Open for business again — thanks to mom-and-pop stores and voluntourists
STEPHANIE GRACE IN NEW ORLEANS New Orleans always had a split personality. There was the picture-postcard city that visitors enjoyed: lovely, languid, funky, obsessed with food and music and bon temps, in the local parlance. Then there was workaday New Orleans, home to poverty that would have shocked the rest of America and the developed world if they had seen it. On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed that other side for all to see. Residents who filled the Superdome, who lined the streets around the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center waiting for days for food, water, help, were in many cases the same people who filled the low-wage service jobs that made the tourist economy tick.
Local leaders were left with a conundrum. Without tourism, which pre-Katrina employed 75,000 people, there could be no recovery. Images of flooding and mayhem beamed around the world were bound to frighten potential visitors, yet efforts to portray the city as ready to welcome them back might send the wrong signal too — that the tourism establishment was insensitive, that New Orleans no longer needed outside help. What has emerged has been a delicate balancing act, a promise of good times along with an acknowledgment of the bad that is now part of the city's story.
The New Orleans most people know didn't flood, the message goes: the neighbourhoods along the Mississippi river — the sunken city's highest ground, thanks to centuries of silt deposits, now nicknamed the Sliver by the River — include the French Quarter and the stately Garden District. The New Orleans which people discovered after Katrina is here too, still damaged, and the way to help it is to come and spend. Or pick up a shovel or a hammer Since Katrina, the city has welcomed a parade of so-called voluntourists, who gut or build houses, replace trees killed by floodwater, then sleep on church floors — or retreat to fancy restaurants. Struggling French Quarter shopowners might secretly wish they'd spend less time helping and more time shopping, but nobody complains. One sign of the times: Gray Line tours has supplemented its menu of plantation, ghost and swamp outings with a Katrina disaster tour that takes visitors through empty neighbourhoods and past levee breaches. It's been a big hit.
atrina has produced changes for its laidback, artsy locals too, and one of the most dramatic has been a surge in activism. Fuelled by anger at the institutions that have failed the city, New Orleanians have taken matters into their own hands. It happened with politics. And it happened with shopping. When the first residents were allowed home, businesses that toughed out difficult conditions — damage, looting, ruined stocked, scattered staff — became cherished gathering places, little slices of home in an alien landscape. Often it was the mom-and-pop places that reopened first. Restaurants grilled burgers outdoors, and used paper plates. Shops recruited friends and relatives to man cash registers. They did it out of love, and out of necessity. Small businesses didn't have the resources to wait for the population to return, and business-interruption insurance turned out to be less than advertised. Meanwhile, the big chains that could best afford to rebuild could also afford not to. Macy's department store, which had two outlets here before Katrina, still hasn't decided whether to return. Starbucks took its own sweet time, and has yet to replicate its pre-Katrina presence — it boarded up a branch on trendy Magazine Street near Tulane and Loyola Universities, while nearby coffee houses thrive. Over time, other major chains did return, but there's evidence that the storm has reshaped the community's relationship to retail. Loyalty to merchants who were there in the city's hour of need hasn't wavered, even though competition has returned. People make a point of buying local, to make sure their sales-tax dollars go toward rebuilding the city, not enriching the suburbs that suffered less damage And they're not skimping on the feel-good purchases that make the frustrations easier to take. Those items just go by a new name: Katrinkets.
ighty per cent of New Orleans was flooded; tens of thousands of homes were badly damaged or destroyed. Reconstruction so far has been spotty — to put it generously — held up by insurers' reluctance to write new policies, parochial fights over rebuilding plans, shortage of contractors, a long wait for state grants, the slow trickle of federal dollars to repair roads, schools and fire stations. And little direction from Mayor Ray Nagin who, in the midst of a re-election fight last year, rejected the idea of a strong government role in rebuilding a smaller city, and declared instead that every neighbourhood could be saved by the mechanisms of the free market.
To understand Nagin's reluctance is to know the lie of the land: the city's tricky racial terrain. The flood covered not just the relatively compact, impoverished Lower Ninth Ward, but many other neighbourhoods. Among these, mostly white Lakeview and racially mixed Broadmoor are starting to hum again, thanks to their well-off residents' resources and proximity to intact areas. Not so Pontchartrain Park, the first subdivision where African-Americans could buy homes, or largely black Eastern New Orleans, the aspirational suburb for African-Americans who made it.
That these areas are hardest to defend from nature is neither conspiracy nor coincidence. The first settlements on higher ground were populated largely by whites. By the time blacks could buy property, available land was largely swamp reclaimed by elaborate drainage systems and the levees that failed. These are the neighbourhoods where future musicians jammed, where budding chefs learnt in their grandmothers' kitchens. Today, they're mostly quiet, with some former inhabitants living in trailers, some waiting to see what their neighbours are doing and others gone for good, part of the largest migration in US history.
The net effect is summed up by a startling insight in the Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella's book Geographies of New Orleans. Campanella found that the higher, unflooded areas were more likely to be inhabited by incomers, while natives clustered in the flooded areas. 'If residents with deep local roots depart New Orleans in large numbers,' he wrote, 'Katrina may have dealt a devastating blow to genuinely local culture.'
Stephanie Grace is a staff columnist of the TimesPicayune.
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