Tulane's McAlister Auditorium learning where we would go that day. I went with a couple of friends who'd been volunteering all semester. They said we were going to St. Bernard Parish. I've never been there before. I didn't even know where it was. They said it is past the Lower Ninth Ward that you always hear about on the news when they talk about areas that were demolished by the storm. Apparently the damage in St. Bernard was even worse.
We drove through the Ninth on the way there. The Wal-Mart was back in business, and other shops had reopened as well. Some parts looked like the architectural equivalent of a car crash—like some drunken homeowner had lost control and crashed his house into his neighbor's. We saw more new sights on the way to the community service headquarters, where we would get our materials and assignment. You get a whole new perspective on physics the first time you see a minivan stuck in a tree. I wonder what the fire department would say if you called to say your pet Toyota had climbed up the old oak tree and was afraid to jump down.
We arrived at a nondescript building and a church, where a student service organization called Safer and a larger organization called Common Ground are based. There was a makeshift donations tent, along with a bunch of equipment deemed appropriate for house gutting. We each got a fly white jumpsuit made of something in between paper and cloth, a respirator, goggles, gloves, and big rubber boots. The guys in charge of our group said we would split into two teams. One to gut a house and one to "demo" a house. My friends and I opted for demo. Demo as in demolition. We got back into the car and drove to a one-story, wooden house. Most of one side was already off. The guy who lived there was happy to see us. We were there to tear down the house he and his father built together about 35 years ago. Sort of a strange circumstance for introductions when you think about it. His neighbor is a kind lady who lives in the two-man tent across the street. The tent sits on the concrete slab that one can only assume once held an actual building with walls and ceilings and all the other amenities of the modern world. Her son lives in a FEMA trailer next to the house we were destroying.
It was time to start taking the house down. First, we were going to knock out the drywall (leaving the studs in place for now so the house wouldn't come down on our heads). The tools of destruction were piled inside a big brown trash can. The sledgehammers, mauls, and crowbars may be a little bit more practical, but why not demolish in style with a big ax?
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