The AAAM before and after

Joseph Crain
Friday, March 28, 2008

The pre-Katrina image, taken two weeks prior to the storm, shows the Frank Gehry-designed African-American Arts Gallery nearing 80% completion. The exterior brick work was in place, and the skylights and windows for the building was delivered to the job site for installation just days before the storm, while Katrina was still a vague distant threat passing Florida’s tip.

(Two weeks prior Katrina)

 The post-Katrina image speaks to the storm’s fury.  The building was stripped of all brick work and exterior sheathing, leaving only a broken skeleton.  The site, which in the previous image shows a lush grassy lawn with full live oak canopies dripping with Spanish moss, was reduced to a barren debris field.  More striking is the “addition” to the gallery: a battleship-sized casino barge that was ripped loose from its massive steel beam moorings a half-mile away, floated across Highway 90 on a 30-foot storm surge, and rammed into the gallery by the forces of Katrina.  This building, although small, was designed to withstand massive lateral forces.  Although the size of a small house, structurally it contained over 60 tons of steel connected to a 2-foot thick slab coupled to fifty massive concrete piles driven 60 feet into the earth.  However, this impact was so violent that the gallery was sheared off of all 50 piles and pushed three feet north; only the massive rebar held as the barge’s shredded mooring became entangled in the steel gallery framing.  As the storm surge receded, the barge came to rest on the south side of the slab, bending the two-foot thick concrete elevated slab into the mud like a sheet of paper.  If not for this gallery, the hundred foot tall barge surely would have drifted further inland, obliterating everything within its path.  The gallery was a total loss. Undaunted, the Ohr-O’Keefe Museums of Art immediately began fundraising and recovery efforts which continue today.  This museum, which is one of the few Mississippi Gulf Coast cultural institutions that survived the storm, will be rebuilt.

(One week after Katrina)