Rebuilding after Katrina, one memory at a time

The Lower 9th Ward is a dreary landscape of deserted brick and wood-frame structures, concrete slabs where homes once stood, unshaded streets and sidewalks buckled by uprooted live oaks and weeks of standing water. At night, a graveyard silence is broken only by the skittering of rats.

It is about as inhospitable a place as exists in post-Katrina New Orleans.

And yet sisters Tanya Harris and Tracy Flores are moving back.

Harris and Flores, whose feisty, stubborn devotion to their neighborhood has become well known to City Hall since the storm, are determined to reclaim the neighborhood that nurtured five generations of their family.

Almost entirely black and working class, the neighborhood became symbolic of an economic divide, in which the have-nots were stranded, overlooked by their own government to the point that foreign nations offered their help.

But to many people who lived there, the Lower 9th is not a symbol. It is a 22-block neighborhood once home to 19,000 people. It had a significant percentage of owner-occupied homes, a core of closely knit longtime residents.

And it had families such as Harris's and Flores's.

Flores finished renovating her flood-ravaged house in December and moved back in with her two children. They're the only family currently living on her block. "I hope to serve as a beacon of hope to my neighbors," Flores said. "I want them to see it can be done."

Harris is in the midst of repairs to her home. A high-spirited woman with a no-nonsense attitude, Harris would not sit back. As a community organizer for the grassroots Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, she has made it her mission to revive the Lower 9th.

When a preliminary city report suggested making portions of the Lower 9th into green space, Harris led the fight to prevent it. She fought for restoration of potable water and electricity long after other areas were being served. When city officials set a deadline for homeowners, many of whom lacked the money to comply, to clean up their property or lose it, Harris fought to overturn it.

Meanwhile, Flores was initially denied a permit to rebuild her home. She staged sit-ins at City Hall until she got one.

Old rockets rest in pieces in space junkyard

Mounds of titanium and steel glinted in the afternoon sun, valves and pipes protruding in all directions like half-formed metal organisms.

In one corner of the warehouse was a twin of the Apollo command module engine that brought astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong back from the moon nearly 40 years ago. Nearby was the second stage motor for a Saturn V, the most powerful rocket ever used in the U.S. space program.

For almost five decades, Norton Sales in North Hollywood has been collecting the nuts, bolts and heat exchangers from the rockets that helped American astronauts shrug off the steely embrace of gravity. This is where the bits and pieces of America's space program came to die.

Through most of its history, the space junkyard has served as part museum and part fantasy camp for wealthy collectors willing to plunk down thousands of dollars for a piece of an Apollo rocket.

Today, few space junkmen are left. The decimation of the aerospace industry in Southern California in the 1980s hit the junkers as hard as it hit the engineering community. Norton shrank to a single building. In recent years, the company has been renting its futuristic-looking space flotsam to Hollywood set decorators.

Ukrainian confrontation escalates

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko demanded Tuesday in a face-to-face confrontation that the prime minister accept early parliamentary elections and warned against violent street protests — noting pointedly that as president, he commands the military.

Backers of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich in turn asked the Constitutional Court to overturn a presidential decree signed Monday that disbanded parliament and called elections for May 27.

The day's developments suggested that an ongoing power struggle between the pro-Western president and pro-Russian prime minister would be played out, at least for now, primarily through the legal system rather than on the streets.

The two men were bitter rivals in 2004 when massive street protests forced a repeat of a presidential runoff that Yanukovich claimed to have won. He lost the second balloting, but became prime minister last August when he put together a coalition of parties to form a parliamentary majority.

At his meeting with the prime minister Tuesday, the president warned that he would not tolerate any violent means of preventing fresh elections.

- Compiled by Brooke McKean