From my father:
Dear Kathryn,
Hello from Houston.
Mom saw your blog and wants to know if the St Alphonsus Church [2045 Constance St.] is
OK. This if the place where my father was baptized and which we would
have visited if we had made a trip to New Orleans.Love,
Dad****
From my mother:
Kathryn,
See
http://www.stalphonsus.org/photoalbum.htmlOn Constance Street,there are two churches. One is the oldest Catholic church in Louisiana. One built by the Irish and one by the Germans. The German church had old wooden sculpture and the original organ was still used. The other church has beautiful stained glass.
This area is between the French quarter and the water. The street where grandpa Louis [Lois A. Cramer, my great-grandfather -KC] lived when he was a baby was Tchoupitoulas St., which is parallel and right by the Mississippi and perpendicular to Constance street.
It would have been an interesting area to visit.
Mom.
I'll check later today.
UPDATE: So I'm on a slow, borrowed computer with a tiny little monitor and so checking things by satellite is much more difficult than on my Mac G5 with two big monitors at home where I have a veritable mansion of screen realestate to work with. On the other hand, to my complete astonishment, I see that Google Maps has made the job easier by adding a "Katrina" button to New Orleans Google Maps searches. So I typed in 2045 Constance St. and bounced back and forth between the before and after satellite views at various magnifications. If I was at home on my own equipment, I would also check the much more detailed NOAA photos, which would give a much better idea. but I'm not. So here is my tentative opinion on St. Alphonsus Church. First, I can't really tell which building in the image is the church, so I don't really know what I'm looking at. Secondly, the church appears to be located near the flooding stain so may be in standing water some of the time, but not deep water, most likely. Most importantly, I have a hard time matching up the builings in that block because some of them are missing. I don't know which they are, but there are disturbing absences.
Can anyone do any better? I would be interested to receive comparative jpegs using different methods to assess this location, since it is an historically significant church and since it would be very useful to be able to compare tactics.
UPDATE 9/16: Using the Microsoft VirtualEarth Katrina site, I got this nice shot. Looks like the church came through pretty well:
