Boisterous Builder for HUD

New Orleans ex-Mayor Landrieu: a man for all cities

Hardly had Moon Landrieu taken office as a 29-year-old Louisiana state legislator in 1960 when segregationist Governor Jimmie Davis called a special session to resist federal integration orders. The vote in favor of ramming through the segregation package was 93 to 1. The dissenter: Moon Landrieu. Colleagues told him that his political career was ruined; his family was showered with death threats. "I certainly wasn't a Sir Lancelot," Landrieu now insists. "I was miserable because I couldn't figure out a way to evade or finesse the issue."

As the incident indicates, the man Jimmy Carter chose last week as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is not the type to compromise on important principles. The reports of his political demise were premature. Ten years after he stood up to Davis, Landrieu built a coalition of black and upper-middle-class white voters and was elected mayor of his native New Orleans. He appointed blacks to high-level city jobs and, up until his very last days in office, continued to pressure the city's business elite tobe more responsive to the black community and to the area's economic and social needs.

His forceful style and short temper provoked controversy, as did the projects that he backed. One was the renovation of the historic French Market and the construction of a riverside mall, inevitably nicknamed the Moon Walk. He was also a staunch advocate of the controversial $163 million Louisiana Superdome. Argued Moon: "They called King Ludwig of Bavaria mad for building all those elaborate castles. But now thousands of tourists come to see the castles. So Bavaria's rich, and old Ludwig's a hero again."

As a member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and later its president, Landrieu helped formulate the federal revenue-sharing program for the cities. He stumped the country to bring attention to urban America's tax-base problems. Lamented Landrieu to whoever would listen: "If we can get our hands on it, we tax it, and if it moves, then we tax it again." When he left office in 1978 to become a real estate developer, he had won the respect of mayors across the country.

Landrieu, who celebrated his 49th birthday last week, lives in an unpretentious house in the racially mixed neighborhood where he was raised in the rear of his parents' grocery store. Once again, he has been doing a little door-to-door campaigning. This time it is for his daughter Mary, at 23 the oldest of his nine children (all of their names begin with the letter M; his own name was Maurice before he changed it to Moon). She is running for her father's old seat in the state legislature.

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