Hy and Christopher take on several topics, including whether a remote straw vote of the legislature is constitutionally legal enough to provide teacher pay raises; how despite critics on the Left, whether SpaceX might actually help lower tech prices and help the poor bridge the digital divide; and whether the ideological extremes of both parties are like “Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff”— and WE are the convertible.
However, the Founders’ Show kicks off talking about one of the big news pieces of the week: Tulane University’s $500 million dollar restoration of ‘Big Charity’.
Hy and Christopher suggest that the investment might come 20 years too late and $250 million too high —and thousands of homeowners paid the price for the delay. That is not to say that the proposal to refurbish abandoned, art deco skyscraper into Tulane’s Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine as well as the Tulane University Innovation Institute, medical school classrooms, and apartments lack merit.
In point of fact, Tulane University’s half of a billion dollar offer stands as the only legitimate proposal to bring Big Charity back into use and commerce. The state-of-the-art classrooms, community spaces, and labs will provide space for 700 new researchers and 2500 new jobs. A win-win, as Tulane President Michael Fitts has noted, due the fact that the university’s uptown campus has run out of space— and expansion downtown (on Tulane Avenue no less) for some of its graduate schools seems like a viable plan.
At least the proposal promises to reconstitute the blighted property which Big Charity has become, erasing the vines and padlocked doors tarnishing the CBD’s image.
The tragedy that Fitts’ predecessors, particularly Deans in Tulane’s medical faculty, went along with a plan to shutter a perfectly viable hospital twenty years ago and instead build a suburban medical complex on top of an historic Black neighborhood—all in the cause of constructing a unified teaching hospital which LSU and LCMC sidelined Tulane Medical School by the time the doors opened—was left unmentioned.
By the point of UMC’s groundbreaking, the Creole cottages and Camelbacks between Claiborne Avenue and S. Rocheblave Street already had been demolished and generations of families expelled. Many of these homeowners had returned after Hurricane Katrina and rebuilt the very homes which met the wrecking ball just over two years later. The Louisiana Weekly told these soon-to-be-lost neighborhood stories in a series at the time, attempting to convince the bipartisan political leadership that saving historic homes proved good politics.
Christopher’s newspaper recounted how families faced permanent separation by the hospital project. Our pages recounted varied tales including that of the Korean War veteran arrested for simply reentering the house in which he was born—his own home in which he had lived for more than 70 years—to retrieve a small chandelier his grandmother had hung, whose crystal would have been crushed in the trash pile when the forklifts came in the next few days.
A myriad of stories populated the series from the original Deutscheshaus’ destruction to historic bars and corner eateries collapsed by a wrecking ball. Unnecessary redevelopment of this historic Black neighborhood, as this newspaper pointed out at the time, since Big Charity Hospital easily survived Hurricane Katrina, with only a couple of subterranean rooms having experienced any flooding.
In fact, Charity Hospital remained open with patients and (limited) electrical power until the Friday after the previous Monday’s storm. Moreover, US Special Forces Medical personnel had actually come in and cleaned the entire hospital complex from top to bottom in weeks after Katrina, replaced broken equipment, and stood ready to re-open the doors of Big Charity. Hospital staff subsequently toured the now-spotless facility, and they expressed eagerness to get back to work.
Then, state officials reportedly told these Charity nurses, doctors, and administrators that the complex would remain closed for another two weeks. A fortnight later, the staff members returned to a locked building, which somehow had been entered and severely vandalized in the interim with little evidence of a break-in. The timing of the wanton destruction always proved curious, as proposals to build a massive billion dollar medical complex on top of the nearby neighborhood coincided with what would have been the Big Charity reopening date.
From incumbent Democrats like Mary Landrieu to newly elected Republicans like Bobby Jindal, federal officials received a clear message that Big Charity had been “destroyed by Hurricane Katrina” and needed a complete new hospital replacement. A smorgasbord of federal money flowed into the Crescent City to do just that, at the expense of bulldozing an existing Black neighborhood.
Conveniently ignored was a study (championed by the Foundation for Historical Louisiana) showing that the Big Charity complex could be renovated and reconstituted into one of the most sophisticated hospital buildings in the United States for just $250 million, a fraction of the construction cost of the new hospital. Not one house had to be demolished.
Critics replied that hospitals “no longer were in skyscrapers”, ignoring that some of the finest medical centers in the United States, like New York’s Mount Sinai, were indeed housed in skyscrapers. No one questioned whether the alternative plan would work, only that the aesthetics were complicated and that constructing a new medical campus on the other side of Claiborne Avenue proved a “once in a generation” opportunity.
Today, much of a footprint of the UMC hospital complex stands as greenspace, with manicured lawns where houses one stood. Big Charity could have been reopened as a working hospital rebuilt to stand on the cutting edge of medical science eighteen years ago, not a blighted structure that has seen multiple redevelopment proposals from LSU medical classrooms to a new Orleans City Hall.
That Tulane University will finally make something out of the historic building that Huey Long erected creates a certain satisfaction, yet the laboratories, classrooms, and apartments will provide little solace to the loss of family homes existing now only in memory.