It’s the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s whomping of the Gulf Coast. I’ve been down to New Orleans four times since then. I’ve tried to chronicle a little bit of the reconstruction, or at least my viewpoint on the progress.
My perspective is limited, of course. Amy’s family lives about 25 miles from the city, so the people I see the most down there talk more about the after-effects, not their own property loss. We’ve made trips into the city each visit, but mainly in the central business district and the French Quarter. I haven’t gone through the lower Ninth Ward in any of my visits, but I also don’t visit the South Bronx when I go to New York.
Or does the WTC site serve as a better analogy? Ray Nagin seemed to think so, when he contrasted NOLA’s rebuilding pace with the five-year span since the Twin Towers were knocked down: “You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”
It was a cheap shot, but Nagin’s a mentally unstable grandstander, so that needs to be factored in.
How does the city get rebuilt? Darned if I know. I wouldn’t exactly trust a “master plan” developed by the crooked politicos of Louisiana in concert with the ass-clowns in Washington, and the Army Corps of Engineers is already covering its ass about the possibility of the current levees being unable to handle another major storm. I’m having enough trouble just trying to settle on a color for my home office, since the official VM wife objects pretty violently to the deep green currently in place.
(Witold Rybczynski in Slate has a neat piece about how a new-urbanist project in Denver provides an example of how to start putting together neighborhoods, but it all presupposes that the neighborhoods aren’t built in a locale that’s existentially flood-prone.)
I’m having trouble coming up with anything to say that I haven’t gotten at already, so why don’t you, my dear readers, tell me what you make of New Orleans? A bunch of you came to visit in March for my wedding, but I want to hear from those of you who haven’t seen it, too. Tell me what you remember of the city, if you’ve been there before, what you thought if you’ve been there post-Katrina, and what you think of the ways and means of rebuilding a city that wasn’t in great shape before it’s cataclysm.
(Update: I know it’s hard to believe, but Ray Nagin has more to say!)
Tim’s friend at CBS, Byron, is interviewing Nagan tonight on 60 Minutes. Worth a watch. Hope you are well. Call me. Sorry I missed the impromtu dinner. And I found NoLa a tradgedy and if I were religious, which I am not, I would pray for the city.
Elayne
How tragic, also, that I fucked up the spelling of tragedy.
Tradgic.
One thing that connects the Gulf Coast and NYC is a sense of entitlement among those who suffered in terms of what they feel is due them in the reconstruction.
Even better: in the weeks following Katrina, the NY media decided that it needed to scare the locals about how deadly the threat of a hurricane would be if one hit NYC!
As I put it at the time, “Would you PLEASE stop trying to muscle in on other people’s catastrophes? You already got two buildings knocked down by terrorists! Stick with your own trauma!”
Well, this morning I dreamed that I was having to prepare to flee from a hurricane. We debated whether to put masking tape x’s across the windows, and I also tried to drive down 163 (the pretty, winding highway that goes into downtown), only to find out that it had been blocked with a concrete wall due to the impending disaster.
More to the point (since I imagine there would have to be some extra-crazy global climate change for a hurricane to threaten San Diego) and to directly answer your question, I remember New Orleans in March (aside from your fantastic wedding — great event, great people) as being empty and sad and a little scary and lined with giant piles of garbage. I was sad I’d never been there before, never seen the city the way it used to be.