We’re due for a rash of Katrina retrospectives, I think, with the ‘anniversary’ approaching. For all the horror and general ugliness of that shameful period, there is still hope. People are resilient, and the people of New Orleans are by history and inclination perhaps more resilient than most. Here’s Dan Baum, in the Washington Post, “Five years after Hurricane Katrina, how New Orleans saved its soul”:
… When I was in New Orleans this May, I was dumbstruck by the extent of its physical recovery. I could remember the terrible silence of Katrina’s aftermath, but now I had to go looking for traces of its destruction. Even in the Lower Ninth Ward, so often deemed unsalvageable after the crisis, businesses are open, homes are under construction, and eye-popping houses built by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation fill block after block.
[…] __
There was a time when the Big Easy’s culture seemed likely to work against its recovery. “You pay for your blessings, man,” the New Orleans organizer Jacques Morial told me in the dark days after Katrina. “Sometimes you overpay, sometimes you underpay. Right now, we’re in an overpay cycle.” What we didn’t know then was that the city’s culture would ultimately see it through. The I’ll-help-you-gut-your-house-if-you-help-me-gut-mine communalism, the parties thrown in a neighborhood’s first reopened house in the hopes of encouraging others to return, the palpable sense that nobody was alone — these are the things that brought people home.
__
Of course, I don’t live in New Orleans. If my perspective seems glass-half-full, it’s because I don’t face daily the glass-half-empty aspects of the city’s post-Katrina life: the businesses that haven’t reopened, the public housing communities that remain scattered, the shuttered Charity Hospital and the abandoned public health system with which it was associated. In a city still trembling with the post-traumatic stress that followed the flood, mental health services are almost nonexistent. Infrastructure is falling apart. The crime rate is terrible; my trip in May was to attend the funeral of a beautiful young bandleader whose murder was the city’s 61st this year. And the BP oil spill has shaken two of the legs on which New Orleans still stands: seafood and tourism.
__
Five years after Katrina, living in the Big Easy is not for the weak of spirit. It’s a triumph that the place continues at all; that it’s still the singular city it was borders on the miraculous. As we mark Katrina’s anniversary next weekend, it will surely be a time for mourning and for taking stock of the challenges ahead. But since this is New Orleans we’re talking about, it’s a time for celebration, too. As a wise old man of the Lower Ninth Ward once told me, “We’re capable here of holding more than one thought in our heads.”
Supplemental reading: Brentin Mock at The Root reviews “Books About Survival in the Post-Katrina Gulf”.
patroclus
Thanks for the info. Anything I can do or tweak??
Waynski
Wendell Pierce from The Wire (the Bunk) is doing yeoman’s work down there. He should be nominated for a profiles in courage award.
jwb
I just got back tonight from New Orleans and had a great time. The place is now stark raving Saints’ mad, and the parties last night all throughout the town—including a very large one across the street from the hotel where I was staying and the street was shut down with the game projected on the side of a building—were amazing. All this for a preseason game!
ETA: I felt extremely safe during my stay, and I didn’t see a great police presence, so I was very surprised to learn the crime rate is up.
Kiril
Thanks for the shout out. I started noticing early last year that we seemed to be thinking things were going better than non-residents because I kept being amazed at the progress while visitors were appalled. My people are my people. We can take it. I’m not gonna lie, because 4 years ago I was a crying little baby when I thought about things too much. But fuck all those people who said New Orleans wasn’t worth saving. We can save ourselves. (But just the same, America, thanks for the money, volunteers, and prayers. We love you. And thank you, Texas. It was our honor to keep Galvestonians drunk and fat while they were here.)
Kiril
BTW, check the link:
“Last weekend, as I updated our list of every open restaurant in New Orleans, a happy statistic emerged from two other bits of good news. We now have 1110 restaurants open in the New Orleans area. That’s 301 more than before Hurricane Katrina, and the largest number of restaurants here in history.”
freelancer (itouch)
Which is why this is the Perfect Time for the RNC to roll out their latest attack about Obama: he’s vacationing too much.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_08/025323.php
I wish I was joking.
getsmartin
I live an hour east of the city, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I’m very connected to NOLA – love the city – and I’d never “minimize” or downplay the tragedy that happened in the wake of “K”. Truth is, though, the Miss. Coast took the full brunt of the storm and that little factoid seemed to have received much smaller headlines during the aftermath and recovery. So when you hear about “when Katrina hit New Orleans”, remember that NOLA was situated on the weak side of the hurricane.
That said, I completely agree with the point of the article – NOLA is alive and well. I encourage people to travel here and “indulge”…
El Cid
This has nothing to do with anything, but I just read in Scientific American that Leonardo da Vinci invented a pasta making machine. That’s more impressive than the heliocopter.
Erik T
I’ve been through four times since Katrina, about equally spaced, and I’ve come to not be surprised by the progress. Such progress, as near as I can sit, borders on full recovery; only the decrease of permanent population seems to be responsible for any abandoned buildings and the like.
Warren Terra
Am I the only one who saw “Crescent City” and thought it was another joke about how the proposed use of a former Burlington Coat Factory for Unchristian Purposes means that Lower Manhattan is now under Sharia law?
asiangrrlMN
@Warren Terra: Nope. That was my first thought as well.
I am glad New Orleans is seeing a glimmer of hope. They deserve it.
lamh32
@jwb:
since Katrina, “Laissez les bon temps roulez” takes on a whole new meaning for me and mine. We never really needed any excuse to “let the good times roll” before Katrina, it’s just that now, we truly savor it.
My gram died early Sept 1, two days after the hurricane hit, so I my fam and I try to take this time to visit her grave site, which is actually in Thibodaux, since that is where she evacuated to, and died 2 days later. We thought about having her buried in a NOLA cemetary, but the cemetery where she had a plot was demolished by the Hurricane, and with other hurricane seasons approaching, we figured she had a better home there.
Anyway, we go we fix up her site, and we just talk to her, and about our memories of her. Being in DFW, and finding it harder to just get up and go home to NOLA is hardest for me at that time.
lamh32
@getsmartin:
Yes, Mississippi got the brunt of the storm, and in terms of actual damage from katrina, then you are correct.
But remember, the damage in NOLA, was not caused by the brunt of Katrina, but because of the inadequacies of the levee system, of which it took Katrina to really showcase how inadequately they were built. So even though NOLA got the “weak side” of Katrina, it was the levee breaches, that made NOLA the “bigger” catastrophy (sp?).
Also, not to play, “mine’s is bigger than your”, Louisiana had by for the greater number of fatalities indirectly and directly from Katrina (of about 1800 Louisiana had about 1600 and the majority of those in Louisiana I believe were from the New Orleans area)
asiangrrlMN
@lamh32: I’m sorry about your grandma and that it’s so difficult to go back.
arguingwithsignposts
As someone who grew up in SE Texas, on the gulf coast, I have to say that you should *not* visit NOLA or any part of this pit of hell during the summer months – that includes you, Houston.
Wait until fall, or winter. The humidity sucks. It sucked when I was growing up, and it sucked a few weeks ago when I went back. 93 degrees and 98 percent humidity is not your friend. I love the food (boudain shout out! Gumbo shout out! crawfish shout out!), I love the people, I love the scenery, but damned if I would encourage any tourist to travel to the center of humidity suckitude at this time of year.
ETA: It could just be that classes start tomorrow and I’m cranky, but oh, the humidity!
freelancer
Just finished power cycling the first season of Treme. Makes me want to visit simply for how they captured the remix culture that is uniquely American.
Yutsano
New Orleans has been there a very long time. It’s been through rough patches before. It will survive this one, and possibly be a much better place when it comes out the other side.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: So speaketh by better half, the optimist. How you be, hon?
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I had fun playing with the horses tonight. I invented a new game for them: Find the Apple. They won!
scarshapedstar
I just wanna know why there aren’t any assholes suggesting that we “move” Nashville someplace safely inland like Missouri. (Evidently the Midwest thinks that their grain floats down the Mississippi and then goes all around the world on a fucking barge.)
Wait, Missouri’s been flooded, too. Hmmmmmmm.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Sweet! Pics?
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I wish I had thought to take some! I was too caught up in playing the game with them. Oh well there’s a ready supply of apples (there’s a row of apple trees next to the pasture) so odds are I’ll end up doing this game again.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Next time, then. I DEMAND pics!
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Done and done. :) Oh and they’re replaying the Obama election win episode of “Boondocks”.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Who is ‘they’?
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Adult Swim. And it just ended. Funny how they all get disillusioned at the end and how that applies to a lot of folks now. But again I r an Obot.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Ah. You are speaking of the mystical beast called ‘teh cable’. I see. I R not an Obot, but I am an Obama supporter.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Beep beep boop. :)
Must…not…have…too…much…fun…with…this…line…
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Oh, go ahead. You know you want to have the fun with the line.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I wouldn’t suggest supporting Obama too much or you might find yourself on the wrong end of Michelle’s guns. Oh wait, you might like that…never mind.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Mmmmm…..
MiniVanVader
@getsmartin
Regarding the problems in Mississippi over Katrina, many Louisianans felt the same way after the neglect we got after Rita. The storm wiped out towns, homes and schools all along southwest Louisiana and shifted populations between Lake Charles and Lafayette. Yet in terms of media, federal and state attention, you’d have thought Rita was just another hurricane.
Similarly, the oil spill. I’m from Lafayette, my wife is from the Morgan City area. The people in those areas, much more so than the people of New Orleans, are feeling the effects of the spill. And to the media’s credit, there has been a good deal of focus on the small fishing towns, but I’ve yet to see that much nationally about the larger cities outside of New Orleans, which actually do rely on fishing and oil work as the primary drivers of the economy.
Not that I blame N.O. for any of this. I love the city, and I’m happy to see so many friends moving back. There was a great upbeat story in NPR not too long ago about all of the young labor moving in to New Orleans, and in my anecdotal experience this is absolutely true. It’s also in no small part due to the Saints; I was never one for thinking that sports mean that much, but N.O. is one case where football actually has helped the city’s vigor.
@arguingwithsignposts
Some of us live for the humidity! My wife had never lived above I-10 in her entire life and was worried about moving “up north” when we moved about 90 minutes north of Houston. The people up here seem to think it’s humid and don’t believe me when I tell them that this is dry climate compared to the swamp. IMO, the heat and the humidity is the best thing about south Louisiana.
joe from Lowell
New Orleans recovered because it’s a real city, with a real history, real neighborhoods, and a real culture. A city like that causes its residents to have a commitment, and also to have social and spiritual resources to draw on that might not be there in a less meaningful place.
If Phoenix were to be buried in a giant sand storm, I doubt it would be rebuilt. Everyone would just go somewhere else.
Mike Furlan
@freelancer (itouch):
I’m sure that if they just repeat over and over again.
Obama, Katrina, Obama, Katrina, Obama, Katrina
that at least 30% of the population will then believe that Obama was the President when Katrina hit the gulf coast.