NOLA's Future: Big Easy or Big Museum?

Having recently been to New Orleans to help my in-laws clear out a house they own, knowing a fair number of people from there, and living in the city most similar to New Orleans and with the most Katrina refugees, I have a good appreciation for the overwhelming extent of the devastation wrought by Katrina this August. I have also seen a fair number of editorials in the print versions of the Houston Chronicle that I have wanted to blog, but which have very annoyingly been absent from their online edition.

Yesterday, I encountered two good, contrasting editorials on New Orleans post Katrina, which I think do an outstanding job of conveying both the magnitude of what this unique city faces and why there might be reason to hope for its rebirth. I am, perhaps surprisingly to some of my Objectivist readers, pessimistic by nature, so I often find that I have to take a step back and decide whether I am being too bearish about one issue or another. The situation in New Orleans, however, is far worse than anything I could have imagined before the storm actually hit. For once, I don't know if it is even possible to be "too pessimistic" about the task faced by residents of the Big Easy. There are, however, signs of life beyond the (mostly spared) French Quarter and the Garden District.

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Before I go to the articles, I'll post a few shots I took about a mile from the neighborhood where my wife grew up. This is the neighborhood affected by the London Canal breach.


Photo 1: Mirabeau Avenue looking west towards the canal. The car at left was ruined by the floodwaters and completely caked with mud.


Photo 2: Looking north from Mirabeau Avenue, one can see water still standing on this unidentifiable side street nearly two months after the storm. The house on the other side of this small pond is not situated at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was removed from its foundation and deposited in the middle of that street by the floodwaters.


Picture 3: This picture shows the general degree of devastation in this area, which was by no means the worst-hit. The water line (which, the NRO article below notes, is not necessarily the highest the water ever got) marks where water sat and festered for weeks. On this house, raised a few feet above street level, the line is just above the window sills. The orange markings were left when rescue workers checked the house, and resemble those on nearly every residential structure in the city. The boat resting atop the car was probably left there by rescue workers when it ran out of gas.

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Now, with that small photographic hint of perspective -- and I haven't even talked about the huge piles of trash waiting to be removed everywhere, or even the groups of taped up, smelly refrigerators that congregate at street corners all over the place (I started calling them "wafts" of refrigerators.), or even the worst-hit parts of town -- I have set the stage for the more pessimistic of the two articles, one by Deroy Murdock of National Review Online.

In a very long, but outstanding article, Murdock does the best job of anyone I have read of capturing the sheer oddness of visiting New Orleans these days. I especially found these three passages good in that respect.

1. A Hudson Booksellers is as closed as most departure gates. A worker boxes up books that suffered water damage. The store's periodicals offer a Katrina time capsule. Although winter approaches, copies of Newsweek and The New Yorker still read "August 29, 2005" -- the very morning Katrina roared ashore. Rapper Kanye West stares out from the cover of that week's Time magazine. Soon after that publicity coup, West gained even greater notoriety when he declared during an NBC Katrina relief telethon: "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

2. While most of the French Quarter is surprisingly intact and largely back in action, a clear sign that things remain askew arises at the Quarter's edge. At Canal and Decatur streets, a major intersection, the traffic signal is disabled. Lights do flash red, yellow, and green heading north along Canal Street, just past Basin Street, about which Armstrong recorded a delightful blues number in 1928. There, the lights conk out again. Three blocks north, Interstate-10 speeds by. Behind this concrete curtain lies mile after mile of a major American city still in total darkness. Just past dusk, nearly three months after Katrina, these streets are pitch black, save for occasional lights at several padlocked, yet illuminated, gas stations.

3. In the Lower Ninth Ward, a 25-foot wall of water raced through a 930-foot breach and a 210-foot rupture in the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal (commonly called the Industrial Canal). This powerful storm surge smacked houses from their foundations and into telephone poles, onto cars, and into each other. In many cases, houses simply splintered, and soaked lumber sailed in every direction. This happened on block after block after block.

It is hard to characterize the general impression of New Orleans succinctly other than to say that it is overwhelming. The eeriest part of being in this ghost city is being there at night, as I was briefly after we'd finished work one day and were packing some things into a moving van. The night sky is as brilliant as it is in any remote location, and yet you are surrounded by perfectly dark buildings and deathly quiet.

Murdock's article is also notable for two other things. First, he indicates that Louisiana's legendary corruption may have directly compounded the damage caused by the storm.

Beyond the Lower Ninth Ward, stands the London Avenue Canal. Dusk finds breaches in the floodwall that let water drown the Crescent City. These deadly breaks have been sealed temporarily with gravel. Researchers have discovered that floodwalls like this one only extend 10 feet into the ground, as opposed to 26, as the Army Corps of Engineers recommended. [bold added] Louisiana's attorney general and the FBI are investigating whether this shortfall involved cost-cutting, shoddy workmanship, or deliberate fraud. The latter would have planted the seeds for the negligent homicide of many of the 1,076 Louisianans killed in Katrina's wake. The death penalty would befit such perpetrators.

Were I a New Orleanian from one of the flooded areas, this would give me great pause about rebuilding, too.

He also sums up the daunting task of maintaining the continuity of this legendary city's distinctive flavor.

"I see a lot of media coverage, especially on television," [David] Freedman [General Manager of local-music powerhouse WWOZ 90.7 FM] says. "It seems that there's always so much focus on the music, and the spirit, and the life of that music...But don't be fooled. This city is deeply wounded. I'd say it's like an amputee with phantom memory."

Freedman chats at a jobs, housing, and resources fair for displaced musicians at Tipitina's nightclub, sponsored by the Tipitina's Foundation.

"We are not well," Freedman adds. "And we could lose this city, and we could lose the culture. Oh, it'll still be here. It'll be called New Orleans. But it'll be a museum...Right now, we are perilously close to becoming a dead culture, if we don't figure out some way to renew, restore, and reinvent our lines of cultural transmission in this city."

Can this be done? Murdock notes the huge government effort to help the city recover, but even so, the real task of recovery will lie with those who choose to return, and there aren't that many so far.

But there is a trickle (HT: Mover Mike), and they are basically camping out in what's left of their homes in order to rebuild. Get ready to meet the gritty pioneers who will bring the Big Easy back to life, if anyone can.

In the city's middle-class neighborhoods, where houses are often two- and three-stories tall, a culture of second-story living is quietly emerging. Tired of hotels and imposing on relatives, families are returning to their partially destroyed dwellings, taking refuge above the warped wood and stripped wallboard and cocooning themselves in a world of familiarity - even if only one half of it survived.

"It's terrible being here," said Thompson, who carries a Coleman lantern from room to room to dispel the darkness. "But it's even worse being away."

Around the city, second-floor dwellers are easy to spot when night falls. High above a pitch-black street, a candle flickers at the end of one block. A few streets away, the darkness is broken by the intermittent beam of a flashlight.

"I'd like the convenience of electricity, cable TV. A hot shower would be nice, too. But I just can't inconvenience my friends anymore," said Beth Danisavich, 38, a former school teacher, who was the first to return to her street, a few blocks from Thompson's house.

When dusk falls, she begins lighting the 20 candles in her living room, the 10 in her kitchen and the eight in her bedroom, including one in a heavy glass jar that bears the image of a winged angel. "I need all the guardian angels I can get," she said.

Functioning in the dark, using flashlights, lanterns and candles, is by far the biggest adjustment, say those who have returned. Besides the hassle, there's the issue of fear: Before she snuffs out her candles, Danisavich places a flashlight, as well as a large kitchen knife, underneath her pillow.

Then, there's cooking.

"I didn't have a birthday cake this year," joked Thompson, who uses a Coleman stove to heat his meals. Instead of toasted bagels for breakfast, he's switched to instant oatmeal, which requires him only to boil a pot of water - the same water he then uses to make coffee.

Even in houses that have had electricity restored, cooking without a gas stove and a proper sink is a chore.

Terri Stuckey's kitchen was located on ground floor and had to be ripped out. Now, she cooks on the barbecue outside. She uses the garden hose to clean her family's dishes, or else the bathroom sink upstairs. She combs the local grocery store for ready-to-eat ingredients - like pre-washed lettuce and packets of broccoli florets.

"It's a lot of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches," said Robin Albert, 31, whose entire first floor, including her kitchen, stewed in the fetid water for 13 days. She had to strip the entire ground floor, including the kitchen, to the beams.

Here's hoping that this trickle turns into a flood, and that the levees are rebuilt properly to prevent future floods of the aqueous variety.

In closing, I present this picture, which appeared on the Times-Picayune website with the a caption to the effect that it had been removed from a local mall because it offended some shoppers.

(Editor's Note: This photo and countless other hurricane photos can be found here. I actually composed the bulk of this post yesterday due to a crowded schedule today and found a link to a story about this display today, to which I link below, at the word "laugh". Also, for those curious about this year's hurricane season, or who might want to see a picture of Katrina itself, go here. There is also a link to a NOAA map that shows the superimosed tracks of every hurricane since 1851.)


While I can understand why some might want to escape the destruction for awhile during a shopping trip, I also see this as a sign that others are starting to be able to laugh (link via Matt Drudge) at their own situation, which I take to be a good sign. The display also does a pretty good job of capturing what the city looks like right now, at least in the areas where the recovery has some momentum.

Will New Orleans come back? It will not be as large as it once was any time soon, but if it is to become anything more than a sort of national park, it will need more pioneers of the sort described in the second article and a better government than it has ever had. I'm still a little pessimistic, but there is some hope.

-- CAV

Updates

11-26-07: Corrected caption of car photo to read "west" vice "east". A later trip into this area (and my wife) showed this to be the case.