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Hernando Today

New Orleans Rising

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By KAREN HAYMON LONG

Published: June 21, 2008

NEW ORLEANS - This may be the best time to go to New Orleans. Tourist crowds are down — some say by 30 percent. But spirits seem way up: both in alcohol and good cheer.

Bartenders, bell hops, food servers, even cops seem happy to see visitors in their still-aching city. Many thank them for coming, for supporting New Orleans. Banners at the airport and on city streets proclaim: "We're jazzed you're here."

"Pardon Our Progress" signs dot the city. A banner in Riverwalk Marketplace along the Mississippi River shows a musician holding a sax and says: "Soul Is Waterproof. New Orleans Forever."

The French Quarter shows few signs of the despised Hurricane Katrina, whose storm surge broke and breached levees and flood walls in August 2005, flooding four-fifths of the city and leaving 80 percent of homes uninhabitable. Some bricks are missing from sidewalks, and potholes make it hard to walk along some streets, especially in high heels and at night.

The popular French Market is a pale version of its pre-Katrina self, with far fewer vendors. Longtime visitors will hardly recognize its new, snazzier pavilion-type buildings, so different from the old cobbled together — authentic-looking — ones.

But all the old favorite restaurants — Brennan's, Galatois, Acme Oyster House, Cafe du Monde — are up and running and still serving charbroiled oysters, turtle soup, beignets, po' boys and the other mouth-watering specialties that make New Orleans New Orleans.

And the Garden District, home to the zoo, scores of mansions, Commander's Palace and other popular restaurants, seems to be in good shape.

But take a Grayline tour bus to the worst-hit sections of the city, and you'll quickly see that times are still hard in the Big Easy. Huge piles of debris are gone, but FEMA trailers remain, even in middle-class neighborhoods.

Vacant lots stretch for blocks where apartment buildings once thrived. Some buildings still standing are shuttered, their tennis courts overgrown with weeds. Others have been renovated and reopened — with 40 percent higher rent. As a result, many service workers are doubling and tripling up in single units to afford to stay in the city.

An entire upscale mall — the largest in the city —is gone, replaced by a Lowe's home-improvement store. The flood walls are fixed, but the houses that used to be in front of them were demolished and carted away. In their places remain weedy lots, some with phantom driveways leading up to them.

The city's pre-Katrina population of about 500,000 has shrunk to 239,000, and 6,000 businesses have relocated or closed. Construction crews are everywhere, even in the French Quarter, where some historical buildings are being converted into condominiums. The Superdome, where 30,000 flood victims huddled under a torn and leaking roof, has long been repaired, to the tune of $185 million.

In flood-ravaged St. Bernard Parish, locals recall deer leaping from rooftop to rooftop during the flooding. They saw sea turtles swimming in floodwaters.

"Now notice what's opened here — Home Depot and precious little else," says New Orleans native Carol Stauder, who guides Katrina tours for Grayline twice a week.

Bearing Witness

The Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest hit and where the poorest people lived, looks like a war zone, with boarded-up houses, long swaths of empty lots and streets leading to nowhere. Few live here. Make It Right New Orleans, spearheaded and largely financed by actor Brad Pitt, plans to build 150 houses. Construction hasn't begun, but locals eagerly await them.

The Katrina tours are depressing, since there's still so much left to do, but those who take them feel they are important, if only to remind the rest of the world that New Orleans still needs help.

"We want to bear witness to the tragedy that happened here," says Donna Tasselmyer of Scranton, Pa. "Hopefully, we can go home and tell people about the need to come back and revitalize the city."

The slow federal, state and local response to those stranded in their flooded homes and struggling to get to safe ground was absolutely atrocious, she says. The country watched in shame as dead bodies floated through the streets and hungry and thirsty people pleaded for any kind of help. About 700 died.

"That should never have happened in America. This is the United States of America. Shame on everybody involved. We ship food all over the world and don't give water to New Orleans," Tasselmyer says.

Her husband, David, says they wanted to take the Katrina tour because they are furious.

"As citizens, we don't want this to happen anywhere else in this country."

A Legacy Of Survival

Although the city has been pumped dry, many lingering vestiges of the storm remain. Some homes still have holes in their roofs where families, who spent days waiting for help in their attics, finally chopped their way out with axes. Other homes still have spray-painted X's on them, flanked by letters and numbers indicating number of dead found inside, the date and the initials of the National Guard Unit that checked the home.

Brown watermarks still stain the fronts of some homes, above doorways and windows. "NO WATER OR ELECTRICITY" is printed in big black letters on some. On one tidy red brick house is the admonition: "DO NOT DEMOLISH." On another: "U Loot U Die."

Financial help has come, but not enough, some locals say.

Stauder says the U.S. government has not done enough for New Orleans. And she scoffs when people call this a natural disaster.

"The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn't do what they were supposed to do," she says. "This was man made."

But back in the French Quarter, the party rolls on. People still stroll along Bourbon Street at all hours of the day and night, though the crowds are thinner.

In his new book, "The World That Made New Orleans," Ned Sublette tells of horrendous fires that swept through the French Quarter in 1788 and 1794 and of hurricanes that assaulted the city through the centuries. (See review, Page X).

But New Orleans always bounces back, and it will this time, too, locals vow. They tell visitors how much better the city is today than it was in the dismal days after Katrina.

Stauder says she led her first Katrina tours with tears in her eyes.

Devastation and debris stretched "house after house, street after street, neighborhood after neighborhood, mile after mile," she says. "It is much better now."

T-shirts in French Quarter shops remind tourists that humor thrives, even though not all is back to normal and may never be.

"I Drove My Chevy to the Levee and the Levee Was Gone," says one. "New Orleans — Worth Swimming Home To" and "Make Levees Not War," say others.

One says it all: "New Orleans Matters."

Reporter Karen Haymon Long can be reached at (813) 259-7618 or klong@tampatrib.com.

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