Bright Light, Crescent City: Restore Wesley United for New Orleans

By Don Paul~Puppetgov

The idea of Restore Wesley United is to transform the great, old building at 2517 Jackson Avenue in New Orleans’ Central City–once home to the Wesley United Methodist Church, the second-oldest African-American church in New Orleans and the eighth-oldest African-American church in the United States–into a ‘A Digital Arts and Training Center for the 21st Century.’

In the five months since work began inside the building with volunteer crews of Central City residents, trained by the Home Builders Institute, quite a lot has gone forward. We’ve seen much more of the craft and care that went into the building in the 19th century.

The Wesley United Methodist Church and the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans both have histories of richly contributing to the U. S. and the world since the 19th century.

178 years ago (1838), The Wesley United Methodist Church began in a stable at Baronne and Gravier Streets on one corner of what’s now New Orleans’ Central Business District. The Wesley’s congregation was then a rare, Abolitionist grouping of Blacks and Whites. The Wesley’s own building was completed in 1844 on Liberty Street, its site part of the present New Orleans City Hall, the new place of worship built largely and voluntarily by slaves in their hours away from plantations.

“Mother Wesley” was for centuries of generations a hub for social change. Mary Todd Lincoln read the Emancipation Proclamation in the Wesley on Liberty Street. The church began New Orleans’ first multi-racial school during the Reconstruction era. Marcus Garvey spoke in the Wesley about how his 1920s’ United Negro Improvement Association could bring economic independence. Mary McLeod Bethune and both D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille were among other famous speakers in the Wesley during the first half of the 20th century. After the church moved to 2517 Jackson Avenue in 1951 (displaced due to expansion of New Orleans’ Civic Center), it gathered thousands during the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in the upstairs Sanctuary.

Central City, once known as Uptown, also carries invaluable cultural legacies. Central City is the birthplace of New Orleans’ brass-band and Mardi Gras Indian traditions. Fabled musicians and venues arose in this neighborhood. Buddy Bolden and King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory, the Dew Drop Inn (scene of 1940s-to-1970s performances by Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Dave Bartholemew, Esquerita, Dr. John, Art Neville and many more) and the No Limit and Cash Money labels (Juvenile, L’il Wayne, Master P,  Soulja Slim, and many more) all came out of Central City.

Check out this audio of Nina Simone’s Hey Buddy Bolden

Esquerita (given name Eskew Reeder) was a peer of Little Richard’s. Check out this video of Esquerita’s “Dew Drop Inn” (‘You’ll meet all your fine friends!”)

And this video tribute to Soulja Slim, the rapper raised in the Magnola (C.J. Peete) housing-project who was murdered in 2003–’It’s All Good in the Hood’–

Central City at present is a phenomenally neglected and hard-hit neighborhood. Before and after the 2005 post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans (a flooding whose primary causes were failures of U.S. Government-engineered levees and decades of oil-and-gas Corporations’ destruction of wetlands), Central City suffered from losses of jobs and massive influxes of narcotics and guns. Smack (heroin) had come in plenty to the Magnolia housing-project coincident with middle of the Vietnam War. Crack-cocaine had come in plenty to Central City coincident with the reduction of New Orleans’ unionized trades-people through Louisiana’s 1976 “Right-to-work” law.

18 months before Hurricane Katrina, on February 8, 2004, the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote about this city’s return to being the ‘Murder Capital of the United States’ , the newspaper’s piece titled ‘Violence Thrives on Lack of Jobs, Wealth of Drugs’   (http://www.nola.com/speced/cycleofdeath/index.ssf?/speced/cycleofdeath/violence.html). In 2008, three years after the flooding, New Orleans had 25% more murders per capita than the second-most-murderous city, St. Louis, in the U.S. (64 per 100,000, equal to a surely intolerable total of more than 4000 murders for the year in New York City). In one four-block stretch of Central City in 2008 19 people were shot and killed, most of them young. See http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/01/no_murder_rate_remains_among_h.html

In the midst of the general and mind-boggling neglect in New Orleans after the 2005 flooding,  the Wesley United Methodist Church was threatened with demolition. Its much-diminished congregation lacked resources. The church sat in disuse for more than four years.

In November 2009 the groups who make up Restore Wesley United came together to preserve and transform the building and its beneficial meanings. You can learn more about our partnership through the Thanksgiving 2009 Update on our savewesleyunited.org website

Our aim is for the Wesley United Digital Arts and Training Center (or WUDAT-C) to educate and employ its surrounding community in all media that deal with digital technology. The new Wesley United … Center will serve a movie-industry that made 23 feature-films in Louisiana last year. It will produce new video, images and music. It will provide a platform for New Orleans and the multi-colored mix of cultures in the U.S. South to again reach and change and enrich the entire world.

The Restore Wesley United project has been multiply blessed over the past half-year.

We have excellent Partners–the Board of Trustees for the First Street Peck Wesley United Methodist Church, the United Saints Recovery Project, Strip Ease of New Orleans, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Early Childhood and Family Learning Foundation, Hands On New Orleans, the House of Blues New Orleans, the Operational Plasterers and Cement Masons International, and more.

We have institutional support–the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, the Zeitoun Foundation, the Home Builders Institute, Home Depot, Ecologic Mortar, Organic Valley Farms, and more.

We have musicians and architects and engineers and athletes as Advisors and/or Adopters of Bricks and Pews–Florence Andre, Steven Bingler, Amby Burfoot, Evan Christopher, Diego Cortez, Dave Eggers, Kavanaugh Farr, Michael Franti, Helen Gillet, Kirk Joseph, Daryl Kiesow, Tommy Larkins, Sheila Matute, Cyril Neville, David O’Reilly, Amee Palalazzo, Eve Pell, Randy Poindexter, Jonathan Richman, Ramon Santos, Margaret Smith, Patti Smith, Steve Spence, Teresa Torkanowsky, Ben Vereen, Mark Wilson, Gail Wolkoff, and many more.

We have an untiring National Coordinator in Sakura Kone, the person who spearheaded preservation of the Wesley United Methodist Church building and its role in Central City, and we’ve been blessed by devoted caretakers of the building (Harold Augustine, Sue Swain, Mary Clark, “Tennessee”) and a highly experienced and resourceful lead-hand in the reconstruction, Norman Clark.

We’re constantly arriving at new solutions that both preserve materials and increase the building’s overall efficiency, such as the salvage of driftwood logs from banks of the Mississippi for use as columns, posts and beams and the recovery of dangerously overturned cement ornaments from the bell-tower.

And we haven’t even started on the part of the project that promises the most innovation and community-participation: the classrooms, the culinary academy, the digital editing-bays, the recording studio, and the state-of-the-art cinema.

Ooh-wee! I-ko–I-ko …

Despite years unto decades of treatment worse than neglect, abuse whose latest crime is invading the mouth of the Mississippi like 50,000-barrels-of-oil worth of poison, New Orleans and the Deep South of the United States still have truly unlimited resources of tradition and culture and vitality to add to the world.

Our website is savewesleyunited.org

Updates about the Restore Wesley United project can be found at RESTORE WESLEY

Please contribute in any way that you can. Purchase of books or recordings by me through the PuppetGov Store will also go toward the new Wesley United.

Don Paul for Restore Wesley United

Related posts:

1. ACTION ALERT: Restore Wesley United New Orleans
2. Restore Wesley United
3. Your Support is Needed: Real Hope for New Orleans
4. Save the Wesley! New Orleans’ “Beacon” Threatened with Demolition
5. The Story Of Wesley United: The eighth-oldest African-American Church in the U.S
6. Musician Michael Franti Helps Wesley In New Orleans
7. The Wesley United, 2009-2010: Our Four-Stage Plan + Snapshots of Five Months’Progress