Crescent City Voices
‘It Lives With You’
Cindy Bowles laughs when a visitor asks for the bathroom. She walks through a maze of metal studs to a roughed-in space surrounded by refrigerators. A large painting is propped in the doorway. “Here you go,” she says, gesturing grandly. “I’ll guard the door.”
It’s not much, but when you’ve got an entire building needing repair, incremental improvements like a working bathroom are important.
As Bowles, manager for HRI Properties’ American Can Apartments in New Orleans‘ Mid-City neighborhood, surveys the damage, her phone chirps constantly with calls from tenants, contractors, and maintenance workers.
“This is all we’ve got,” she says, waving her mobile phone. “No land phones. But I hear we’re close to getting Internet.” She smiles like a kid on Christmas morning. As she walks through the property, she’s picking up garbage. Sometimes, she says, she even cleans the pool. “You just can’t keep up,” she admits. “We’re desperate for staff.”
Bowles breezes through the gutted lobby and into the parking lot. Standing a few hundred feet from the site of a rescue helicopter crash, she lets her guard down.
“There’s no such thing as regular hours right now,” she notes, looking tired for the first time this afternoon. “We’ve been going nonstop since the storm. We don’t eat lunch.
I don’t have any furniture.” She pauses.
“How long before things get more normal?” She asks, looking around. “I go home and still think about it. It lives with you.”
–Margot Carmichael Lester
