St. Claude Avenue Corridor

After 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city's creative economy redistributed downriver. Artists and musicians priced out of the Quarter and Marigny moved where the rent was cheap — along St. Claude Avenue, from the Marigny through the Bywater into the Upper Ninth Ward. Galleries, performance spaces, and studios opened in former commercial buildings. What emerged is the most visible evidence of how the storm remade where and how art gets made in this city. The densest stretch of galleries and venues runs from Press Street to Poland Avenue. Walk or bike it. The corridor continues to evolve — gentrification pressures are now pushing artists further downriver, the same economic displacement that brought them here in the first place. St. Claude is what happens when a catastrophe forces a city to rebuild not just its levees and houses but the entire map of who can afford to live where. The art on these blocks exists because the rents allowed it to, and it will move again when they don't.