Treme (and surrounding neighborhoods) once hosted a thriving Black business corridor... until the Claiborne Expressway tore it and these historic communities apart.
Brut met activists trying to rebuild their community.
Brut met activists trying to rebuild their community.
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00:00My earliest memories of the Claiborne Expressway and really the entire highway system in New Orleans is through nightmares.
00:19When the bridge came through, it literally tore through downtown New Orleans, tearing apart Treme.
00:25I had, for years, a recurring dream of being with my family in a car on a bridge, and the lanes of that bridge just getting narrower and narrower and narrower.
00:45I started actually on Ash Wednesday, the day after Carnival, the day after Mardi Gras, when people were waking up to get their ashes.
00:51The bulldozers were here to tear down the oak trees that lined this boulevard on each side and created a shade canopy over the greenery.
01:01In order to build the interstate, they closed 326 black-owned businesses.
01:05The longest stand of live oak trees in North America was also located on Claiborne Avenue, and that stand of over 500 live oaks was removed as well.
01:21What we are going to do in our community is to build the Cultural Innovation District that will allow us to replace those 326 black-owned businesses.
01:36The environmental impact of the cars on the expressway traveling constantly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for generations.
01:46We have high levels of lead, legacy lead, in our soil. Our communities have much poorer air quality.
01:54It causes both cancer, respiratory illnesses such as asthma, particularly in children and elderly, and it's lowered life expectancy for the communities adjacent to this bridge.
02:08The reason that just taking this interstate down would be bad for community is because there's no protections for community in that plan.
02:16It does not consider displacement, and we much prefer to put solar panels on them so we can reduce our electric bill.
02:38I remember being here as a kid. You can see here just how close the edge of the Circle Food Store is to the highway.
02:45I mean, it looks like if you jumped from the highway, you could almost land on the roof.
02:49The Circle Food Store was the only African-American grocery store in the city of New Orleans.
02:54Circle Food Store was one of the few spaces in the city where people could go to get those traditional foods, okra, collards, mustard greens, black-eyed peas.
03:03There were a number of different services on the second floor of the building. People came here to buy school uniforms for their kids.
03:10People came here to go to the pharmacy. Now it's just a grocery store. It's no longer a black-owned store. It's no longer a locally-owned store, really.
03:18Much like the area around it suffered from the disinvestment that was created by the overpass when all of these black businesses were destroyed.
04:04When we began to rethink the implications of what happened to this community because of the imposition of this highway,
04:11artists got together and did murals on many of these pillars. And on the outside pillars here, you can see a representation of the oak trees that once were here.
04:21Once we're here, we've repurposed that expressway to be a site of our Super Sunday, which is a spiritual event for the people here to bring back those old spirits.
04:51The parade has just started with the brass band. Some of the Indians are out. The baby dolls are out.
04:58This is my first time seeing the Indians in over 12 years. It's just magic. This is our faith. This is our religion.
05:09The Claiborne Expressway plowed right through the path of this annual procession on Claiborne Avenue.
05:16The oak-lined trees provided the perfect canopy and the perfect backdrop, recognizing both our ties to this land, our ties to nature.
05:24And the expressway really industrialized the space, paved it over with concrete, made it ridden with pollution.
05:32But the culture was still able to survive, still able to repurpose and reimagine that space.
05:38What we see here today is how culture can keep a community together, even as a highway will physically tear us apart.
05:55Because of the racism that I experienced, it just gave me a very different perspective. I was just always set out to be a change agent.
06:04We could still come back on a Sunday and reoccupy that space with our culture, so you can never fully erase us from this territory.