By Valerie Faciane
Times-Picayune
Copyright 2007 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
NEW ORLEANS — It pained Mike Langston to watch volunteers haul office equipment, files and furniture out of the Firefighters Local 632 Union Hall on Monday morning -- particularly the conference tables built by the late Capt. Elliott “E.J.” Fredricks.
“It’s depressing; it’s stuff that has been here for years,” he said.
But 18 months after Hurricane Katrina inundated the first floor of the 10,000-square-foot building, union members welcomed the 50 volunteers who helped clear away the debris.
Union officer Terry Hampton said he jumped at an offer from the Phoenix of New Orleans, a nonprofit neighborhood recovery association, to round up volunteers to gut the building. He said the union didn’t have money to the job itself, and firefighters were too busy fixing up their flooded firehouses and their own storm-damaged homes. In all, PNOLA recruited volunteers from Americorps and Yale University. Firefighters also pitched in.
“It took us this long because of the cost,” Hampton said.
During the storm, neighborhood residents took refuge on the second floor of the union hall and eventually had to be rescued by the Coast Guard, which had to cut holes in the roof to get to them, said Wallace Bailey, a retired fire captain who serves as executive vice president of the union.
Piles and piles of computers, furniture, boxes and other items lay in the union parking lot and lined the 300 block of South Dorgenois. The volunteers were careful not to do any further damage to a six-paneled mosaic of a horse-drawn steam-powered fire engine that is attached to an exterior wall. The union commissioned Italian artist Franco Alessandrini to do the piece around the time the building was dedicated in 1980, said Bailey.
Bailey said Alessandrini broke 1-inch-square tiles into four pieces to create the mosaic, which is about 10 feet long and 15 feet wide and is now missing some of its tiles.
“We would like to have it restored,” said Bailey, “but we’ve got to have a place to put it.”
He said a crane will be needed to lift the panels and bring them to a place where they can be repaired.
The realization that the storm took so many irreplaceable things overwhelmed Yale sophomore Daniel Bleiberg.
“I can’t imagine my things . . . being gone,” said the 19-year-old history and economics major. Even though he has no connection to the things that were being thrown out, “It’s pretty powerful to see it . . . knowing what it means to lose everything you had.”
Bleiberg said he has done community service in other places in the past, but the devastation he has witnessed here is an experience he’ll never forget.
The gutting at the union hall is expected to be completed as early as Wednesday.
PNOLA founder and director Paul Ikemire, a student at Tulane Medical School, said that while gutting is the organization’s mainstay activity, it is helping prepare students at Wicker Elementary School for the LEAP test and venturing into neighborhood planning and social economic development for the lower Mid-City area, particularly the Tulane/Gravier neighborhood where he lives.
Ikemire said he moved to the neighborhood a few weeks before the storm with the idea of starting a block association. After Katrina, he founded PNOLA, a neighborhood recovery association that is both a volunteer nonprofit organization and also a neighborhood association.
PNOLA is staffed mostly by Americorps volunteers, one of whom is Nick Vilelle of central Missouri, who has been in New Orleans since November. He said it is good that the volunteers see firefighters joining in the gutting effort because “it’s nice to put a face with a project, to get history of the building and see who you are helping.”
Vilelle said PNOLA has no corporate sponsor and all of its money comes from individual donors. For more information on PNOLA, the services it offers to residents in the lower Mid-City area and to make donations, call (504) 342-4399 Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. or visit . The office is at 310 S. Broad St.