'This is water management.' St. Joseph sisters create massive rain garden in New Orleans

When the water garden is complete, a set of pumps at the northwest corner of the property will lift water from the storm sewer up to the surface, where it will flow through swales and slowly fill low-lying areas.

Another storm sewer at the southeast corner of the land will drain onto the land by gravity. A small berm around the edges of the property will ensure the water stays where it belongs as it waters the landscape, soaks into the soil and evaporates. When the storm sewers have capacity again, the water — up to 10 million gallons of it — will flow out of Mirabeau back into the city system and to the bayou.

Architect J. David Waggonner III, who proposed and designed the water garden, said one of the biggest problems facing New Orleans is the way it has fought the water.

Yes, the city does lie below sea level, but it didn't always. A century of pumping water out of the ground to lower the water table has caused the land to sink — a process called subsidence — up to 8 feet in places, he said. That means the more engineers use pumps against the water, the deeper the hole they find themselves in.

Mirabeau will do something different.

Instead of pumping out groundwater and causing more subsidence, Waggonner said, Mirabeau will return groundwater — and more than engineers originally thought. In studying the land, they found what was once a barrier island thousands of years ago that is now underground, meaning a huge tube of sand is there that can easily move groundwater away, making room for more.

"This is not designed to protect you from storm surge. It's designed to protect you from rainfall, which is a much more common occurrence," Waggonner said.

When complete, the Mirabeau Water Garden — land the sisters still consider holy, a place where generations of sisters lived and worked and served God — will serve the neighbors, their city and the environment and will be a model for other cities dealing with stormwater.

Today, the 25 acres of Mirabeau is empty save for the horseshoe-shaped driveway that led to the main entrance and a large piece of concrete bearing the congregation's shield that once marked the center of the lobby floor.

Massive spreading oaks form a grove near the northeast corner of the land. The center of the property is mostly prairie, and the southern end is lightly wooded.

The process hasn't been easy. Waggonner met the sisters in 2008, but it took years to come up with preliminary designs and apply for and receive federal funding. They had to deal with the local bureaucracy, state government and multiple federal agencies; those processes took time. Once the funding was in hand, the plans were announced in January 2016. Since then, Waggonner's firm created has construction plans and gone through the permitting process.

Now, it is ready to be bid on, and work could start within months, depending on the status of the COVID-19 pandemic. After more than a decade of planning, the sisters, now based in Baton Rouge, are long past mourning the loss of their old home.

"I'm praying not for an end" to the process, Laplace said, "but an end to getting it started."

Mirabeau was where Laplace's consecrated life began.

She was 18 years old and knew the St. Joseph sisters well. Her family lived in New Orleans, and she had gone to their high school in the Tremé neighborhood. On Sept. 8, 1960, Laplace entered the order, and Mirabeau became her home for the next few years.

At that time, Mirabeau was a busy place, with about 125 sisters living there. For the first nine months, Laplace and her fellow postulants lived together in a dorm: 16 women in a single room with beds separated by white curtains.

"I would call [the building] functional. It wasn't built for the beauty of the architecture," Laplace said. "But the grounds were beautiful."

A providential meeting

In 2008, a mutual friend introduced Waggonner to a woman considering joining the Congregation of St. Joseph. Waggonner at the time was hosting a series of workshops he called the "Dutch Dialogues," examining how the Netherlands managed water rather than simply trying to fight it by building ever-bigger infrastructure.

Soon, the sisters and Waggonner met under the spreading oaks at Mirabeau, but the sisters were skeptical, said Sr. Pat Bergen, who was on the leadership team at the time.

Developers were already approaching them, salivating over 25 acres of open land in the heart of the city, but the sisters were not about to have Mirabeau turned into a sea of chain restaurants and strip malls.

Waggonner was different.

"Everybody's got a plan," Bergen said. "We said, 'We only have a half-hour, so make sure he's on time.' Of course, we would have given him hours and hours once he started talking."

It was more than just his philosophy of managing water.

"He has this sense, like many artists do, of the spirituality of the land, and that resonates with us," Bergen said. "We really believe this land is holy. People have prayed there for years and years and years. And this land could bless the water as it held it before it returns to the canals."

Waggonner grew up in the woods of north Louisiana in a faith-filled Protestant family. In the early 1990s, he met Dominican Sr. Ambrose Reggio. He was working on a high school for the congregation, and Reggio was in charge of the campus, so they worked closely together for several months.

"She was one of the most influential figures in my life," Waggonner said. "The construction meetings would start with a prayer. It was the best construction job you could have. The atmosphere was just totally different. So I have a deep bond and a love for the sisters."

Now, Waggonner has designed a new future for Mirabeau, one where it becomes the flagship of the Gentilly Resilience District, a plan to turn a large swath of New Orleans into an area that manages its stormwater through diversions, storage and infiltration instead of more pumps and higher levees.

"That's why this project is so important," he said. "It goes beyond the 25 acres. This is where the sisters have this intuition: There's something the Earth does for us, there's something grasses do for us, there's something trees do for us."

Others agree: The first phase of the project is funded by a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the second will be part of a $143 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to the city.

'We were so happy'

Today, the sisters are preparing to lease the land to the city for 99 years for $1 a year, Bergen said, and they hope groundbreaking will occur soon. They don't know how far the pandemic will push things back.

"All the money is there. It's just not being used," she said.

The sisters know they could have simply sold the land for millions of dollars, but that would have hurt the neighborhood environmentally instead of helping it.

"The thought did come up that we could use that money for something good, but the people of the neighborhood would be in the same situation," Bergen said.

Instead, they helped get grants, including a massive federal grant, to pay for their project.

"We didn't get anything out of it," Bergen said, laughing. "We were so happy."

Waggonner said the choice of protecting the land versus pocketing the money was an easy one for the sisters.

"They didn't agonize over that," he said. "They have a higher agenda."

[Dan Stockman is national correspondent for Global Sisters Report. His email address is dstockman@ncronline.org. Follow him on Twitter or on Facebook.]