Broken City

The characters in this story could be real. The place where they come from is real, and so is what they have lived through. The civic truths they embody -- their connectedness and their brokenness -- are as real as you and me. Imagine it is mid-August 2005. Jim Thibeault makes his way to the pickup truck parked in the driveway of his small brick bungalow in the southeast New Orleans suburb of Chalmette. His hand glides along the gunwales of the big bass boat that sits on a trailer next to his truck, and he thinks ahead to the fishing charter he has lined up for the Labour Day weekend. The smell of the Murphy Oil refinery where he works hangs in the morning haze. It's something you get used to out here, just as you get used to the white egrets that wade in the Forty Arpent Canal across the street and the muskrat-like nutrias that burrow in the mud at the base of the levee.

Jim drives south through the neighbourhood and turns onto Judge Perez Drive where there's a Burger King that makes good coffee. He parks and goes inside. The day manager, Tondra Cayette, sees him and greets him as she always does. Tondra has been up since 4:30 a.m., making lunches for her two school-age kids and writing out a shopping list for her sister, Dawn. The sky was just beginning to lighten as she quietly closed the door of the wooden shotgun house she bought with her sister three years ago in the Lower 9th Ward. The familiar throb of fatigue settled in behind her eyes as she caught the number 39 bus and made her way to work in Chalmette.

After rousing Tondra's kids and bundling them off to school, Dawn Cayette catches a bus into central New Orleans, transfers onto the St. Charles Avenue streetcar and rides to Washington Avenue in the Garden District. She walks under a canopy of oaks to Prytania Street and the home of Paul and Lorraine Moorehouse, where she punches some numbers into a keypad on the iron front gate and waits for a buzz and a click before pushing the gate open.

Surrounded by portraits of four generations of ancestors, Paul Moorehouse is standing in front of a gilded mirror in the front hall, straightening his tie. Down the hall in the kitchen, his wife, Lorraine, waits with a notepad in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. New doors are arriving today and she needs a few minutes with Dawn to explain where they should go.

Maintaining grand old houses in the humidity of New Orleans is a never-ending chore. The Moorehouses have a long-running relationship with Johnny Girard, who runs a specialty hardware store not far away in the trendy Uptown district. He got his start running a True Value hardware store in Lakeview, near the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, during the building boom of the 1970s. His customers now are old-family New Orleanians who appreciate his deep roots in the city. His wife, Ginnie, has parlayed her affection for the city and its many eccentricities into a personalized tour business. It's a thriving niche in a tourist industry that pumps $5.5 billion a year into the local economy. When a client wants to fish for the big bass that lurk in the bayou country outside the city, she gives Jim Thibeault a call.

Some cities are outwardly pretty; all cities are inwardly beautiful -- infinitely complex webs of human interconnectedness that are the foundation for everything we call civic. Cities are about common purpose, about people coming together for the greater good. People who live in cities may annoy each other, bring harm upon each other, but at the heart of civic life is the unalterable fact that people need each other, are drawn to each other and are better off for being part of each other. There is a deep holiness in the bonding.

Like many things of beauty, civic relationships are also fragile. But we rarely appreciate how fragile because we rarely, if ever, see them -- we are too busy playing our own part in the civic reality. Only when something extraordinary unravels the web do we fully grasp that there is a web at all. And only when it's gone do we realize what has been lost. New Orleans in August 2005 was hardly a perfect city. A quarter of the population lived in poverty, as many as one in five were unemployed, and violent crime flourished. Its public school system was one of the worst in the United States, its police department was corrupt and people were leaving in alarming numbers. But it lived and breathed as a city, sustained by the pride it took in its diversity, its rich cultural life and its historical status as a gateway for American commerce. Upwards of 10 million people visited each year, drawn by the city's carefree ways, its food, music and an affable citizenry that seemed to rise above the odds. "Never," wrote New Orleans native and gothic novelist Ann Rice, "have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance."

No city, gentle or otherwise, should have to face the raw violence that nature set upon New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina roared out of the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 29, 2005, pushing a massive dome of water on shore with no regard for who or what might be in its way.

Canals connecting the city to the Gulf and to Lake Pontchartrain became funnels for the storm surge, and within 24 hours the levees that were supposed to protect low-lying areas had failed, and 80 percent of New Orleans was under as much as 12 feet of foul water.

Brick homes near the breeched levees in Chalmette were pushed off their foundations and deposited down the street. A storage tank at the Murphy Oil refinery buckled and shifted, draining a million gallons of oil into the already-putrid water. Terrified deer from the surrounding bayous were seen leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Snakes and sea turtles swam up and down residential streets.

The local government issued a mandatory evacuation order before the storm, but 27 percent of the population had no way of fleeing. In the poorest neighbourhoods, such as the Lower 9th Ward, hundreds met lingering deaths in sweltering attics or drowned trying to swim or wade to safety. For those who made it to shelters such as the Louisiana Superdome or the New Orleans Convention Center, the nightmare was just beginning.
By now the statistics have a numbing familiarity: 1,464 dead; 216,000 homes flooded; losses in excess of $80 billion; 374,000 evacuees living in shelters, homes, hotels, hostels, trailers and tents.

The name Katrina still evokes images of New Orleans’ nightmare. But even nightmares of Katrina’s scale have a limited shelf life in a world increasingly used to seeing itself in real time. A nightmare that lingers too long will soon be set aside  for something else.

Almost two years later, the nightmare of Katrina is now a city’s living tragedy. Pockets of New Orleans that escaped serious flooding — the Central Business District, the wealthy Garden District, the French Quarter — are up and running, but are a long way from running on full steam. A chronic labour shortage is hobbling everything from banks to shipyards to fast food. Employers will pay top dollar for workers, but the workers won’t come if there’s nowhere to live. Tourists are beginning to trickle back, but the tourism infrastructure remains skeletal. Before Katrina, Grayline Tours employed 64 bus drivers; as Mardi Gras approached last winter, only 11 were on the job. When the sun goes down, the French Quarter tries to crank up its famous party scene, but somehow the party spirit just isn’t there. The sweet refrain of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World spilling out onto St. Peter Street from Preservation Hall, seems ironic if not hollow.

Elsewhere, what was widespread damage two years ago is widespread blight today, and there’s a gnawing sense of permanence setting in. From the freeways that arc east to west, you can see huge swaths of the city and its suburbs that remain utterly desolate, save for the occasional Home Depot or car dealership bravely trying to make a new go of it. A billboard invites motorists to visit “cheaphousedemo.com” where takedowns can be had from $4,900.

Exiting the freeway to inspect some of the worst-hit areas up close feels like going to the hospital to visit a gravely injured friend. You steel yourself, but nothing can prepare you for the shock of what you find: street after street in neighbourhood after neighbourhood of wrecked and abandoned houses; high-water marks and spray-painted “X’s” telling a tale of what the rescue teams found; blue tarps still covering the holes that victims punched in their roofs as they tried to escape the grim tombs of their attics. After a while, you are overwhelmed by a crushing sense of so incredibly many lives breaking when the levees failed. You stare at the stacks of rotting timber, at seaweed piled on top of empty houses 20 miles from the seashore, and shake your head. But it’s what you can’t see, what you imagine, that breaks your heart.

Jim Thibeault and his family rode out the storm further north in Texas where there was a relative who could take them in. The Moorehouses and the Girards joined the exodus, too. Eventually, Jim returned to Chalmette to find his house, which sat underwater for two weeks, damaged beyond any hope of repair. It is among the more than 8,000 buildings — one-third of the total — in St. Bernard Parish that will be demolished. His fishing boat is jutting through the roof of a neighbour’s house down the block. Two years after Katrina, he and his family will still be living in one of hundreds of trailer colonies set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His kids resumed classes again last fall in an overcrowded recovery school that requires a long bus trip each way. Jim’s new nightmares are insurance adjusters and government red tape. He makes his own coffee in the morning now and hasn’t heard from Ginnie Girard since the storm.

The Cayette sisters and Tondra’s two children were among the thousands of Lower 9th Ward residents who made their way to the Superdome or the Convention Center and endured a week in hell before being loaded onto separate buses and driven away. Tondra and Dawn spent weeks trying to locate each other. They will likely stay put in their new surroundings. They’ve seen the pictures and heard the news reports. There’s nothing left to go home to.

The Moorehouses are making do without full-time domestic help. They have no idea where Dawn Cayette is. Their house suffered only minor damage, but with the labour shortage it will be a long time before it’s fixed; in the meantime, other problems keep cropping up. One of them, ironically, isn’t its resale value: because of the housing shortage and because of its location in a well-to-do neighbourhood away from the levees, it’s probably worth 30 to 35 percent more now than before Katrina.

A sign tacked to a telephone pole in the Lakeview district advertises “House-Gutting From 99 Cents a Square Foot. Call 261-8201.” The Girards had flood insurance and are rebuilding. But with so much emphasis on basic construction needs, the market for specialty hardware has fallen flat. Johnny closed the Uptown store last winter. It was easier to retire than ride out the rough patch. Ginnie still works and has found a new niche for her personalized tours — showing conventioneers Katrina damage at $55 a head.

Offering $9.50 an hour and a $250 biweekly bonus to attract counter help, the Burger King on Judge Perez Drive reopened last winter. Long, festive lines formed at the drive-through on the first day. Across town, at St. Anthony and Mirabeau Streets on the commercial edge of Lakeview, there was another party when a cluster of three businesses — Johnny’s True Value Hardware, John Gendusa’s Bakery and Zimmer Seafood — declared themselves recovered and opened their doors. With the return of sewage and water service to pockets of the 9th Ward late last year, Habitat for Humanity moved in and blitz-built 36 new houses for homeless musicians. Dozens of other volunteer organizations are on the scene, cleaning up debris and planning new neighbourhoods.

“We’re coming back,” proclaim the signs around the city, and blue-and-white fleur-de-lis banners flutter everywhere, symbols of resilience and rebirth. Many New Orleanians are determined to make their city whole again. But the hard fact is that for every stalwart with rolled-up sleeves, there’s another who has simply given up and stayed away. Recent surveys suggest that the city’s population may stabilize at about 200,000, less than half of its pre-Katrina total. The studies go on to suggest that the diaspora will forever change the city’s character. A huge percentage of the unreturned are poor and may have found better opportunities elsewhere. The New Orleans of the future is likely to be more homogenous and well-off.

People will still call it New Orleans but it won’t really be New Orleans any more. Katrina swept away more than homes and neighbourhoods. It breeched the web of interconnectedness that, for better or worse, was the city’s soul. Katrina revealed many hard truths about inequality, good and bad government and the folly of trying to out-duel nature. But its greatest lesson may have been about cities themselves. Cities are only as strong as the relationships that underpin them.

Buildings may topple, but if the human foundation on which they’re built stays intact, the city will survive. Sever the bonds of interconnectedness and the city is broken, irrevocably. We owe it to New Orleanians to cherish in our own cities what has been lost in theirs. We owe it to ourselves to strengthen the bonds that define and sustain us in our beautiful and fragile communities.