Why New Orleans Matters

DEDICATION

FOR MARY, WHO WENT THROUGH IT TOO.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface to the 2015 Edition

Introduction

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part II

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Acknowledgments

Afterword to the 2008 Edition

To Help

For Information

Further Reading

About the Author

Praise

Also by Tom Piazza

Credits

Back Ad

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE TO THE 2015 EDITION

It is difficult to believe that Hurricane Katrina, with all its nightmarish immediacy and impact, is ten years in the past as of this writing. This book was written in five agonizing weeks immediately following the disaster, in September and October of 2005, when nobody knew if the city would survive. Writing it was, as I say in the afterword to the 2008 paperback edition (included in this volume), an attempt to cast a kind of magic spell, to summon up for myself all the things that I found most potent about New Orleans and somehow make them live. It was also an attempt to bear direct witness to what had happened to New Orleans and to advocate for the city’s rebuilding. It was part love letter, part polemic, part hymn, and part dirge.

A lot has happened since then. New Orleans’ recovery has been astonishing. Many newcomers have arrived, attracted both by the city’s traditional charms and by the sense of possibility in the air as the rebuilding began. The citizens who decided to stay and rebuild after the disaster have shown a tenacity, humor, imagination, and soul that I doubt could be topped anywhere. The city elected a badly needed new mayor, and the nation a badly needed new president. Brad Pitt’s Make It Right initiative turned large parts of the devastated Lower Ninth Ward into something like livable space again. HBO’s post-Katrina drama series Treme, for which I’m proud to have been one of the principal writers, increased the national, and international, visibility of the city’s culture. The New Orleans Saints, under the leadership of coach Sean Payton and quarterback Drew Brees, won Super Bowl XLIV in 2009. The Bywater neighborhood is home to a thriving community of young and often newly arrived artists, writers, and musicians, especially along St. Claude Avenue. Prospect New Orleans’ international art biennial has attracted visual and performance artists from around the world. Frenchmen Street, in the Faubourg Marigny, has become an amazing three-block-long strip of nightclubs, music venues, and restaurants. One could go down a long list of such developments; it would be impossible, in this space, to address them all.

New restaurants, especially, seem to open every week. Some are extraordinary, like Boucherie, which began as a food truck in the storm’s aftermath. Some others are stylish in their design and ambitious in their menus, yet lack a certain keel in the water. Dining at one of the more highly touted new ones—the surfaces sleek and cool to the touch, the waitstaff brisk, the portions small and detailed down to the final ingredient in the demi-glace—one could easily imagine oneself in the best new restaurant in St. Louis. But from Booty’s and Pizza Delicious in the Bywater, to Three Muses in the Marigny, to Uptown’s Dat Dog and Hi Hat and Sarita’s, to Lakeview’s El Gato Negro, to Peche in the CBD, New Orleans’ food culture today may well be richer than it was before Katrina.

Things are not quite so upbeat for the roughly one hundred thousand New Orleanians still displaced from the city, ten years later, and unable to return. Some, to be sure, have been happy for a fresh start elsewhere. Many others long to come back but cannot. Most of the old public housing has been demolished, replaced in most cases by clean, cheerful, suburban-looking mixed-use housing set out under the sky on treeless streets that could just as easily be in Levittown. Housing prices thoughout the city have skyrocketed, especially in areas that did not flood during Katrina. Many of those displaced could no longer afford housing here if they did want to come back.

It’s Sunday, and out here under the oak trees, with a street parade in progress, the music pulsing and the dancers making their way along the street and the sidewalks, and the friends appearing in the crowd and dancing over for a handshake or a hug and a few words, you could almost believe Katrina never happened. Except, of course, for the occasional telltales—the markings still left on a small handful of houses by search-and-rescue teams immediately after the disaster, the increasingly rare horizontal lines on the sides of houses or sheds showing the high-water mark from the flooding. And the blocks where houses once stood, but no more, or the blocks where new construction has replaced demolished buildings. Or, if you lived here then, the houses of friends or family absent or dead these last ten years. But still you dance and follow the parade, perhaps with even more urgency now, for knowing how fleeting it all is.

For a while, it all hung in the balance—the music, the neighborhoods, the food, the sense of community, the landmarks, the rituals. And, in truth, it still does. Although the improperly designed and constructed levees were repaired (in the places where they broke), and important improvements were made in the city’s ability to withstand storm surge (such as the construction of flood gates at the mouths of the Lake Pontchartrain canals that ruptured and caused most of the flooding, and the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, or MRGO, which funneled an accelerating wall of water into the Industrial Canal and from there into the Lower Ninth Ward), the city is still vulnerable. Thanks in large measure to the carelessness of oil companies working in the Gulf of Mexico, the coastal wetlands, which provide a buffer against storms moving in from the gulf, sapping them of strength and absorbing storm surge, have eroded at a rate for which the word frightening will no longer suffice.

And, of course, the effects of climate change have been felt across the country, in every region. Freakish storms and bizarre weather patterns are the new normal. Hurricane Sandy struck the Northeast with unprecedented force in the fall of 2012, crippling the New York City subway system, flooding parts of Lower Manhattan, and wrecking houses and communities along Long Island’s South Shore and the New Jersey Shore. As this is being written, California is going through a cataclysmic drought that threatens the continued health of one of the nation’s richest and most fertile agricultural regions. Rising sea levels have placed all the coastal cities in jeopardy, to speak only of the cities. People concerned with the fate of their city, or any coastal community, would do well to pay close attention to what happened in New Orleans, both before and after the storm.

Of course, New Orleans’ situation has always been precarious. Readers are advised to check out historian Lawrence Powell’s fascinating book The Accidental City, a panorama of the adventurers, scoundrels, miscreants, and dreamers who created this outpost, threatened on all sides by water, pestilence, and invasion. From the start, New Orleans developed strategies both healthy and unhealthy for asserting the continuity of life in the face of impending entropy and death.

The city’s traditions of civic engagement and common cause are perhaps not as fully developed as its celebratory traditions. Corruption, as I write elsewhere in this book, is almost an art form of its own. Violent crime has returned to the city with a vengeance. New Orleans is, and always has been, a dangerous place. The city’s police department has become so riddled with bad policing policies and practices that a federal consent decree had to be put in place in order to mandate departmental reform. The Orleans Parish Prison, run by Sheriff Marlin Gusman, is ranked as one of the very worst urban jails in the country, with suicides, rapes, and hideous violence shockingly common. It, too, is now operating under a federal consent decree.

There are those who want the city’s geographic footprint reduced and its poorer, blacker, citizens to remain, or move, elsewhere, remaking the town into a well-groomed Southern showplace, like Savannah or Charleston. Others, perhaps more visionary and certainly more ambitious, would like nothing better than for the city to mutate into a glossy developer’s paradise, a characterless urban hub like the worst of Atlanta or Houston. This group has proved particularly pernicious in their great triumph to date—the shuttering of Charity Hospital and the bulldozing of some seventy acres of historic neighborhood between the Central Business District and Mid City for the construction of a shiny, ugly, expensive, sprawling new hospital complex that as of this writing sits vacant due to lack of sufficient funds to open and operate it—a monument to the developers’ greed, and a little taste of Houslanta along Canal Street in the heart of the city.

And yet people from around the country and the world flock here to visit, and to live, at an unprecedented rate. Despite the best efforts of real estate greedheads and corrupt politicians, the effects of freakish weather, and decaying infrastructure, the city’s spirit is indomitable. As long as New Orleans exists, it will attract the imaginative, the creative, the adventurous, and the soulful people of the world. Walking down almost any street and drinking in the cocktail of historical resonance, architectural whimsy, olfactory magic (sweet olive, jasmine, ligustrum), savoring the peculiar mix of seriousness and play, of new possibilities, good and bad, around any corner, will remind you of why it is good to be alive.

New Orleans, like every urban center in the country, faces monumental challenges, both man-made and natural (the distinction is melting away as quickly as the polar ice caps). As always, the choices we make now will determine what kind of future, if any, awaits us. It is my hope that Why New Orleans Matters will continue to give a sense of why people have fought so hard for this town, and perhaps lend some inspiration along the way to people fighting for their own towns, wherever they are.

—TOM PIAZZA

NEW ORLEANS

MAY 2015

INTRODUCTION

On August 29, 2005, I sat in a kitchen in Malden, Missouri, watching televised images of my adopted hometown, New Orleans, sliding into chaos. Like tens of thousands of others who had evacuated the city, I breathed an initial sigh of relief when I saw that New Orleans had been spared the full effect of the long-predicted Category 4 hurricane named Katrina that had destroyed the Mississippi Gulf Coast towns of Biloxi, Gulfport, Waveland, Pass Christian, and Bay St. Louis, only to watch in horror and disbelief as cracks opened in two levees holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans began to fill with water.

Anyone who was alive and conscious that week will remember the images. First the Lower Ninth Ward, home to some of the poorest people in the area to begin with, St. Bernard Parish, and New Orleans East filled, in places, to the rooftops. People who had not been able to follow, or believe, or even hear, the evacuation orders were trapped in their houses, forced to climb to the second floors and often to their attics, and finally to break through their own roofs, sometimes with nothing more than a pocket knife, where they waved desperately for someone to rescue them. Others waited on the sidewalk, luggage packed, for the buses they thought were coming to take them to safety, eventually giving up and returning to their houses, where they were trapped by the rising water.

Many who had not been able to evacuate the city were told to go to the Superdome for shelter. Midway through that Monday, August 29, the roof of the Superdome began to blow off. Toilets overflowed, there was no organization, thin medical services, no real forethought, and over the next day and a half the population at the dome swelled from 10,000 to 20,000, to 25,000, to 30,000, and higher. A man committed suicide by jumping from one of the balconies, a harbinger of worse, much worse, to come. People were kept inside by guards—at first to keep them from going out into the storm and being killed and later to keep them from illegally foraging for food or fresh water. And, perhaps, to keep them from the television cameras as well.

Electricity had failed in the city, and soon the hospitals’ generators ran out of power. Rising flood waters made rescue dangerous and sometimes impossible. Except for some walkie-talkies, all communications failed—home phones, police phones, cell phones. Looting began to break out, and then heavier looting—according to eyewitness accounts some police officers took part in the looting themselves—and by Wednesday gangs of armed thugs roamed the city at will, unchallenged,