The Rose Tavern appears in a still from one of the “Straight from The Projects” episodes, which accidentally documented a city in the moments before it vanished.

The bar at 3901 Thalia Street first appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1933. Its liquor license had been revoked for allowing patrons to imbibe on premises permitted solely for the sale of beer in “unbroken packages.” Housed in a small clapboard building on the corner of Thalia and Dorgenois, deep in the Third Ward, it was renamed Rose Tavern shortly after the 1941 completion of the Calliope Housing Development, which all the locals simply called the “Cally-oh,” even after the city attempted to rebrand it, in 1981, as the B. W. Cooper Apartments. The Rose Tavern, located across the street from the Calliope’s central courtyard, became a hub for the projects and a clubhouse for the Calliope High Steppers and Lady Steppers, the local social-aid and pleasure organization. Outsiders knew the bar only as an intermittent location for shootings, stickups, and gambling arrests reported in the newspaper. But within a culture that existed outside the boundaries of any tourist map, it was a landmark.

After more than seventy years of operation, the bar closed when Katrina hit and never reopened. Most of the old blond-brick buildings in the Calliope were demolished, despite protests from residents who had been blocked from returning after the storm. Like the mythical speakeasies in Storyville—a turn-of-the-century vice district that was razed after being deemed a cesspool by the Navy—a picture of Rose Tavern might exist only in the memories of those who saw it in person were it not for a low-budget DVD series called “Straight from the Projects: Rappers That Live the Lyrics.” In 2001, the video series produced an episode with the rapper Corey Miller, a.k.a. C-Murder. Nominally famous nationwide, Miller was hailed as a conquering hero on his home turf. His New Orleans tour is genuine in its juxtaposition of Southern leisure and imminent violence. In between gratuitous shots of automatic weapons and gunshot wounds, he takes the camera to watch motorbike races at a Sunday picnic on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, ducks into Peaches Records, on Gentilly Boulevard, and joins a Second Line parade in the Melpomene projects until gunfire slashes the sunny scene.

After strolling through the Calliope quad, the cameras follow Miller into Rose Tavern. We get a fleeting glimpse of the interior, just long enough to see the red-and-white walls mounted with wooden plaques bearing the names of beloved patrons: SELLES & HATTIE, SEMETRA, SWEET NEICEY. Carrying his rum and Coke outside in a little plastic cup, Miller gestures to patrons at the adjacent Washateria. “The washarette, y’erd me?” he says, lackadaisically. “Wash everything up, huh.”

“Straight from the Projects” lasted for three episodes in the early aughts, and was produced and directed by Stephen Belafonte, a British-born entertainment impresario. No relation to Harry, he was born Stephen Stansbury, and is best known for his high-profile relationship with the former Spice Girl and current “America’s Got Talent” judge Mel B. In addition to filming Miller’s New Orleans, Belafonte toured Brownsville, Brooklyn, with the rap duo M.O.P., and visited with Trick Daddy in Liberty City, Miami. The conceit was always the same: under the guise of a warts-and-all exposé, “Straight from the Projects” offered pre-YouTube-era rap fans a chance to indulge in inner-city tourism without any of the real-world hazards.

Because no one actually living in the projects would waste twenty dollars on something they could see for free in their own neighborhood, “Straight from the Projects” often feels like exploitation. In the C-Murder episode, subjects revel in the on-camera gun-wielding, but there is an uneasy sense that the people being filmed aren’t entirely complicit in the film’s motives. In a scene that may or may not be staged, a life-insurance salesman is shown writing up a policy for a twelve-year-old in the living room of his mom’s home. “It’s cold, jack,” Ice-T, who introduces each segment from a remote studio, says, like a host on Turner Classic Movies.

Intended as a fearsome celebration of project life, “Straight from The Projects” accidentally documented a city in the moments before it vanished. The detailed chronicle of Third Ward living depicted in “Straight from the Projects” plays like an extraordinary time capsule of pre-Katrina city culture. The street-rap legend Soulja Slim, who has a key cameo, was murdered in 2003. Corey Miller has been incarcerated on murder charges since 2002, while nearly every stop on his “Projects” tour moved or closed in the wake of Katrina. Peaches Records and Tapes relocated from their original location on Gentilly Boulevard, not far from where Slim was killed. The Rhythm City night club and the Washateria, on South Dorgenois, are long gone, as are the Calliope, Melpomene, and Magnolia projects, three hearts that made the Third Ward the epicenter of New Orleans hip-hop.

“One of the benefits of living in the projects,” Miller says during his on-camera tour, “hurricane time you ain’t gotta trip, ’cause them bricks ain't going nowhere. You got people who got houses coming in the projects just to be cool in hurricane season.” He was right. When Katrina hit, the Third Ward projects escaped the damage that destroyed large swaths of the city. Still, in 2007, the City Council voted unanimously to renovate Melpomene and raze Magnolia and Calliope. “They took the projects from us,” two longtime elderly residents told the Times-Picayune reporter Katie Reckdahl in 2011. Magnolia was rebuilt as a mixed-use community called Harmony Oaks. Old residents said the new development was safer, but not as social. A few of the remaining buildings from the old Calliope are now crowded out by the cheerily prefabricated façades of Marrero Commons. The slogan on their Web site is “It’s not just an Apartment … It’s your Home.”

Even in a city premised on cross-pollination and contradiction, where good forces and bad forces are often allowed to co-mingle, outsiders could never accept the Calliope on its own terms. A neighborhood can be a cultural center or an “incubator” of crime and poverty, but not both. To longtime residents, the projects were beyond the binary of good or bad. The Third Ward was a life style, an identity, a planet. Even at its ugliest, its residents took pride in everything that it was and was not. In “Straight from the Projects,” Soulja Slim walks through Magnolia, the patron anti-saint of the New Orleans projects, gesturing to his surroundings. “All this is me,” he says, grinning.

The pungent truths of Storyville are lost to time. Now it’s a tourist buzzword used by the same type of civic leader who hated the neighborhood when it was in swing. As the city selects a new self-image, how will its great bad neighborhoods be remembered? Split into fifteen-minute chunks on YouTube, clips from “Straight from the Projects” attract former residents, and the video’s comments sections serve as guestbooks for ghosts of the recent past. Two months ago, tude618 wrote: “I have good memory, i remember this day they was walking around showing the hood i was like 8 yrs old i used to always think c murder was master p cause they both look alike damn i miss the calliope that was my hood always gone be my hood.”