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The French have offered financial help in the form of grants to help Treme recover from the hurricane. Their desire is to make some impact toward preserving it’s architecture, this neighborhood suffers from very serious blight. I have been working as part of a team of other preservationists to find the best candidates to receive a small grant. This house belongs to Mrs. H., a long-time (59 years) resident of Treme and this house. She worked as a custodian for most of her life. Her husband died just a few years after they were married and she has no children and lives alone. Her house is spotless, she has pride of ownership but doesn’t have the resources to keep the house up. That is her Nova out front, it still runs.

This is a three-room deep masonry Creole cottage with parapet walls. Mrs. H. resides on one side and would like to get the other side renovated so that she can have some have someone from her family stay there to assist her with upkeep or rent it for income. We found significant amounts of active termites on Miss H.’s side. On the other side termites have eaten all of the flooring and most of the floor joists. The unoccupied side needed to be completely gutted to even get an idea of what we might be able to do. Even if we cannot afford to complete a renovation of that side, opening it up will at least allow us to treat the termites and correct any major structural problems.

On Friday, a very dedicated group of volunteers took on this project aside from their official charity work, they volunteered on a day off from volunteering. It was important to have experienced gutters on this because it was an exploratory gut in a structure of significant historical value. They took out the floors, a suspended tile ceiling, and all the sheetrock. Someone had framed in the brick walls and sheetrocked them, we got them back down to the brick/plaster. We found the original lath work was hand-cut cypress which seems to be in very good shape. The gutting team removed the walls of a small bathroom that was part of the kitchen addition at the back of the house. We found that the exterior walls of the addition are bargeboard and they uncovered a large eight over eight exterior window on the original rear wall of the house as well as a small window on one of walls of the middle room of the home. There was also evidence of some water seepage on the wall between the original section of the home and the small addition at the rear, the gutting revealed that this is probably coming from the roof.

So with a report from a termite specialist we will have to sit down with this information and consider how we can get Miss H.’s home back in shape. Hers is a worst case scenario and we want to avoid her being displaced from her home for more than a weekend. We will find a way to get this work done with some paid professionals, professional donated skills and volunteers to stabilize/restore two homes. We are trying to do a lot with a little money and will have to be very resourceful in order to help both people we have identified as our grant candidates.

Today I am doing a walk-thru of the pink lady owned by the Halprens on lower St. Charles Ave. This building is being demolished by Willie White, a salvage expert. The report is that the home is not structurally sound and Willie verified that this is the case, renovation is economically unfeasible and the building’s condition is becoming dangerous. This will be a very solemn walk-thru for me. This work can be rather depressing at times but at the end of the day I get to go home to a miracle of a house and that is a very healing counterweight.