Organization
Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum
Also known as: LNWLM
Neighborhood-led oral-history and community-archive museum in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans — the historically Black neighborhood most catastrophically affected by the 2005 Hurricane Katrina levee failures, where the Industrial Canal floodwall breach destroyed 4,000+ homes and displaced an entire community. Founded 2011 by neighborhood residents to document and preserve the Lower Nine's pre-Katrina history (the neighborhood was a center of Black home-ownership, Mardi Gras Indian masking, and second-line traditions), the storm and its aftermath, and the ongoing community-led rebuild. The museum occupies a small storefront on Tupelo Street and operates entirely on volunteer labor and donations.
What's happening now
from their newsletter
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Practical
The museum is open by appointment and during scheduled public hours (typically Saturday afternoons; check website). Address: 1235 Deslonde Street. Suggested donation $5; no one is turned away.
The collection includes neighborhood photographs from the 1940s onward, oral-history interviews recorded with residents who lived through Katrina, school yearbooks, second-line memorabilia, and a continuously-updated wall mapping where pre-Katrina residents have resettled (many never returned; the population of the Lower Ninth in 2020 was ~3,000, less than 30% of its 2000 figure).
The museum’s premise: the Lower Ninth’s history is too important to be told only by outside scholars and journalists, and the work of community memory is itself a form of recovery. Programming includes neighborhood walking tours led by lifelong residents, school visits, and partnerships with the [[house-of-dance-and-feathers|House of Dance & Feathers]] and the [[backstreet-cultural-museum|Backstreet Cultural Museum]] on Mardi Gras Indian and Black Masking documentation.
See also
Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.
- Shares approach with: [[house-of-dance-and-feathers]]
- Member of: [[organization]]
- Contained by: [[new-orleans]]
What links here, and how
Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.
Cultural
shares approach with
- House of Dance & Feathers the two principal neighborhood-led culture-and-history museums in the Lower Ninth Ward; complementary lenses (continuing Mardi Gras Indian craft tradition vs. historical archive)
- Sankofa Community Development Corporation two Lower-Ninth-Ward neighborhood-led organizations doing complementary work; the Living Museum on oral history, Sankofa on food-and-wellness substrate
- Whitney Plantation two Louisiana sites that center Black-led-and-Black-centered historical interpretation against the dominant American historical narrative
contains
- New Orleans neighborhood-led oral-history museum in the post-Katrina rebuilding zone
shares substrate with
- Vietnamese-Creole New Orleans East two parallel post-Katrina community-led recovery stories in different parts of New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth
5 inbound links · 3 outbound