That Sinking Feeling

I was in New Orleans on August 28, the fifth anniversary of memory that most locals would like to forget. CNN had its uplink truck parked near its rain-sheltered cameras that pointed across the park towards the church on picturesque Jackson Square in “the Quarter.” Channel 6 was running an all-day retrospective of the coverage of all-things-Katrina. August 27, 2005, the skies were sunny and blue as the category 5 monster sucked up Gulf water and gained strength heading straight for a truly unprepared city.

Here’s an excerpt from and email I sent to a friend on August 28, 2010: Strange to be here on the fifth anniversary of one of the worst disasters ever to hit this country. Folks don't offer up their memories, unless you ask.... But if you do, you hear of water rising in office stairwells, dogs' eyes - growls penetrating the night air - shinning from rooftops when lights shone in their eyes, SWAT teams asking people to move - to get out of the line of fire, looting, nights of revenge under cover of despair, ancient grandmas wheeled in their beds down the I-10, blackness, muzzle-flashes sparking through an unlit night, fear as days lingered, the belief that the waters would soon recede - when they didn't, how the city forced residents out of their homes by shutting off water, death and destruction... very tough stuff. The city is not the same town. Lots of stuff left to do, not a lot of money to do it. Music's still everywhere, tourists are here.... national media have trucks all over town. Yet this feeling still lingers... lives put in abeyance for years.... But when the Saints won their last pre-season game on Friday night against San Diego, for a moment, all was right in New Orleans. Little things bring big feelings.

But the questions remain: Can New Orleans ever really recover? Do its residents really have the faith that this is a town worth rebuilding? The city still leads the nation in dead and decaying buildings; the official records show 55,000 blighted structures still hovering. Parts of the city are… well… simply sad. The plywood boards nailed over windows and doors half a decade ago are themselves buckling with age and mildew. In many communities, folks who took the chance and rebuilt are still surrounded with structures that often shelter to roaches, rats, snakes and feral cats and dogs. Mud-lines still mark where the rising waters snuffed out hopes and dreams. Crime statistics and neighborhood fears tell you that it’s not just about the structures; the whole place hints at a community at the tipping point – and it could go either way.

AOLNews.com (August 29^th) tells of one neighborhood where one in three parcels is unoccupied and uninhabitable: “Ten feet of flood had turned Burbank Gardens, a neighborhood of tidy shotgun homes and "camelback" duplexes, into a dead zone. Everything below the water line was coated in moldering gray mud. All living creatures seemed to have vanished, even the bugs…. [The] neighborhood itself is now a patchwork quilt of new houses (some on stilts of varying heights), empty lots (some overgrown with weeds) and abandoned wrecks of falling-down homes. Burglars sweep through regularly. It's not a place to go walking after dark…

“Many of the people she knew growing up vowed to return, but did not. Nearly all of the elderly, who bought in when the neighborhood was developed after World War II, are gone. Families with young children stayed away. The next-door neighbor, who had long rented out his duplex, never repaired it. .. Subtropical climates are not kind to unkempt land and the house has become an eyesore -- with broken windows, creeping vines, tall weeds and trash billowing about. The woman who lives on the other side, who did rebuild, has not moved back because she’s afraid of rats and snakes.”

You’d think rebuilding wouldn’t be controversial, but talks of taxpayer money in recession-plagued times mixed with racial considerations that many thought had vanished as an ugly vestige of the past still tilt the playing field. Recently elected Mayor Mitch Landrieu still has plans “to unveil a major blight program soon and has been making the rounds of community groups in an effort to keep the issue from unraveling into a more fraught dispute about race. At one community meeting in early August, he was surprisingly blunt, according to an account by The Times-Picayune. Talking about homeowners' property, he said, inevitably leads to comments such as ‘Why don't you want the brothers and sisters to come home, Little Mr. Mitch, looking the way you do?’ Landrieu predicted that, as soon as he laid out his program for dealing with abandoned properties, ‘somebody's going to come in here and somebody's going to have a march and turn it into something's it's not.’” AOLNews

Billions of dollars have poured into rebuilding the area’s levee system, but if climatologists are right, if sea levels are destined to claim this city forever, many ask if this city and its suburbs are worth saving at all. I suspect they might never have visited this extraordinary city of musical, architectural and cultural delights that have in no insignificant part defined our history and even what makes our hearts soar and our toes tap.

I’m Peter Dekom, and visiting New Orleans these days is bittersweet.