Photo du Jour: New Basin Canal Irish Memorial

A late Happy St. Patrick's Day . . . .

Markus at Wetbank Guide has a fantastic St. Patrick's Day post on the relevance of the Irish to the past, the present, and perhaps even the future of New Orleans. Read this post.

About the Photo du Jour:
The New Basin Canal Irish Memorial commemorates the death of at least 8,000 Irish (mostly to disease) during the digging of the New Basin Canal between 1832 and 1838. After its completion until the 1960's the canal provided navigable access from Lake Pontchartrain to the present location of the Louisiana Superdome transversing a distance of about six miles. It was filled in the early 1960's in conjunction with the construction of Interstate 10 which utilizes half of the canal's original right of way for its routing. The monument is within the Lakeview neighborhood and sits a few blocks east of the 17th Street Canal floodwall breach that contributed to the flooding the City of New Orleans in August 2005. Because the monument is elevated upon a small hill it was not completely submerged in the flooding, however the bottom 1/3 of the cross including the base was underwater as observed by the still very evident water line. The depth of the floodwaters (from street level) were in the seven to eight feet range in this area.

Check out the floodlines in this panorama via flickr visible upon the adjacent houses on West End and Pontchartrain Boulevards. THIS IS ALMOST SEVEN MONTHS LATER--although much of debris has been hauled away, the majority of houses in areas like Lakeview resemble what they looked like in October once the floodwaters receded.