Reading the other site reviews, it seems like all of them were probably written before Hurricane Katrina did its job on New Orleans. I've been back there several times since the storm, and have a few thoughts.
I myself am an expatriate New Orleanian. Born and raised there, I've lived away for several decades, but still have ties and visit occasionally. As it happened, one of those visits was on the weekend before Hurricane Katrina hit. I've been back three times since then, and have seen the city slowly put itself back together.
There's no sugar coating it: Katrina did a number on the city. The house I grew up in was lucky: it was on the edge of the flood zone (which covered nearly the entire city, except for the older parts of town hugging the Mississippi River), and so only (only!) had four feet (1.3 meters) of flooding for several weeks. Other parts of town were not so fortunate. Six,
eight, ten and more feet (2+ meters) of water were not uncommon in most parts of the city. The result is that all over town, the ground floors of buildings had to be gutted and renovated -- interior walls, wiring, gas lines, you name it. In City Park, the largest park in the city, hundreds of trees simply drowned and had to be cut down. All over town, even today, one sees signs of the flood and its aftermath: dull brown horizontal lines repeated from house to house throughout the neighborhood marking the high point of the flood. And big spray painted "X"s on houses denoting the days when police or national guard troops inspected the house, together with a shorthand note of what was inside. A recent book on Katrina was named after one of those notations: "1 dead in attic".
And yet the city still lives. In typical New Orleans fashion, Bourbon Street was one of the first areas of the city to get electricity back, and the first thing they did was to sell drinks to the rescue workers. It's also popular for tourists to book what are locally called "disaster tours" where they drive through the most devastated parts of the area: the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly, Lakeside, New Orleans East. and Saint Bernard Parish.
Ghoulish as it sounds, it's both chilling and fascinating to travel through the hardest hit areas. Every time I go to New Orleans, I take a drive through various parts to see how things are coming along. Strange as it may sound, people don't generally mind having folks do the tourist thing in the hard-hit areas -- after all, the people of New Orleans WANT the outside world to see what they've gone through and are still going through.
Things are getting better. The city population is returning. The schools have mostly reopened, as have most of the hospitals. Some parts of town, especially the above-named neighborhoods, are sparsely habited.
From a tourist point of view, the city looks practically unchanged, believe it or not. Most visitors have always gravitated toward the French Quarter, or the neighboring areas of Downtown or the Faubourg Marigny. Farther afield, there's Uptown and the Garden District, where a lot of the finest residential architecture of the city -- and of the United States -- is found.
Because they were slightly higher in elevation, albeit only by a few feet, those parts were almost untouched by the flood. The result is that a trip to the Quarter or the Garden district is going to be almost exactly the way it was two years ago. Bourbon Street in all its sleazy glory is going strong. Adjacent Royal Street with its antique shops is also still there. The extraordinary old homes on Esplanade and Saint Charles Avenue are still there, as are the jazz clubs on Frenchman Street. Mardi Gras and the Jazz Fest are still celebrated.
New Orleans food, certainly the most original cuisine in America and a crowning cultural creation in its own right (okay, I'm biased -- I grew up eating crawfish gumbo, stuffed flounder, stuffed artichoke and turtle soup with sherry) is also still there, but here I have to add some caveats. A lot of the smaller neighborhood restaurants either have closed for good or have not yet reopened.
My admittedly biased verdict: visit New Orleans. Go for the food, go for the jazz, go for the beautiful surroundings, go even for Bourbon Street (if you like that sort of thing), go even if you just want to rubberneck and see the devestated sections. The city is there,a nd it's still great.
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Advantages: Friendly people, relaxed atmosphere. Be prepared to party, and party hard! Disadvantages: Keep away from the tacky and overpriced tourist area.
Smokey64 02.12.2000 ·
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