May 29, 2006 -- Canal Street is trying. Every half hour or so, a borrowed St. Charles streetcar clangs by slowly. Wendy’s and MacDonald’s are back to selling burgers; the Brennan-family Palace Café is open for potato pie.
At the corner of Decatur Street, the Katrina-damaged sign reads “Decat.” Across from Harrah’s, the tony “Shops at Canal Place” are officially open, but the upscale shoppers are few and some big-name retailers have yet to return. Further north on Canal, the sleazy souvenir-slash-convenience stores are waiting for customers who need a trashy t-shirt or late-night bottle of bourbon. The Ritz-Carlton won’t open until December and the looted Footlocker is still boarded up.
As I walk to the Starbucks in the J.W. Marriott, the urban refuse smell drifts toward Poydras. A storeowner, bored for lack of business, spits on the cracked sidewalk. Last week, a man was killed at a bar on Bourbon Street. Downtown New Orleans today reminds me of New York City in the 1970s: a place you have either left, want to leave or refuse to leave.
I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t have any preconceived notions when I went to New Orleans earlier this month. It was a journalist’s curiosity, a need to see the story first-hand, that drew me there. That, and a craving for Café du Monde beignets.
In order to understand the magnitude of the New Orleans disaster, it’s necessary to put off judgment and take down your defenses. The destruction – viewed now, nine months after Katrina – is still astounding. Television can not convey it: video of people on rooftops awaiting rescue is not the same as a house directly in front of you with a hole cut in its roof, frozen in time like a corpse in the Pompeian lava. Newspapers can analyze it, but analysis is only a way of intellectually distancing yourself from the shock of seeing crumpled houses that, but for random chance, could have been your own.
Beyond Canal Street, beyond the high-rise buildings of the Central Business District with their windows blown out, beyond the French Quarter where jazz is still playing, lie miles and miles of ruptured homes and uprooted lives. Not just in the Lower Ninth Ward, but also in middle-class Gentilly and among the marinas and country clubs of Lakeview. In the days following Katrina, ill-informed and insensitive commentators – including some members of Congress – wrote off New Orleans as a victim of its own imagined stupidity or alleged corruption.
Media focus on crowds stranded in the steamy New Orleans summer at the Superdome and convention center distorted the scope of the destruction and encouraged non-Gulf Americans to distance themselves from the disaster. “That’s too bad, but it would never happen to me. I’m smarter/have more money/am more worthy of rescue.” (Choose one.) During a recent visit by some Hollywood celebrities, one well-known actress said, “If this were Beverly Hills or Bel Air, it would be fixed by now.” It was a well-meaning comment, meant to describe the difference wealth and power could make, but it also represents a psychological defense: this couldn’t happen to me.
Yes, it could. Disasters aren’t discriminatory: More than 1,200 people lost their lives in New Orleans alone. While the narrow lens of the video news camera may have created the perception that all of the victims were poor African-Americans from the Lower Ninth Ward, some 44 percent of the fatalities were white. Most were elderly. Some lacked the means to get out, others wouldn’t leave pets behind, some couldn’t leave aging or sick family members, others simply waited too long or thought they could ride it out. The Lower Ninth was hardest hit and the poor were disproportionately affected, but televised obsession with the aerial Superdome shot may have merely allowed the rest of us to build ourselves an emotional flood wall.
The last time I visited New Orleans, a few years ago, the convention center was filled, not with desperate refugees, but with cell-phone carrying conventioneers. This time it was empty save for a few construction workers. The damaged facades of hotel and office towers reminded me of Liberty Street in the months after the attack on the World Trade Center. The Superdome, which I first visited in 1984, now shows its scars to the sky.
In Carrolton, in Gentilly, in Mid City and in Lakeview, debris is piled on almost every lot. Some homes simply collapsed into sticks of two-by-fours, fractured furniture and useless possessions. Some stand, empty, bereft of anything but a few walls and a gaping garage. I see homes that once looked like those my friends and family live in, in other cities, and I wonder if they know how to cut a whole in their roofs if they have to. I see the mustard-yellow water line around these houses, and remember that I don’t swim well.
Property damage can be measured, business loss can be estimated, but the long-term economic impact of Hurricane Katrina is incalculable. Of the city’s pre-Katrina 440,000 population, 300,000 people have yet to return. They may have no home, no possessions, or no job – or all three. The basics we’re all used to, like supermarkets, are hard to find. The U.S. Postal Service only recently restored delivery of magazines.
Signs of rebuilding are sprouting slowly, like saplings after a forest fire. There are construction crews here and there, but there is a massive shortage of workers, and an even bigger shortage of housing for the workers that are needed to rebuild the city. Government bureaucracy and insurance hang-ups seem to be holding back progress, but, mainly, it is the enormous scale of Katrina’s destruction that looms over the steep trail to an indeterminate future.
“Tomorrow is a Long Time.” It’s a Dylan song from 1971 that’s coming back to me as I trod the empty Riverwalk. “I can't see my reflection in the waters, I can't speak the sounds that show no pain.” The blues, as Dylan knows, arise from pain to seek an understanding of experience. New Orleans will someday arise from pain; its spirit remains. And the beignets are back.
