I wonder if this means that what we were told by some Holy Cross residents while we were in NOLA is true - that Donald Trump is going to buy the Holy Cross school site (in Holy Cross on the riverfront) and turn it into another Disneyland-type French Quarter for tourists. Military patrols there along the levee told some of us in a late-night conversation that Trump had been in the neighborhood just several days before our arrival in October, to tour and speculate on visions of highrise casinos with boardwalks and water shuttles to the Quarter. They told us many things that seemed hard to believe, but perhaps there was truth in them.
~deb

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/us/19orleans.html
 In Tale of Church vs. School, a New Orleans Dilemma
By ADAM NOSSITER
  Published: December 19, 2006
                NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 18 — The past always seems to be gaining on the new New Orleans. Just when one foot seems to lift out of the post-hurricane muck, the other slips.

In the latest entanglement, the move of a historic Catholic school, promising rebirth for the battered Gentilly neighborhood, has been stymied by preservationists. The school had planned to tear down an abandoned 1960s-era church in Gentilly in order to rebuild, but preservationists here said the austere, modernist structure was worth saving. Providing an unexpected assist to the preservationists is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is vital in financing the school’s move but is balking, for now. 
Dismayed politicians and residents of the emptied Gentilly district, desperate for any hint of confidence in New Orleans’s future, are crying foul. Barely a third of residents have returned to the neighborhood, one of the city’s black middle-class centers. 
“This could be a blow that the neighborhood may not be able to come back from,” said Cynthia Hedge Morrell, the district’s city councilwoman.
“Are you saying,” she said, “that a piece of concrete is more valuable than humans?” 
The dispute is typical of the tough choices routinely forced to the surface here in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. Moving on or moving back is a theme playing out across the city, notably in a fierce struggle over the future of public housing projects. 
Other signs of faltering renewal abound, like companies shifting their headquarters and employees out of the city, developers waiting on tax credits, and homeowners looking in vain for aid checks. Building projects are numerous on paper, but actual construction is much harder to detect, and it will be several years before inexpensive housing is developed. 
A new survey by the University of New Orleans suggests that one-third of residents, weary of the waiting game, are thinking of leaving, and soon. 
At the heart of the church standoff is the Holy Cross School, a fixture on the riverbank in the Lower Ninth Ward since the 1870s. It usually educates more than 800 boys in grades 5 through 12. The school, inundated by Hurricane Katrina, now operates out of trailers at about 60 percent of its old enrollment levels, and it wants to leave the moribund, vulnerable area it colonized when the Lower Ninth Ward was still farmland. 
The school flirted with moving to the Jefferson Parish suburbs, an idea that is generally poison to city residents. But then it said it would stay in New Orleans, proposing to move to Gentilly. That decision was a rare thumbs up for the city, and even citizens living far from Gentilly felt a boost that a pillar of New Orleans’s old-line Catholic establishment would be staying. 
In Gentilly itself, where on a weekday morning the loudest sound is the wind rustling through dead tree branches, there was jubilation, as well as visions of loud schoolboys and teachers crowding the empty sidewalks. 
“I can’t tell you the overwhelming joy people felt with this announcement,” said Scott Darrah, president of the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association. “It was one of the most joyous occasions people in this community had had since the flood, one of the most hope-filled occasions. People all over were sending me e-mails saying, ‘Thank you, we’re so thrilled.’ ”
 It is not hard to see why. Vacant houses and empty windows stare across the street at the 18-acre site that the school’s independent board is buying, at a reasonable price, from the Archdiocese of New Orleans. At intervals a trailer in a front yard indicates an owner’s rare interest in the future. All seems ready for redevelopment — or abandonment. 
But there was a hitch in the good news. The site chosen by the school contains the St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, one of the city’s rare expressions of mid-20th-century modernism, an unusual structure with a white knitting-needle spire poking out from a thin, curled concrete roof that seems to float over the church’s brick-box body. 
It has hardly been on the city’s list of must-see landmarks, and with its resemblance to a giant kitchen appliance, it gets mixed reviews from architects. 
“It’s certainly an important modernist building, locally,” said Errol Barron, a leading New Orleans architect.
The church has been unused since the storm, and the local archdiocese was ready to part with it. The school, saying it needed the site cleared, was preparing a date with the wrecking ball. Fixing up the church and maintaining it would be too expensive, school officials said. They ringed the site with bright yellow signs advertising enrollment.
But rumblings from preservation-minded former parishioners, who had moved elsewhere, began percolating upward. The New Orleans Historic District Landmarks Commission voted to study the church, and school officials, construction plans at the ready, started to get uneasy.
 Then the city’s de facto tutelary deity stepped in: FEMA decided the church might be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. And that was a position with potentially deep consequences for the Holy Cross School, one that could mean no federal money — a potential $20 million — to help it relocate. 
“It was very much of a surprise to us,” said William Chauvin, chairman of the Holy Cross board of trustees. “The archdiocese had no intention of keeping that facility.”
Now, all is on hold, a frustration to the school and its supporters. In a statement on Monday, FEMA said it was required to “evaluate the potential historic significance” of the church, though late in November an agency official wrote that it had already determined that the church was eligible to be in the National Register. Mr. Chauvin interpreted the shift in wording as a softening of FEMA’s position.
 The State of Louisiana and the National Park Service must also weigh in on the church’s precise significance. 
Its fans are as passionate as those yearning for Gentilly to come back. “A very exciting place to worship,” said Stephen Verderber, a professor of architecture at Tulane University, “the exact opposite architecturally from the traditional design of a church.”
But Bruce Velez, a contractor living in a trailer across the street as he fixes up a gutted house, said, “If they keep messing around, the school will go somewhere else.” Mr. Velez longs for the school. 
 “We were lucky to get it,” he said, looking down the empty street. “I wish they’d hurry up and tear the church down. You’re going to have kids from the 5th to the 12th grades. I mean, think about it. That’s a lot of people.”

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