New Orleans - Three Months On

Article by: Pableaux Johnson, December 2005

An Ongoing Love Affair

Many travellers have a long-standing love affair with New Orleans. Maybe they fell in love with a particular funky bar during a youthful lost weekend or chased the wintery chill away with oyster gumbo between cold-weather Mardi Gras parades. Some shape their lives around annual trips to the Jazz and Heritage festival.

Since Hurricane Katrina, it's not that the city hasn't seen its share of visitors. There were times when the city's downtown boulevards were choked with television broadcast trucks, military patrol vehicles and insurance company vans labelled 'CATASTROPHE TEAM'. Thousands of contractors from across the country still live in temporary tent cities in vacant parking lots and city parks and long-term relief workers fill the downtown hotels that escaped major storm damage.

They're making a pilgrimage to support a beloved city's long, complex recovery process

But these new visitors won’t work directly on rebuilding the city. And they're not coming to New Orleans for all the old reasons - to partake in round-the-clock nightlife, shuttling from club to club in search of new music and old favourites. Or to dine in the city's legendary Creole restaurants and measure their stays in meals instead of days. Instead, they're making a pilgrimage to support a beloved city's long, complex recovery process.

These travellers were bombarded with a flurry of tragic images following Hurricane Katrina - the winds pounding historic homes in the French Quarter, raging floodwaters lapping at the rooftops in the devastated Ninth Ward, desperate crowds huddling outside the Louisiana Superdome. They watched as governments grappled with the enormity of the crisis while fetid floodwaters were pumped from city streets and New Orleans underwent the first full urban evacuation in modern American history.

The oak-shaded canopy of stately St. Charles is a little the worse for wear

And then, gradually, they noticed as New Orleans dropped from heavy rotation and was relegated instead to human interest stories of notable post-storm re-openings - the first crispy beignets issuing from Café du Monde, or the first whiff of fresh crawfish etouffee at K-Paul's. It’s not hard to recognise that a city so dependant on tourism must put on a positive face.

High Ground, Low Ground

Three months later, this first wave of travellers will find a city fighting for survival after weathering its worst nightmare. New Orleans is caught between heartbreak and hope, between despair - the natural reaction to recent events - and celebration, its natural state before the flood.

Many of the city's iconic neighbourhoods - the French Quarter, Garden District Uptown - escaped major damage and show pronounced signs of life. Restaurants throughout the Vieux Carre have resumed nightly service, as have cafes and shopping areas on now-bustling Magazine Street. The oak-shaded canopy of stately St. Charles is a little the worse for wear - fallen branches and bright blue roof tarps remain. Apart from this, and the few boarded businesses and celebratory 'WE'RE BACK' banners, these neighbourhoods seem more or less normal.

Butt-shaking and drinking until early morning, they'll probably talk to roofers in from Alabama or Red Cross volunteers

But drive past a certain boundary line and the city changes drastically - from business as usual to a dead zone eerily void of human activity. These low ground neighbourhoods bore the brunt of the rising flood and will lack basic services (electricity, water, natural gas) for months to come. Now-derelict houses are marked like oaks with grimy rings left by gradually receding floodwaters. The sedimentary reminders show the water's elevation - to the roof, to the door, or not quite to the front door stoop. Abandoned cars sport the same muddy stripes, as do the boats abandoned on the neutral ground, or median, areas of once-grand boulevards.

Post-Katrina tourists will likely gravitate to the high ground neighbourhoods at night, seeking out comfort and continuity, company and solace in the brightness of the New Orleans that survived. They'll decompress over a Pimm's Cup cocktail at the Napoleon House, a classic bar room that reopened as soon as potable water was restored to the city. They'll slurp a few dozen raw oysters at Casamento's oyster house or tackle a roast beef po-boy sandwich at Parasol's Bar in the Irish Channel neighbourhood. And as the night wears on, they'll head over to the Maple Leaf Bar for a traditional and soul-soothing Tuesday night gig - the Rebirth Brass Band playing weapons-grade funk until well past the official 2AM curfew. Butt-shaking and drinking until early morning, they'll probably talk to roofers in from Alabama or Red Cross volunteers who spend the rest of their time in San Francisco or Spokane.

With any luck, these travellers will experience the strange mixture of pain and joy, uncertainty and permanence, hope and dread that locals have felt since the levees broke and we started dividing time into two categories: pre-and post-Katrina.

So to those of you who make the trip, there's only one thing to say: Welcome back.