Postcard from New Orleans

The Frommer’s 2008 guide to New Orleans advises strongly against getting a hotel on the main drag: “Don’t stay on Bourbon Street unless you absolutely have to—or don’t mind getting no sleep. The open-air frat party that is this thoroughfare does mean a free show below your window, but it is hardly conducive to… well, just about anything other than participation in the same.”

Filled with voodoo shops and Halloween masks year round, the street is a mystical place, and two hours before midnight is its witching hour. Street musicians pick up their instruments, bars begin to fill, and tourist shops are eclipsed by drunken karaoke and neon “barely legal” signs. It’s Las Vegas without the slot machines and circus acts, a city of wild abandonment and self-forgetting.

Interesting, certainly, but not particularly family-friendly. Vacationing with my parents and two younger sisters in a quieter part of town, we soon grew bored with the limited options for non-partiers.

So we rented a car and drove across the bridge spanning Lake Pontchartrain, passing the recently rebuilt levees on our way to the Lower Ninth Ward. Debris on the shore stretched inland for hundreds of yards before giving way to rows of houses—if they could still be called that. Roofs snapped in two rested precariously above splintered and warped planks of wood. Tacked-up plastic sheets covered some of the holes where windows and doors had once been; others were left open to the elements. Behind a rusty chain-link fence, an old church stood in cross-section, exposing its soul to the world. The area was completely abandoned—our car was the only apparent source of movement and sound. I felt like a rubbernecker each time my family stopped to snap photos, but nobody was around to judge.

I hadn’t expected things to be this severe. It has been four years since the Ninth Ward was flooded catastrophically by Hurricane Katrina, and again a month later by Hurricane Rita. But the damage is still considerable. Katrina was the costliest disaster in U.S. history, and its long-term economic and social effects are considerable. Reconstruction and volunteer crews have cleaned up some of the streets, but the area remains uninhabited; more than 160,000 New Orleans evacuees never came home. Many of the affected areas were among the city’s poorest, and for many former residents, it is simply not worth the cost to return. And so their detritus remains on full display to tourists, a still life.

“Despite billions of dollars in aid, recovery programs with catchy names, and an outpouring of volunteer effort, New Orleans is not recovering from Hurricane Katrina,” wrote Associated Press correspondent Brian Schwaner in an article last August that applies just as well today. “Beyond the happy mayhem of the French Quarter, entire neighborhoods are in ruins and the business district sags from the shattered economy. Thousands of people are homeless and squatting in vacant and storm-damaged properties, some just a few blocks from City Hall.”

Returning to the French Quarter, I realized how suspended things seemed there, even amid the “happy mayhem.” New Orleans is a nocturnal city, and in the bright sunshine the carnival-like setting gave way to pressing heat and gridlocked traffic. A month after Mardi Gras, glistening strands of gold, green, and purple beads still dangled from trees and telephone wires, and lay broken in the streets. Middle-aged men nursed their drinks in quiet bars, and shop owners idled in empty gallerias waiting for customers. Somebody may have been sitting in City Hall, but inertia governed. In this atmosphere, action was—and continues to be—slow in coming.





Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Canaday Hall.