Thoughts on the city

Well, I got my ass handed to me again in trivia tonight. I don’t like having to pay to have my confidence rattled. I mean, if I need to be reminded that I know nothing I could just go to work. But, I do take a small bit of pride in the fact that I knew none of the answers to the Sex and the City questions. Not as much pride as I took on Friday night when I knew all of the answers in the pro wrestling category but pride nonetheless.

(Yes, I aced a pro wrestling category and was damn pleased with myself for it. Whenever I complain about the state of my social life remind me to read that last bit over again. It probably explains everything.)

Anyway, I thought that today I’d give some of my impressions on the city of New Orleans and the way things stand right now. (More pictures tomorrow, it’s too late to deal with a dial up modem and large files.) I have a feeling that most people believe that the city is either a) a barren wasteland or b) perfectly fine. The answer is somewhere in between though probably a bit more towards the former than the latter.

We’ll start on the positive: the French Quarter is perfectly fine. From an architectural standpoint you wouldn’t even know that a hurricane came through town. There is still that sense of decay and griminess but that has probably been there for the past century. Canal Street is a bit of a mess, it always is but this time it is worse. Lots of boarded up store fronts and a sense of nothing has been cleaned up for a long time.

As you move deeper into the city the devastation becomes more apparent. To get to the church that was our base of operations we would go down St. Charles Ave. and as you made your way you would see businesses that haven’t reopened and buildings in various states of disrepair. Certain areas would be fine but there was a general sense of things being off, like the streetcar not running down the center of the road. Then when you made your way into the neighborhoods things just got worse and worse. I started looking for the water line on the exterior of buildings and where we were (mainly Uptown and the lakefront by UNO) the line was up a good four or five feet on the side of the buildings. And you know the water was that high for a week.

I did spend a little time in the ninth ward and I’m still not sure if I can quite come to grips with that. Houses were just completely destroyed, just off their foundations and left untouched for nearly a year. It really just tore at your heart, every direction you looked you knew that all of the houses were unlivable and each one had that dreaded X with the date it was searched and what was found inside spray painted on the side. I don’t think I even tried to comprehend what I was seeing there, my mind found it much better to just shut off at that point.

But the biggest thing that struck me during my entire time down there was the lack of people. It is really disconcerting to walk down a street in the Quarter and not have anyone around you. What got me the most was not what was damaged but what simply wasn’t there anymore. You walk into Jackson Square and no one was there. No painters, no fortune tellers, even the doors to the Cathedral were locked. No street musicians hanging out on Royal, no kids dancing on the sidewalk, no guys coming up to you betting that they can guess where you got your shoes at. All of those things that made New Orleans a unique place and really gave the city its soul haven’t made their way back.

Here’s my best example of the way the city is right now. The good news is that Pat O’Brien’s is open and has no visible damage that I saw. Walk in there and it looks the same as it always did. Except that the piano bar isn’t open, we had a group of twenty walk in and get our own section, and they are closed on Tuesdays. When Pat O’s can stay open seven days a week it tells you how few people are in town.

But there are still good signs. The areas that we worked had people living in FEMA trailers or in houses that had already been rehabbed. I did see some of the street musicians that I remembered from last year, though they were much fewer in number. And many of the stores (including my art gallery) are back open, just in much limited hours. So Nola is coming back to life, just not all at once. And that gives me some hope.

And hope is what I will be writing about tomorrow, when I discuss more of what I was actually doing down there.