5 of 5: Storyville superimposed on the Iberville Housing Project.

Current photo (4) with Storyville map (3) outlined in red.
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In 1987 I left New Orleans and my teaching in the architecture school at Tulane University. Around that time I was falling into an obsession with Storyville, New Orleans's infamous red light district, and one of my regrets in leaving when I did was that the next design studio I had planned to teach was to have addressed my interests in the site's history and the implications that history might have for its current uses. I had planned to call the studio THE HOUSING PROJECT OF THE RISING SUN.

I have revisited these interests in occasional research over the last twenty years. But over the last two and a half, as the triple whammies of Katrina, HUD's entanglements with voracious developers, and intractable racism have threatened anew the Iberville Housing Project, the sadness, mysteries and pathos of Iberville's history have brought me to my obsessions with a re-found urgency.

I plan to post prospectuses for a work I am devising for Iberville, as well as a revision to that interrupted Tulane studio, in these pages soon. Meanwhile, any information, contemporary or historical; factual, anecdotal or otherwise, that anyone has regarding the area outlined in the image above would be most welcomed.

I would also appreciate any of you directing other flickr users to me who you think may have information or interest in these issues.