Into the Water

In New Orleans, a convent is transformed into a flood-reducing wetland.

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In the spring of 1718, when Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville set foot at the mouth of the Mississippi with plans to build a new port city for the would-be United States, members of the native Chitimacha tribe tried to stop him. “Trust us,” they said (and I’m paraphrasing, here), “you don’t want to do that.” The land was low-lying, swampish, and prone to flooding during seasonal storms; the idea of slipping cobblestones onto loose soil and raising churches in the alligatored bayous seemed foolish at best, and a detriment at worst. “Maybe this one spot could work for a small village,” the tribe might have said, pointing the way to what would become the Vieux Carré, or French Quarter, “but otherwise, you might want to think again.” The French didn’t listen. Neither did the Spanish, who helped extend the limits of an infant New Orleans not just along the relatively dry Esplanade ridge, but to the edges of the Mississippi, insisting that human-made levees would hold the river at bay. These settlements reached all the way to the modern-day Gentilly neighborhood, where, hundreds of years later, Hurricane Katrina would cause flooding to significant portions of residences, including the grounds of a convent belonging to the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph. 

The levee idea hadn’t worked, and in successive years, national conversation would use the Katrina disaster—as it has in our current era of COVID-19, with lower pollution rates and renewed vivacity of wildlife—as a spark to light the candle leading to more holistic, environmentally friendly infrastructure. So, after the floods of 2005 dried up, and after a lightning strike damaged the building yet again in 2006, the sisters decided, in 2008, to demolish the house and lease the twenty-five acres of convent land to the City of New Orleans for $1 a year for the next one hundred years, on the premise that it would be used to create one of the nation’s largest urban wetlands: the Mirabeau Water Garden. 

The Gentilly area is a former marshland with highly porous soils that need water to remain stable. When pump systems drain out water, the soils shrink like a sponge, then swell again during rainfall. This back-and-forth causes “differential movement,” which damages streets and building foundations, hence the need for more naturalistic methods of flood-reduction. 

“We didn’t want to sell it to developers who would turn the land into housing that would just flood again,” said Sister Joan Laplace, who had to evacuate the convent when Katrina hit. “We knew there must be a way to make the land more beneficial to the city, something with more motive.” When architect David Waggoner of Waggonner & Ball approached the sisters in 2007 with his idea for a wetland that, as part of the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, would absorb ten million gallons of water during flooding events before easing it back to the original water sources, as well as provide educational opportunities for students and environmental researchers, the congregation felt that their prayers had been answered.

In 2015, landscape architect Shannon Blakeman and landscape designer Amy Norval, both with CARBO Landscape Architecture, joined forces with Waggoner’s team to help make the vision come to life, starting with plans to begin stage one of the construction by 2019. The plans were postponed to 2020 due to rigorous processes of approval by FEMA meant to ensure that it would have the greatest benefit to the community, with more recent delays caused by the intrusion of  COVID-19.

“I look to God, who I call Love, to show us how to transform the suffering into insight,” said Bergen.

“I think what we’ve seen with COVID is a lot more people reconnecting with nature,” said Blakeman. “I’ve seen more people than ever outside jogging, riding bikes, playing with their kids, going into parks. There are lots of studies out there that show just how important nature is to your mental and physical health, so that’s been one silver lining we hope the project can attest to.”

Landscape architects, he said, ultimately see themselves as problem-solvers, assessing the natural world and finding ways to help humans live in it. The real goal, he said, is to help the people of New Orleans learn to live with water, instead of shunning it. 

“We know that a lot of New Orleans’ flooding problem has to do with pumping water out of the city,” said Blakeman. “In doing that for years, the natural makeup of the ground became depleted, and New Orleans became a sink, exacerbating the problem it already had.”

So much of the conversation around climate change and rising sea levels tends to materialize into imagery of hugeness and imperceptibility—think words like “iceberg,” “ocean,” and “Amazon rainforest.” The problems can often seem insurmountable, particularly for vulnerable coastal cities like New Orleans, which will bear the brunt of increasingly common weather events. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“Mirabeau isn’t a magic bullet,” said Blakeman. “It won’t solve every problem, but it can be a great example of what can be done on a larger scale in this country, in increments. That’s a lot more manageable than trying to fix a world-wide issue all at once, and I hope it triggers more engagement in holistic, green infrastructure.”

Norval wants to increase engagement with the beauty of the natural world as well, envisioning natural flora and fauna that leans into the region’s  native wetland habitats.

“The fact that this land was flooded during Katrina, and that it’s being given back to nature in a way that embraces water—that symbolism has always been something I loved about this project,” said Norval. “We look forward to building up native plant communities, starting with wet meadow species and then moving up the banks of the detention basins with drier meadow species. We can play with plants that like different inundation levels, with pine and dwarf palmetto forests on the backslope of the berms. There are a lot of dynamics we can play with so that students and laypeople can go out and enjoy native plants.” 

The educational component of Mirabeau—which likely won’t be incorporated until phase two after 2021—has always been one of the primary focuses for the Sisters of St. Joseph, who have served New Orleans since 1855, largely as educators themselves. 

“This model can be replicated in any urban city in the world,” said Sister Pat Bergen, who sat on the congregation’s board for many years over the course of this project. “Think if something like Mirabeau had existed on the east coast when Sandy hit New York and New Jersey. Or in Houston. So many places could benefit from wetlands like this.”

After all, said Bergen, the current state of affairs brought on by COVID-19 has proven more than ever before that the suffering felt by individuals and institutions is not theirs alone.

“The way I see it, I’m as sick as the sickest person on this planet,” she said. “This is a planetary suffering, and we’ve got to begin acting as one planet.”

Allowing once-flooded land to give into itself, to lean into its difficulties of soil and water and revive something natural and beautiful—that’s the sacred irony of Mirabeau.

“I look to God, who I call Love, to show us how to transform the suffering into insight,” said Bergen. “I believe the human race is being invited to something big right now. And we’re all in this together.”