I won’t recap that entire column here, but Dover’s ideas — both generally and specifically about Savannah — are well worth consideration.

Dover emphasizes, with overwhelming evidence, that great streets in cities around the world are bustling with a variety of types of transportation. Cars are generally present in that mix, but their speeds are kept within reasonable limits and the design of the street actively encourages pedestrianism, bicycling, and other forms of transportation.

Effective streets often include ample parking, although that was not the emphasis of Dover’s presentation. Parked cars help shield pedestrians from active traffic and also slow drivers down. A critical mass of on-street parking also boosts businesses and allows drivers to access neighborhood commercial districts from a variety of directions at various times of day.

Dover showed a slide of St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans and asked his Savannah audience about the ruts along the streetcar line in the neutral ground. I had the answer of course — the neutral ground is also perfect for joggers. Also, it’s worth noting that the St. Charles Avenue median is wide enough to allow cross traffic to cross the street one lane at a time, eliminating any demand for stoplights along long stretches of the road.

Also worth noting: St. Charles Avenue, which now also features a bike lane, has just one lane for cars in each direction. Those lanes handle a lot of cars each day, but they don’t crowd out other uses — and they don’t interfere with the street’s beauty. Here’s a shot I took in 2009 of St. Charles Avenue:

Click here for another post about St. Charles from summer 2013, which included this image:

Dover’s recent talk at the SCAD Museum of Art was also referenced last week in John Bennett’s Connect Savannah column If we win the parking war, we lose the city. I always enjoy and appreciate Bennett’s columns, but I think he hit the ball out of the proverbial park with this one.

From that column:

In Savannah, however, there seems to be something else at work. Millions of people come from all over the world every year to enjoy strolling our streets. Yet some of us just can’t tolerate walking a couple of blocks from our cars to our destinations, even in one of the most beautiful cities in North America.

Should we fine tune the pricing of on-street parking to reflect market rates as Shoup suggests, extend hours of operation at municipal garages and find other ways to maximize the usefulness of our existing parking inventory? Certainly.

However, entertaining unreasonable expectations of suburban-style parking in a historic city is potentially disastrous, as explained by Savannah-based urban designer Kevin Klinkenberg.

“Savannah can, like so many other cities, solve its parking problem by building a lot of convenient, cheap parking,” he said. “And when we are done with that, we will have destroyed the reasons people love Savannah in the first place.”

As I’ve noted over and over and over in my various writings, there are many things we can do to expand the inventory of on-street parking, including lengthening the time on some meters in areas that are often nowhere near capacity.

And let me pick up on one other element of Dover’s talk. He mentioned the possibility of recreating the walkway under the trees down the middle of the Oglethorpe Avenue median. I think it’s a wonderful idea. Just a few weeks ago, I was down that way and pulled out my iPhone and took this photo looking east from Montgomery Street.

Who wouldn’t want to walk on a path between these trees, even with vehicular travel lanes on either side?

Was Ringo Starr to blame? Jackie Kennedy? A fight in prison? An underworld strongman with a pair of pliers?

Booker played with many stellar musicians throughout his brief career and was a key influence on greats like Harry Connick, Jr., and Dr. John, but no one knows or remembers or is willing to say how he lost his left eye?

There are many mysteries that remain about Booker’s life, but we do know that Booker’s influence on other musicians can’t be overstated. It’s simply riveting to see Connick demonstrate his teacher’s piano techniques, and it’s both funny and sad to hear Connick recall latenight calls from a distressed Booker seeking his help. “James, I’m 12,” Connick remembers himself saying, as he kept a tape recorder glued to the phone because he instinctively knew that those calls were momentous in some way.

A low-key Dr. John discusses and demonstrates how Booker taught him how to play the organ.

But the most interesting interviewees are the musicians who played with Booker in the clubs and friends who tried to support Booker even when he seemed bent on propelling himself into the abyss. They describe an immensely talented musician who could at times be a disciplined role player but who could at any moment succumb to his addictions, including heroin.

Keber could have delved more deeply into some of the sordid details of Booker’s life, but Bayou Maharajah maintains a sort of respectful distance. We hear a couple of interviewees talk about Booker hitting on men, but we never know with whom he had sex or relationships (if any). We never hear from his dealers or from those who shot up with him.

Or maybe we do hear from some of those folks, but that’s not what they talk about on screen.

Instead of chronicling such details, Bayou Maharajah immerses viewers in the world of New Orleans in the middle decades of the 20th century and in the many moods of Booker’s music.

I knew little about James Booker before interviewing Keber in advance of last week’s screening here in Savannah, and I certainly wasn’t prepared the richness of his vocals. Touring Europe in the 1970s, Booker played to packed halls with a combination of grace, confidence, and virtuosity that he often didn’t achieve in the U.S., where his talent was never fully appreciated.

Keber lets a few stellar clips play to the end to the end of the song. Many filmmakers would have only included snippets of those taped performances, but Keber gets out of the way of the music. It’s a bold choice that helps give Bayou Maharajah a sense of wholeness despite the many unknowns.

Booker’s career took him around the country and around the world, but toward the end of his life he wouldn’t leave New Orleans. Maybe the city was his only great love, or maybe his paranoia had just grown too powerful.

Bayou Maharajah doesn’t try to solve that riddle either, but the film gives us beautiful and suggestive glimpses of Booker’s New Orleans.

(Btw, our deadlines for Do are typically on Mondays, and the week’s stories and columns often begin appearing online before the print version is available.)

I really enjoyed talking to Bayou Maharajah filmmaker Lily Keber, who graduated from the Savannah Arts Academy in 2000 and who first became interested in moving to New Orleans after traveling there for an X show at the now-defunct Shim Sham Club over a decade ago. “It had a very familiar feeling to me,” Keber told me of the city. Post-Katrina, she knew that she had to move there since the city’s future was so uncertain. There’s a bit more on that and how she came to hear stories of James Booker in my column.

Bayou Maharajah screens on Thursday evening at 6 p.m. at the Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center. Click here for the Facebook invitation.

Here’s the trailer:

Bayou Maharajah Trailer from Lily Keber on Vimeo.

Trailer for BAYOU MAHARAJAH, a feature-length documentary on the life and times of James Booker.

World Premiere: SXSW. March 2013.

Winner of Oxford American Best Southern Film Award. May, 2013.

More info at BayouMaharajah.com

St. Charles is probably best known for its streetcar line, but construction has forced the temporary suspension of service on the western end of the street and on Carrollton Avenue.

Without the usual groups of people standing in the neutral ground waiting for streetcars, both avenues seemed oddly empty.

There was another change to St. Charles since my last trip to New Orleans a couple of years ago: far more cyclists. And this is summertime, when many college students at Tulane and Loyola are out of town.

On the portions of the street nearest Tulane, there’s now a bike lane going each way on St. Charles. It runs right alongside the parked cars — the exact configuration that we have in Savannah on Price Street and Washington Avenue.

So, as you can see in the photo below, long stretches of St. Charles now have the following configuration, working our way from left to right: sidewalk, tree lawn, parking lane (which wisely does not even have lines to delineate spaces, thus allowing for more cars), bicycle lane, vehicular travel lane, large median with streetcar tracks and with vehicular cut throughs for cross and turning traffic.

Here’s a shot taken a few evenings ago looking east, with the gates to Audubon Park visible on the right:

Let me add two other notes:

• Even when streetcars are active, the neutral ground is wide enough, flat enough, and comfortable enough to make an excellent jogging path.
• The width of the neutral ground, i.e. median, is sufficient to handle cross traffic and turning traffic in ways that make streetlights unnecessary except at significant intersections.

So here we have an historic street that far predates the automobile era — and an incredibly beautiful street too. The design has adapted beautifully for cars, streetcars, bicycles, pedestrians, even joggers.

It’s rather remarkable.

The configuration is one that could be adapted almost exactly to Abercorn Street between Victory Drive and DeRenne Avenue in Savannah. Modified versions could work on other streets.

They’re fine, but they still don’t have power back, about 55 hours later, and it looks like some folks are going to have a long long wait.

Electric provider Entergy has over half a million customers (homes and businesses) without power right now. The do have a great outage tracking map, however. The red areas are those without power as of 8:45 CDT, Friday, Aug. 31:

Meanwhile, the inevitable first fatalities have been found: a middle-aged man and woman floating in the kitchen of their flooded house in Plaquemines Parish, to the southeast of New Orleans. Expect more of those.

And expect a long recovery process from some areas that flooded — and in some cases still are flooded.

Obvious lessons, especially for a coastal community like Savannah:

• Even a Category 1 hurricane, especially a slow-moving one, can have devastating, deadly effects.
• A storm surge of over 13 feet is possible even in a relatively week hurricane. The folks who stayed at home in Plaquemines surely didn’t think they were risking their lives, but they were. That was obvious by Sunday afternoon, when one looked at the sheer breadth, the slow speed, and the direction. How can we communicate the danger more effectively?
• Many of those evacuated from Plaquemines had pets with them. If the reluctance to leave had to do with concern about pets, then maybe there are public policy responses worth considering to reassure owners that it’s possible for them to leave with their pets.

There’s some good news from the storm too. The storm surge was only a couple of feet lower than that of Katrina, yet the levee system around New Orleans held.

The final path and intensity of the storm also meant that New Orleans would be spared truly catastrophic wind damage.

But then sometime late on that Monday morning in 2005, I heard a TV news report of a levee breach, accompanied by an inane reassurance that New Orleans was not filling up like a bowl of water. Since much of the city is below sea level, there was no way that some neighborhoods couldn’t be filling up. Of course, as it turned out, there wasn’t just a single levee breach, and all areas of the city were already flooded or were flooding up to at least sea level.

In the immediate aftermath of those breaches, the Corps of Engineers tried to place some of the blame on corruption of New Orleans officials, but just last week a Corps official backed way off from those accusations. From Nola.com on August 22 of this year, Corps of Engineers critic repeats accusations of shoddy work:

Rosenthal also took the corps to task for its past accusations that New Orleans officials bore some responsibility for the canal failures because they pressured the corps to pursue an inferior storm protection plan. For instance, she said the corps blamed local officials for forcing it to reinforce the canal walls rather than build floodgates without pumps at the mouth of the three outfall canals.

The commanding general of the corps in Katrinaâ€s aftermath, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, told the New York Times in June 2006 that the corps accepted responsibility for the levee failures. Earlier this year, he told The Times-Picayune that his statements about local officials†roles were not intended to be deceitful.

“Throughout our response to Katrina I emphasized how critical it was to be transparent and honest if we were to regain the trust of the public,” he said. “I might have illustrated my description with things I had heard but not personally researched, but there was absolutely no intent to deceive anyone.”

Rosenthal made a public-records request for any documents that supported the corps†allegations that they were pressured to build up the canal walls and not install floodgates. In February, Ken Holder, chief of public affairs for the corps†New Orleans District office, responded that the corps couldnâ€t determine which documents Strock and his second-in-command, Major Gen. Don Riley, used to make such claims.[. . .]

Rosenthal said Wednesday that “the evidence speaks for itself.” She added: “It seems pretty clear that the reason the corps canâ€t produce the data is because it doesnâ€t exist.”

Next, let me share two images from Tulane geology professor Stephen A. Nelson’s amazing field guide to the Katrina levee breaks, Hurricane Katrina – What Happened?. My sister Nancye is one of Nelson’s colleagues. First, a map of New Orleans in 1878, showing development on the highest ground, and then a map from the Times-Picayune showing the depths of the flooding about two weeks after the storm:

Here’s the official Katrina forecast map at 11 p.m. on August 26, 2005:

Here’s the official Isaac forecast map at 8 p.m. on August 26, 2012:

Here’s the latest on Isaac’s likely storm surge levels from Nola.com:

The threat to southeastern Louisiana is likely to include storm surges of between 6 and 12 feet above sea level, up to 12 inches of rain, with 20 inches possible in some locations, and sustained winds of 100 mph and higher gusts for much of the coast, depending on the exact location of the storm, according to the Slidell office of the National Weather Service. Its forecast calls for winds of 60 to 80 miles per hour on the north and south sides of Lake Pontchartrain, with gusts to 100 mph.

Water levels are likely to reach 5 to 7 feet above sea level in Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas, and 7 to 11 feet in Lake Borgne and south along the coast on the east side of the Mississippi River. West of the river, water heights could reach 9 feet.

National Hurricane Center Science and Operations Officer Chris Landsea said Sunday that while still only a tropical storm with sustained winds of 60 mph on Sunday, Isaac is huge, with tropicalstorm-force winds extending out 200 miles from its center.

So, barring a rather dramatic change in the track, this looks like the first really big test of the New Orleans levee system since Katrina. Those levees have obviously been repaired, but well enough?

I know everyone wants to project a sense of calm and confidence, but I think it’s inexplicable that New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has not called for an evacuation of all neighborhoods below sea level. By tomorrow morning, we’ll already by within 36 hours of projected landfall. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has called for voluntary evacuations in a number of parishes but sounds confident in levee protection:

State and local officials are taking a number of steps to protect our people and property from the storm. In addition to issuing a State of Emergency for the storm, we are in touch with parish leaders and we are recommending voluntary evacuations within the hurricane watch area. Specifically, this is for people in low lying areas, areas outside of levee protection, and areas south of the Intracoastal Waterway.

From Poynter’s Donald Newhouse rebuffs request to sell Times-Picayune:

Donald Newhouse has rebuffed a strongly-worded letter from a group of heavy-hitters in New Orleans to sell The Times-Picayune rather than cut daily printing. The Times-Picayune Citizens Group wrote in a letter delivered Monday:

“It is painful to report that right now it is nearly impossible to find a kind word in these parts about your family or your plan to take away our daily newspaper … If your family does not believe in the future of this great city and its capacity to support a daily newspaper, it is only fair to allow us to find someone who does.
Newhouse, however, isnâ€t interested.”

“We have read the letter with great respect and concern,” said Donald E. Newhouse, president of Advance Publications, owner of the paper. “Advance Publications has no intention of selling The Times-Picayune.”

Both NOLA.com and Gambit say the group has lined up a buyer for the paper, citing an unnamed source.

Another excerpt from the letter to Newhouse, followed by a list of those who signed it:

Unfortunately and sadly, the considerable goodwill your family enterprise has created in New Orleans in the last 50 years has dissipated in just a few short months because of the decision that took our entire community by surprise. Advance Publications and its leadership have lost the trust and credibility of a significant segment of the community. Citizens have publically protested the proposed new format; prominent civic and business leaders and advertisers have stepped up to speak out against the plan, and an online petition is climbing toward 10,000 signatures, including celebrities like Ed Asner and Garrison Keillor and ordinary New Orleanians whose comments are a tribute to the towering impact of the newspaper you built. Clearly, the voices of our community are strongly opposed to what you are doing.

It is painful to report that right now it is nearly impossible to find a kind word in these parts about your family or your plan to take away our daily newspaper. Our community leaders believe that your decision is undermining the important work we continue to face in rebuilding New Orleans. Whether you intended to or not, you have already created the impression that our recovery is so tepid that we cannot support an important civic institution like a daily newspaper. [. . .]

If you have ever valued the friendship you have shared with our city and your loyal readers, we ask that you sell the Times-Picayune. Our city wants a daily printed paper, needs a daily printed paper and deserves a daily printed paper.

Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond
Archdiocese of New Orleans

Mary Matalin

James Carville

Steve Roberts

Cokie B. Roberts

Wynton Marsalis

Scott Cowen
President Tulane University

Norman C. Francis
President Xavier University

Kevin Wildes, S.J.
President Loyola University New Orleans

Ralph O. Brennan

Archie Manning

Wendell Pierce

I hadn’t seen the band for a few years — it must have been back in 2009 when DDBB was one of the acts for SCAD’s New Alumni Concert headlined under thundering skies by Michael Franti and Spearhead.

I was a little worried that Live Wire would either be too full (the area near the stage can get tight) or too empty (Savannah crowds are fickle, especially in summer), but the crowd seemed just the right size — and everyone was in the mood for fun. Savannah’s Rasheed Akbar, formerly of New Orleans, joined his old friends on stage for a couple of numbers.

During the break between sets, one of the members told me how much they loved playing Savannah. It showed.

You can click for larger versions — once you’re in the slideshow mode, you can just use the directional arrows on your keyboard.