It’s seven o’clock at night in the Lower Ninth Ward. What is there to eat?
“Nothing is open,” says Greta Gladney, 42, who founded the Renaissance Project in 2001 to improve the quality of life in the Lower Ninth Ward. “The option is to have a car or to have a neighbor. You make sure that you have enough food to eat for tonight. You stockpile your groceries. That’s how folks are living.”
Even before Katrina, quality food was scarce in the neighborhood. “Pre-Katrina in the Lower Nine and Upper Nine, the corner grocery stores sold crap,” she says. “Junk food, fast food. They were serving poor communities and fast food is cheap food.”
Gladney grew up in the Lower Nine. She watched the large grocery stores leave. “In the Lower Nine, we haven’t had a supermarket in 27 to 30 some odd years,” she says. “And even the corner grocery stores have disappeared over time.” The family-run, small groceries, many of which used to sell meat and fresh produce, closed as the owners’ kids grew up, went to college and moved away. A handful of fast food restaurants and gas stations were the only places to eat before the storm. Almost none returned.
“The access issues are still the same,” Gladney says. “But this is an opportunity to build in food access better than it was before.”
On a rainy Saturday, I meet Gladney in the parking lot of Holy Angels Convent in the Bywater, the host to Renaissance Project’s Saturday farmers market. Most of the customers are from the Marigny and Bywater areas, says Renaissance Project program assistant Kelly Gaus. It’s been hard to attract residents from the Lower Nine or even the lakeside of Claiborne. A smaller market is held on Sunday afternoon at St. Davis Church in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Gladney has worked to bring a farmers market to the area since 2002. “It’s a struggle finding vendors and committing them to work long-term,” she says. In late-January, problems with vendors forced the Renaissance Project to suspend the market in the Lower Nine. It should open again in mid-March.
“I’m going to show you some of my history,” Gladney says, and we pile into her old Nissan for a tour of the Lower Ninth Ward. We see Louis Armstrong Elementary School, where she studied and her mother taught. Gladney later graduated from McDonough 35 High School and then received degrees from both Xavier and UNO. While in school she traveled to China, Chiapas and Kenya, where she met Greenbelt Movement founder and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. She was searching for models that would work in the Lower Ninth Ward. She lived in New York City and got an MBA from the City University of New York’s Baruk College. There she discovered the greenmarket in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Its mix of ethnicities and different generations looked like an example of how to provide food in the Ninth Ward and bridge the divide across the Industrial Canal.
Gladney points to places where large grocery stores used to operate. The vacant Philadelphia Ministries on Claiborne Avenue was once an A&P Grocery. A shuttered auto parts store had been a Puglia’s supermarket. About 20 years ago it became a Piggly Wiggly. A few years after that it closed.
We stop at a muddy lot on Law Street between Choctaw and Flood streets. “This is where my grandfather’s house was,” Gladney says. This area was pounded by water from the levee break. “The two-story house that was next to it floated into it, and the whole house had to come down.”
The lot will soon be the Dunson Memorial Ethnobotanical Garden, another Renaissance Project program to improve food access in the Lower Nine. Named after Gladney’s grandfather, the garden will grow indigenous crops to feed the neighbors. Extra food will be sold at the Renaissance Project’s markets or to local restaurants. Students from surrounding schools will work in the garden and have a say in how the profits are spent.
“Most of this was agricultural before, say, 100 years ago,” Gladney says. “It’s one way to honor the people who used to live here, like my grandfather and my aunt. And I think it’s a good land use.”
Gladney envisions vacant lots scattered across the Lower Ninth Ward becoming a series of urban gardens. Other local activists, such as Poppy Tooker of Slow Foods and Anne Baker of the New Orleans Food and Farm Network, also see a return to agriculture as a way to restore the devastated neighborhood. The patchwork settlement, the dreaded “jack-o’-lantern” pattern, could be an opportunity to feed the entire city.
Gladney and I return to Holy Angels and end our tour. I ask her if she’s hopeful.
“About what?” she asks. The future of the Lower Nine, I reply.
“That’s hard to answer. I’m committed and I’m determined and I’m confident. Hopeful is hard. I don’t know if I know about hopeful,” she says. “A lot of what I do, people can’t envision it coming together. As things start happening, people want to volunteer and be involved. That’s how the work moves along. It will take time for people to realize that they’re empowered to do something about the future of their neighborhood.”
The Renaissance Project’s Upper Ninth Ward farmers market is held every Saturday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at Holy Angels Convent (St. Claude Ave. at Gallier St.). On March 18, the Sunday market returns to the Lower Ninth Ward from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. at St. Davis Church (St. Claude Ave. at Lamanche St.). Call 482-5722 for more information.
