By Jack Kneece
Like San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, New Orleans is pulling itself up from the hurricane-churned mud as former residents and tourists refuse to give up on the historic, enchanting city.
After all, great jazz is still there. Great food can be found. Party-time nightlife still abounds. Crowds of visitors still stroll down Bourbon Street every night as the sounds of Dixieland jazz waft through the trees. The city’s quaint architecture and rich history are still tourist draws.
Although more than 400,000 displaced people have yet to return from various refuges around the nation, it is obvious they are trickling back.
A recent tour of the flood-ravaged neighborhoods revealed carpenters hard at work; circular saws whining and the hammers rap-raping.
City officials and merchants believe that within five years the city will be largely restored, and by 10 years the damage merely a watermark on the Big Easy psyche.
After all, it has not survived centuries because it is made of sugar candy. Its people are tough and hardy, sustained by a love of the Crescent City that transcends mere geographic loyalty.
The famous St. Charles street car line, which started in 1835 and is the world’s oldest, is running again. Crowds flock at Café du Monde on the river front. Renowned Brennan’s and Commander’s Palace have reopened. It was at Commander’s where a young cook named Emeril Lagasse honed his culinary skills.
No Easy Comeback
The comeback isn’t easy. There are still 300,000 ruined cars pushed under overpasses. The US Corps of engineers is frantically rebuilding broached dikes and canal levees.
The city’s entire infrastructure needs employees. Waiters now earn high salaries. Carpenters and painters find all the work they can handle. Help-wanted signs dot the landscape. Flooded houses are selling for the value of the lots and real estate entrepreneurs are buying blocks of them. Many have “For Sale As Is” signs.
But the spirit of the city shines through everywhere. It was most evident when the city held Mardi Gras and Jazzfest before the ground had dried out.
One vignette illustrates the city spirit: Steve Ferran, Loews Hotel general manager, had to get 300 guests to Baton Rouge or other high ground after the canal levees burst. He scrounged every car and van and rental he could, but wound up two cars short. Then a staffer reminded him there were two prize cars on the hotel property belonging to Wheel of Fortune, which had broadcast from the hotel the week before Katrina. No contestant won them.
But the cars were out of gas.
Ferran ordered a garden hose cut into pieces and he and a staffer waded around town siphoning gas from abandoned cars. All guests got away safely.
Earlier, Ferran had ordered water from the hotel swimming pool be hauled in trash cans to all the rooms to flush inoperable toilets. Much of the city improvised like this, and hotels swapped food and resources with no thought of payment.
Flood Stories
There are hundreds of such stories, including the policeman who was trapped in his attic and shot his way out of the roof. There are still heart-rending stories of families yet to find mothers, children or other relatives.
Damage was often peculiar.
The Loews, for example, had thick windows designed for a hurricane, but the flexing building popped out 47 of them. All have been replaced and the hotel, noted for its elaborate spa facilities, now has a higher occupancy than before Katrina.
Some of the most exclusive restaurants in the nation opened their doors to the hungry during and after the storm.
The famous Super Dome is now being re-roofed and strengthened at a cost of $65 million.
But not all structures were as strong as the Super Dome. Charity Hospital will be razed and rebuilt, weakened by flooding. Small aircraft and boats were tossed about the city like confetti. A nice boat, for example, was resting on the median in the Gentilly section during our visit. The 26-mile-long Lake Pontchartrain bridge, however, was quickly restored despite losing several sections.
The city’s once well-manicured City Park, low on the rehab list, has been abandoned to weeds, the golf course is all deep rough. But the park’s famous art museum survived and has reopened.
Returning Residents
Each passing day sees the city edge back into the stricken areas, but slower than receding flood waters. For example, the traffic lights have just been turned on in Gentilly. Electricity for homes, however, had not reached that far this spring.
Most houses’ front yards are piled high with sodden carpeting, musty and smelly furniture and sheet rock. One home’s sign said “Lucy and Donnie are OK.” Another cursed Katrina.
Luckily, most of the famous old plantation homes on the river just north of the city, including Oak Alley, San Francisco and Destrehan, survived because they were built high up for fear of flooding.
River traffic and shipping are near normal and a paddle-wheel steamer, the “Natchez,” plies the Big Muddy laden with tourists. It was lovely to watch its ponderous progress on the shining coffee-colored river from a 19th-floor hotel room.
Somehow the big, slow vessel was a metaphor for the city’s slow but certain progress from disaster.
(Second of a two-part series on New Orleans and its post-Katrina struggles). |
