A New Orleans Diary--Saints Day

I may be, as I observed on my radio show, the only person in New Orleans for this weekend who didn't come for the Saints game. Nonetheless, there's a palpable difference in the feel of the city this time around, another turn in the wheel back towards, if nowhere yet at, normal. Even my most non-sanguine friends sense it, and seem to be part of it. Partly, it's a normal turn in the city's rhythm as the endless summer finally starts to give way to evening breezes and lower humidity. Partly, it's the beginning of the big exhale: we're two-thirds of the way through hurricane season. And, as a writer friend of mine mused last night, it's possible just to get tired of being depressed.

And the other part is more significant: It's now clear that New Orleans, at this moment, stands as a shining example of what individual resilience and pluck, bulwarked only by the (sometimes very) reluctant insurance companies, can do to craft a recovery. For all those commenters this year who've been giving New Orleans a lecture on making do without federal aid, New Orleans is giving you the lecture right back. The nearly $12 billion appropriated to compensate homeowners for their losses due to the flood has arrived in Baton Rouge, and applicants are being screened, but as of this morning, I don't believe a single check has yet been cut. The Feds? Just last week, FEMA finally agreed to pay for the removal of the trees, thousands of them, killed by the floodwaters caused by the floodwall collapses and levee breaches, trees standing dead as mute testimony to the disaster and as a huge blotch on the city's remarkable green canopy. Despite all the press releases about "lessons learned" and "we get it", the Army Corps and FEMA insisted for a year that their responsibility ended at the removal of felled trees--that is, trees killed by the winds of Katrina. The news story in the T-P is silent on what finally changed FEMA's mind (?), but we are reassured that things haven't changed too much: the city must pay for replanting.

This Sunday, after my show, I drove around the last area of severe damage I hadn't yet visited (I did drive through St. Bernard at the beginning of the month), the neighborhood directly abutting the London Avenue Canal. Fixing that breached levee and floodwall structure is obviously a work in progress, since plenty of workmen were out there on this Sunday. The neighborhoods, just south of the University of New Orleans campus, have been forbiddingly destroyed-looking until recently. Now, along with the FEMA trailers, there are dozens of houses newly raised, standing on improbably high platforms of bricks and blocks, though the houses themselves may yet be unrepaired. The repairs will take place up high.

We can put part of the race issue to bed, finally. New Orleans will not, as some feared and others hoped, be a substantially different city racially in the post-K era. A trip to the big Lowe's store on Elysian Fields will prove that to you. The vast majority of people buying home improvement items in that store, one of the few big-box stores in the city, are African American, with some Latinos and Asians there as well (signs in the store are all bilingual). One of the few things on which I agree with Ray Nagin is that this is not about race, it's about class: the people who can't come back yet--primarily because there's been even less movement by government to jump-start the rental housing construction process, and existing rental property has been priced out of their range--are poor people.

And there are plenty of businessmen and women who don't have such a rosy view of the immediate future, either. Despite the heartening news of big conventions coming to town starting in November, there are ripples of concern that some, or many, French Quarter business owners may not be able to hang on. The lingering fear: that coming in behind them will not be other small, idiosyncratic merchants (the Le Petit Soldier Shop on Royal is going away), but the Gap, Old Navy, and Restoration Hardware--the usual suspects of Ye Olde Character-Filled Part of Towne.

But Friday afternoon, with the train's whistle playing counterpoint to the riverboat's calliope, it was very, very hard to think of any other place I'd rather be.