The St. Thomas Projects

The St. Thomas Housing Development opened in 1941 on forty acres of the Lower Garden District — Modernist low-rise brick walkups built under the U.S. Housing Act of 1937 to move poor white families out of riverfront tenements. Within twenty years it had desegregated. By the 1970s it was majority Black, home to three thousand people at its peak. Sister Helen Prejean lived here in 1982 and did the ministry in these apartments that became *Dead Man Walking*.

By the late 1980s, forty-eight murders in four years. In 1992 a four-year-old named Eric Boyd was shot and killed on his way to preschool — one of five children shot in the project that year. The crack trade had arrived; federal maintenance money had not. HOPE VI money came in 1998 and demolition ran from 1998 to 2001. Three thousand people were displaced. Fewer than three hundred returned to River Garden, the mixed-income development that replaced it. A Walmart Supercenter went in adjacent to the site in 2004. A handful of the original 1940s brick walkups survive at the edge — the only physical trace of what occupied the whole district.