Ronnie Nunez bought the weird pink house in the Battleground Subdivision to entice his daughter and baby granddaughter to come back to Louisiana from out of state. But they didn’t stay with him long.
He thought he’d patch up his marriage there. That didn’t work either.
The house is a bad renovator’s jigsaw puzzle, with three roofs stitched together and an inexplicable interior bay window connecting separate wings. To tell the truth, he never much liked the place.
Soon it will be gone.
A bulldozer is likely to arrive before the new year to scrape away Nunez’s house, the first demolition in one of the first large-scale government bulldozing projects in the New Orleans area since Hurricane Katrina’s Aug. 29 assault. Someone told Nunez that Katrina means “cleansing,” and though he never bothered to look it up, he decided to believe it. The bulldozer will be his personal cleansing agent.
“I have a chance to start over,” Nunez, a 61-year-old trucker and former Marine with a penchant for mirrored sunglasses, said one recent cloudy afternoon. “I said, ‘Here I am. Take me down.’”
Bulldozing, with its crushing note of finality, is an approach heavy with emotions in post-hurricane Louisiana. It is so emotional that “No Bulldozing” campaigns are being waged to save the sodden homes in parts of New Orleans, where several thousand houses may be demolished soon. The battle over bulldozing is most fervent in neighborhoods such as the predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward, where skeptical residents fear that their communities will not be rebuilt.
Overwhelming number of homes ruined
But here in suburban, working-class, mostly white St. Bernard Parish, where the destruction was so complete that just 10 of 25,000 houses are inhabitable, there is a headlong rush to the wrecking ball. More than 300 houses have been tagged for a mass demolition project that will begin in the coming weeks, as soon as a monumental tangle of paperwork is unraveled. Yet that’s just the start in a parish where the water rose so high— 17 feet in some parts— that nearly every house is considered a candidate to be knocked down.
Oil refinery workers and fishermen and suburban commuters line up each day, offering their stucco and brick and wood frames to be pulverized. Parish officials that aren’t involved in demolition have grown so tired of interruptions that they post signs on their office doors to divert people who want the local government to wipe away their homes.
Requests by homeowners who want to memorialize their houses’ final moments on videotape are piling up. The homeowners’ enthusiasm is bolstered by assurances that they will be allowed to rebuild, a contrast with the situation just upriver in New Orleans, where leaders of the city’s rebuilding commission have discussed abandoning parts of the city that suffered the worst flooding.
St. Bernard Parish— known simply as “da parish” in Louisiana because of its inhabitants’ syllable-blurring, Brooklynesque accents— lives in the shadow of the irresistible charm of New Orleans. The parish touches the New Orleans line at the Lower Ninth Ward. The parish— industrial to the east and marshy to the west— always felt like “the bastard stepchild” of New Orleans, said Parish Council member Joey Difatta, who lives in one of hundreds of trailers clustered around the St. Bernard government complex.
Residents still bristle because St. Bernard was intentionally flooded during the Great Mississippi River flood of 1927 when the aristocrats in New Orleans dynamited a levee to save the city. “There’s a lot of malice that went with it,” Difatta said. “We know we were sacrificed for the sake of New Orleans.” More recently, St. Bernard gained a measure of infamy during Katrina because more than 30 elderly people died after allegedly being abandoned in the St. Rita’s nursing home there.
Parish settled by the French
The parish was settled in the early 1700s by the French, who produced indigo used to make blue dye, and were followed late in the century by Isleos, immigrants from the Canary Islands who flocked there when Spain ruled Louisiana. The Isleos’ descendants fill the parish now with names such as Fernandez and Perez and Rodriguez, though some of the pronunciations have taken on their own special “da parish” tenor. Here, Ruiz is “RUE-ez.”
Nunez’s family came from Portugal. An older cousin— Sammy Nunez— was once one of the most powerful members of the Louisiana legislature before being defeated after brazenly handing out casino campaign donations on the Senate floor. But Ronnie Nunez rose from a hardscrabble background. His father was a master barge pilot, whose skill with heavy loads was blunted by his affection for the bottle.
Nunez thought the pink house at 2707 Jackson Blvd. would be the perfect place to reinvent his life five years ago. There was enough room for him to live in one wing and for his wife of 33 years, Beverley Nunez, to live in the other when they weren’t getting along, which was often. He kept his side dark, with thick curtains. “I like dark,” he said.
The neighborhood is modest but historic, lined by graceful live oaks planted as part of a Works Progress Administration project during the Great Depression. It took its name, the Battleground Subdivision, because part of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 was fought there. The developer was the towering figure of modern St. Bernard history, an all-powerful sheriff named Joseph Meraux who was “a despot, but an enlightened despot” with progressive ideas and a love of education, according to parish historian Bill Hyland.
Nunez’s house in Meraux’s subdivision is a wasteland now, a nasty repository for soggy pink insulation and overturned tables. He offered it to the parish as a guinea pig for its demolition project, helping officials determine exactly how long it will take to scrape away a house and how much it will cost— probably about $5,000 per house, reimbursable by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, parish officials say.
Katrina’s ‘Superman’
Nunez was too busy after Katrina— earning the nickname “Superman” because he set up a camp for the displaced on a levee, subsisted on cans of tuna and shrimp from the Bumble Bee plant and made supply runs in his big rig— to bother with any salvage work at his house.
“Y’all’s problem is that y’all try to do everything legally,” he said he told officials. “Just tell me what y’all need and get out of the way.”
While he flitted around the parish, mold crept over the walls of his house and infused his record collection with a musty grime. His wife’s room became a fashion warehouse turned upside down. “Look at this,” he said, pointing at a lumpy pile. “Eighty-four purses and 200 pairs of shoes. Never could buy one of anything.”
In the living room, he paused to marvel at a delicate curio cabinet, miraculously upright without a crack in its glass panels. He won't bother to save it. He wants everything to go. Still, he can't help but find something hopeful in its survival. Inside, he said, were shelves of figurines. Noah's Ark on one shelf and on the other, a row of angels.
