28 Aug The Chocolate City Report, Part the First

Gentle Reader(s), as many (?) of you are certainly aware, this Saturday, August the 29th, marks the 10th anniversary of a very dark episode in the history of this country and of Your Humble Narrator’s benighted hometown in particular. The events that led up to and followed the landfall of Hurricane Katrina have been examined and agonized over in excruciating detail ever since. What really did and did not happen; what could have, should have and did not happen to prepare the city for the calamity; who was to blame for the critical lapses that resulted in the loss of the lives of over 1,800 citizens; the nature of the victims and the varied nature of their victimhood—all of it remains in heated debate to this day. The same is also true of the recovery from this unprecedented disaster. How real is the recovery and who has benefitted from the billions of dollars of aid money that have poured into the city since 2005?

 

Debate aside, one real thing that I can offer to you is a firsthand account of the city and its environs reported during mid-January, 2006, when the situation in New Orleans appeared to have stabilized sufficiently to make visitation reasonably viable. Mayor Ray Nagin had given his (in)famous Chocolate City speech on MLK Day, just a few days prior to YHN’s arrival. The Chocolate City Report was written over the course of a week in the form of three extended emails sent out to fellow native New Orleanians, Brother LowRent and Brother JB, living in far-flung locales. The Chocolate City Report is here offered in its three original installments with additional commentary and updates where deemed appropriate and/or necessary.

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Boys, your intrepid reporter has touched down in Chocolate City. Got in yesterday afternoon and took a cab into town from the flüghauf. Flying in over the swamps from my stopover in Houston I must say that the wetlands looked like they had been scoured over with a Brillo pad. The typical palette is a lot of bright, almost florescent greens down there but with the brackish water pushed in from surrounding bodies of water it was more brown than anything. The proportion of land to water, always tenuous, seems to have been tipped dramatically in favor of the water.

 

The airport is still sort of trashed out and there were a lot of uniforms milling about. There are a couple of areas beneath some large skylights that are still roped off due to unstable conditions in the roof and water damage and the place was pretty desolate in general. The cab ride into town initially betrayed nothing of particular note regarding storm damage other than a exceptional abundance of roadside trash and debris. There was a rather alarming roadside tableau of a black guy on his knees on the side of I-10 with his hands cuffed behind his back as a Jefferson Parish cop searched through the back of the guy’s truck. Didn’t look good but no one really seemed to notice—the traffic wasn’t even slowing down.

 

The blue FEMA tarps on the roofs were in greater evidence the closer in to the city we got. In the residential areas about 1/3 to 1/4 of the houses were wearing them. There wasn’t much destruction visible from I-10 and I didn’t see a totally demolished structure until right before the exit off the highway to St. Charles/Lee Circle—an old building off to the right of the highway, reduced to a giant pile of moldering rubble with a roof on top.

 

If the commercial stretch of St. Charles Avenue between Lee Circle and Jackson Avenue is any kind of an indicator, about 40 to 50% of the businesses in the area have either not reopened or will never reopen. The Williams Grocery at the corner of Jackson and St. Charles, which has been there for as long as I’ve been around and quite a bit before that, is just a shell. Empty, probably looted, and to all appearances never to reopen. [After remaining closed for a year or so the Williams Grocery did reopen.] In the un-flooded 20% of the city you can sort of begin to discern the businesses that are still closed and boarded up are the ones that were looted, since there wasn’t any flood damage of major consequence between St. Charles Avenue and the river. The Rite-Aid stores all seem to be closed—lights on but nobody home. They were obvious targets—all chock full of booze and prescription drugs, so draw your own conclusions.

 

There is One Topic of discussion in New Orleans. One Topic from which many other subsidiary topics flow, but always folding back into the One Topic. It’s what everyone talks about. Strangers. Friends. Relatives. People in businesses, people on the street. I stopped into a shoe repair store on Magazine Street about a block from Louisiana and there was a well-heeled white Uptown lady in there ahead of me talking to the black owner. He asked ‘How’d ya’ll do in the storm?’ She said ‘I did okay but my three kids lost their houses and everything.’ He said ‘I did okay since I live in Luling.’

 

These are the kinds of conversations you have with just about everybody you come into contact with. It’s not a question of ‘if’ or even a question at all, really. It’s just a matter of ‘how much, how bad.’ On the local CBS evening news last night there was a crawl across the bottom of the screen giving disaster relief numbers in a continuous loop. ALL of the local news was about the storm and the aftermath. ALL of it. That and sports.

 

My parents’ housekeeper, Nettie, was in the place cleaning up before their expected return and she is still obviously totally traumatized. She had checked into the Ritz Carlton hotel in the CBD to ride out the storm and she was standing out in front on the day after when the flood waters starting coming down Canal Street from the lakefront. Ahead of the flood was a big crowd of people from the projects north of the Quarter and Nettie said they started smashing windows and looting stores right in front of her. Nettie went inside the lobby of the hotel where there were a couple of off-duty NOPD cops in civvies doing security for the place. Nettie told them what was going on outside and they told her to just come in and then locked the sliding glass doors. One of the cops went back outside and fired a few shots in the air but the rampage had begun. Nettie spent six days at the hotel, water too deep to get out, before she was able to get to the Convention Center and then on to a bus and then on a plane to Dallas. She was in Texas for two months. She had no idea what she’s going to do with herself. Her house in NO East was badly flooded and she doesn’t know whether they’ll be able to rebuild or not.

 

Across St. Charles from my parents’ place, in front of whatever that crap hotel over there is, there’s a huge portable Kohler generator about half the size of a railroad car parked by the curb. It runs nonstop, day and night. It sounds like there’s an 18-wheeler idling outside the building. Apparently the hotel got fucked up the same way my parents’ building did: Flood water backed up into the mechanical rooms in the basement, toasted everything, so their juice is coming from this generator. The hotel is closed but I guess they’re trying to get it cleaned up. There’s no air conditioning here so I have to leave the windows open, but there’s also no streetcars running yet. The tracks and the neutral ground in general are still all fucked up and a lot of the streetcars got flooded at the barn, so there’s none of the usual clanging and clattering and such, which is weird in its own right. [Following the storm the streetcar tracks all along St. Charles and Carrollton Avenues were dug up and repaired. The cross ties were replaced with some sort of exotic African wood that was supposed to last for decades. ‘Decades’ turned out to be about 7 years or less. The tracks are in the process of being torn up yet again and the wood cross ties are now being replaced with metal ones. Streetcar service remains sporadic to this day, augmented in stretches by buses.]

 

Not surprisingly, Igor’s is back open, 24/7 as always. Last night at about 3:30 in the morning all this screaming and yelling started up down in the street. I laid there listening to it for a while and when it didn’t stop I got up to have a look out the window. There was some extremely plastered woman screaming her head off under the streetlights, apparently goading on these two guys who were attempting to have a fistfight. The two combatants were both so drunk that every time they tried to take a swing at one another they just fell over into the gutter. It was amusing for a bit but not funny enough to keep me interested at 3:30 in the morning. They eventually gave up and left and I managed to get back to sleep.

 

I was unable to get in touch with Danny (turns out he switched over to a different cell provider from the one he was using during his evacuation in Austin) and the Commodore was going out of town with Jennifer for the weekend, so I made arrangements to have dinner with Brobson Lutz, who used to be the city’s Director of Public Health under Marc Morial. Brobson was a student of my mother’s at Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and he knows everybody and everything in and about New Orleans. He owns property on the northern edge of the Quarter near Dumaine and Rampart, including an apartment building that used to be home to Tennessee Williams. When he and his partner got sick of not being able to park their cars on the street he bought a parking lot about a block away. Brobson was written up in the NYTimes in regards to his experiences during the storm, which included storing the body of the father of a friend (dead from a heart attack) in his Uptown medical office on Jena Street. There was no one to come pick the body up and nowhere to take it to anyway.

 

Brobson said that Nagin was officially a dead duck as of the Chocolate City debacle. He said that there might be a real race for mayor in the upcoming election, but that Nagin had done himself in. He predicts the next mayor will be white, which would be the first time that has happened since the ’70s (’78 to be exact). [Brobson’s prediction eventually came to pass, but not before C. Ray Nagin was reelected in a close run-off election with Mitch Landrieu in May, 2006. Mitch Landrieu was finally elected mayor in 2010 and reelected in 2014. Ray Nagin is currently in federal prison serving out a ten-year sentence for wire fraud, bribery and money laundering.] Brobson said the majority of looting that took place was at least initiated by the cops: They broke into the stores, took what they wanted, and then left the remainder for the looters to fight over so they could lay the blame on them. He said that the Riverwalk Mall was totally looted by the cops before any of the mobs got in there.

 

We had dinner at Galatoire’s, which was packed to capacity. Bourbon Street was pretty hopping—it seemed like the technique developed by the bars to draw people in has been to turn up the volume of the bands massively and send crowds of barkers out into the street—knots of four and five of them for every bar trying to snag people in. It’s so loud that we had to YELL at one another as we walked down the middle of the street. Lots of humvees and military police wandering around, but it looks like most of the National Guard and active military have cleared out at this point.

 

So, generally speaking, if you’re Uptown or in the Quarter or just anywhere between St. Charles and Tchoupitoulas, if you squint a bit you probably wouldn’t really notice that anything much has happened. The before/after differences are pretty subtle at this point, about four months on. In these areas of the city the main evidence of the storm is that everything is a bit trashier, a bit more disheveled than usual. That and a lot of repair work going on on roofs and such. Uptown, there are hardly any houses with the telltale spray painted markings on the front, but each and every cast iron storm sewer cover along the curb is spray painted with a similar sort of cryptic code, which, so far as I can figure, means that it has been checked for debris and obstructions—including corpses.

 

[This portion of the city came to be known as the Sliver by the River, or the Aisle of Denial. The implication of the latter term in particular was that those who were privileged enough to have homes and businesses on the natural high ground close to the Mississippi River were spared any of the effects of the disaster and were living in some sort of fantasy of disavowal. The reason that the city of New Orleans exists in the first place is because of the natural levee along the banks of the river and the neighborhoods that hug the curve of the river are its oldest and are home to an exceptionally diverse mix of wealthy and poor, black and white, young and old, newcomers and old-timers alike. Thanks to the lack of significant flooding along its route, Magazine Street was quick to rebound after the storm and has remained a major economic engine for the city. It has long been an important business thoroughfare but since the Difficulties the proportion of quirky boutiques, bars, restaurants and hipster coffee bistros has seen an undeniable increase. Full disclosure: YHN is a property owner in the East Riverside neighborhood of the Sliver.]

 

This morning I rented a car and drove all the way Uptown on St. Charles and all the way out Carrollton to the lakefront. The traffic signals are pretty much working until you get up past Audubon Park, beyond which it’s all stop signs mounted on temporary stands at the major intersections. Some huge oaks are still down on the neutral ground and in front of houses and lots of traffic lights are still laying out, flattened, right where they went down four months ago. On Wednesday and Saturday mornings volunteers marshal in large groups and go around cleaning up the streets. Literally just cleaning up the mess—debris, trash, dead trees, whatever. There were hundreds of them out today with rakes and brooms and plastic bags, just cleaning up whatever there was to be cleared on St. Charles and Carrollton. It was impressive to see and it felt kind of weird to just be driving by all these people out giving their time and sweat to rehabilitate the city.

 

Once you get to the Riverbend and head out Carrollton things start to get ugly fairly rapidly. By the time you get to the intersection with Claiborne there isn’t a single store, gas station or restaurant open anywhere. Practically nobody on the street, no traffic lights, four-way stop signs at every intersection. By the time you get out by the Archdiocese it’s complete and utter mayhem. Across the street from the Archdiocese it looks like a scene from Dresden after the Allied firebombing. There’s about two square blocks of rubble, everything burned right down to the ground, front steps and chimneys and some metal piping the only things that remain above ground level.

 

By the time you get out in the vicinity of Kennedy High School everything formerly green thing is dead or just about. The alley of trees lining Lelong Drive from the Beauregard Monument to the museum is looking seriously compromised. The City Park golf course is mostly brown. The real shit kicks in when you get to Robert E. Lee Boulevard. Unbelievable devastation. Guys, I can’t express to you how incredible it is. Everything out there is FUCKED!! Miles and miles of it. Practically NOBODY is there—just FEMA crews and some private contractors gutting houses and, occasionally, working on a renovation. The unifying factors, other than destruction, are the scummy brown high water line, ranging from 5 to 10 or 12 feet high everywhere you go, and the search and rescue markings on every single structure. EVERYTHING out here is destroyed, and this isn’t one of the really bad areas!

 

Most of the houses are actually still standing out in Lake Terrace and Lakeview and such. I stopped and got out to have a look on a couple of occasions and one of the weird things was how quiet it was. Not even any birds out here. When I was a kid I remember that the morning after a hurricane you could hear the sounds of hammering and chain saws coming from every direction—folks out cleaning up after the mess, taking down the plywood over their windows, cutting up downed trees, clearing the streets and their yards. Out here, there’s nothing. It looks like the storm hit just yesterday but there’s no traffic, no one cleaning up.  The people are gone. You just look at this scene and have to think that there is no way that they’re going to come back. The devastation is so complete that it just doesn’t seem to make any sense. And it stays that way pretty much all the way back into town towards the river—past the cemeteries on Canal, past the Commodore’s place and all the way down to where I-10 crosses Canal about a mile, mile & 1/2 from the river. Beyond that, no power is on, nothing is open, everything is FUCKED UP. The pictures on television and online simply can’t convey how utterly unbelievable it is in person.

 

It’s sad. Really sad and depressing. Having now seen it firsthand I really can’t figure how New Orleans is going to be anything more than a shadow of what it has become over the past 100-plus years as it expanded out to fill in the swampy bowl between the river and Lake Ponchartrain. And, actually, that’s probably not a bad thing. It just didn’t work. It shouldn’t have worked, and it was really only a matter of time before this happened and it could happen again very easily. So, I’m hooking up with Danny and Nona in about an hour to have dinner at their place and then we’ll probably join the Commodore at a club on Magazine for a bit of much-needed levity and some libations. By the way, I did get my digital camera but I haven’t had a chance to learn how to use it yet. Uniformly gray and dreary weather out there, more rain colder temps on the way.

 

Over & out,

DC