Uplift for the Grande Dame

Elected mayor of New Orleans in 1946, deLesseps Story Morrison took one good look at that provocative grande dame among U.S. cities and made a worried diagnosis: the old lady was dangerously ill with municipal thrombosis, high blood pressure and cancer. Morrison set out to cure all three and rejuvenate her as well. Last week, celebrating his eleventh anniversary as mayor by dedicating an eleven-story, $8,000,000, glass-and-class city hall, "Chep" Morrison, 45, proudly and properly declared his girl well out of danger and enjoying a new uplift from skyline to dockside.

"Our thrombosis," Morrison explains, "was the traffic strangulation caused by five separate railroad stations, 144 grade crossings, the five-mile-long New Basin Canal with its lift bridges. Hypertension was the pressure on the downtown nerve center because of a lack of parking space and too great a concentration of people in a few buildings. The third of the municipal ailments was the slum cancer."

Big Dose. Looking around for assistants to help him in the cure, Morrison found most New Orleans businessmen painfully aware of the illness, anxious to help, and even ready to accept the cost in time and taxes of the medicines he prescribed. The New Orleans antidote:

P: A $57 million union terminal program to replace the five antiquated depots with one modern station, eliminate 144 grade crossings.

P: Widening of 39 boulevards to speed traffic into the city, and filling the unused New Basin Canal which slowed crosstown traffic.

P: Demolition of the worst 1,500 of New Orleans' 42,000 substandard buildings to make way for an eleven-acre civic center that will include, beside the new city hall, a Supreme Court building (due for completion this fall), a public library, a state office building and a civil court.

P: Replacement of 9,500 other slum units with federal housing projects, rejuvenation of 15,000 more by a coordinated municipal program in which the city persuaded slum landlords to make repairs, took legal action when persuasion failed.

P: Construction of a $65 million cantilever bridge across the Mississippi to New Orleans' undeveloped West Bank, fulfilling a century-old New Orleans dream of bridging the river.

P: Creation of an assembly center by adding a sports arena and opera house-concert hall to the present municipal auditorium.

New Maxim. Morrison's medicine has attracted industry to New Orleans, prompted private capital to construct 25 major buildings in eleven years, raised property values in once dilapidated areas from 95-c- a square foot to $25. But it has done something even more important. Morrison next year is an odds-on favorite to win a fourth term, is being talked about as a potential governor of Louisiana or U.S. Senator. His success demonstrates a political maxim that last-hurrahing wardheelers across the U.S. are rapidly learning: a hard-nosed, hard-pushed program of municipal reconstruction can do more than patronage, back-scratching or the food basket to put a modern-day mayor on the road to political success.

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