Danziger Bridge — Katrina Aftermath

Six days after Katrina, on a vertical lift bridge carrying U.S. 90 across the Industrial Canal, New Orleans police officers shot six unarmed civilians, killing two — a 17-year-old and a 40-year-old intellectually disabled man. Four others were wounded. The officers fabricated a cover story, planted a gun, and filed false reports. In 2011, five were convicted of federal civil rights violations. This was the most egregous documented abuse of police power during the Katrina aftermath.

The bridge itself opened in February 1988, built to replace a 1931 draw bridge. Named for Alfred Danziger, a New Orleans attorney who served as personal counsel to Huey Long and later as executive counsel to Mayor Robert Maestri, the structure became the widest lift bridge in the world. Danziger was also a principal fundraiser for Dillard University, the historically Black institution founded in 1930.

Katrina devastated the city in ways still unrecovered. New Orleans has not regained its original population, and the loss of much of the Black population has affected the city's culture in ways that cannot be replicated by the influx of new ethnic and cultural groups after the storm. What happened on this bridge on September 4, 2005, is inseparable from that larger collapse — a moment when the systems meant to protect the city turned predatory in its most vulnerable hour. The site is on the I-10 service road near the Industrial Canal. It's a place of reckoning.