Claiborne Avenue History Project

The Claiborne Avenue History Project emerged from the community’s own archivists and oral historians in the years after Hurricane Katrina, drawing on collections at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University and the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Center. Researchers assembled photographs of the pre-expressway live-oak canopy, business records from the commercial corridor that operated under those trees, deed records documenting ownership patterns before the right-of-way clearance, and oral histories from dozens of residents who remembered the avenue before and after the construction in 1966 to 1968.

The Project’s collection of several hundred Black-owned businesses along North Claiborne, documented at the parcel level, gave the removal campaign its central factual claim: the construction had not cut through a generic urban corridor but through one of the most commercially active Black commercial districts in New Orleans, a district that the Robert Moses 1946 arterial plan had designated for clearance precisely because Tremé’s residents lacked the political access that protected the French Quarter from the same plan’s riverfront route.

The Project’s collection is deposited at the Amistad Research Center and remains accessible to researchers, community members, and organizers. The documentation it produced underpinned the city-commissioned Livable Claiborne Communities Study and the Congress for the New Urbanism’s Freeways Without Futures advocacy, eventually contributing to the federal framework that awarded Reconnecting Communities planning grants to the corridor.