The Great Deluge

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The Great Deluge Page 5

by Douglas Brinkley


  The same West Bank pluck imbued middle-class New Orleans hospitality workers like Kathy A. Lawes-Reed of Algiers. A beloved waitress at the J. W. Marriott Hotel on Canal Street, she sometimes sang Italian opera or Billie Holiday blues to dinner guests. She lived on her tips, along with a small private income. The hotel would need Marriott employees like Lawes-Reed to tend to the tourists stuck in town during the coming hurricane. She didn’t want to let her employer down. She loved Marriott. There were 38,000 hotel rooms in New Orleans on the eve of Katrina, and somebody had to address their needs. “I didn’t have any money,” she explained, “and my employers need me. So I stayed. New Orleans is a tourist town and I just couldn’t leave the tourists to face Katrina on their own.”68

  Tourists, indeed, helped fuel the economic engine of New Orleans. Long before New York City and Hollywood dominated entertainment in the United States, before Las Vegas took up casinos, and before San Francisco began to pride itself on its gourmet restaurants, New Orleans was the capital of all three: music, gambling, dining, and anything else that held out the promise of a good time. In Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler took Scarlett to New Orleans for their honeymoon, and while that was only a novel, Margaret Mitchell wrote with pinpoint accuracy about the sensibilities of the mid-nineteenth-century South. New Orleans was just the sophisticated setting for a rich and racy couple after the Civil War to impress each other. “New Orleans,” Mitchell wrote, “was such a strange, glamorous place and Scarlett enjoyed it with the headlong pleasure of a pardoned life prisoner.”69

  During the twentieth century, New Orleans remained much the same, in spirit. It did not compete with hurly-burly Chicago, as the nation’s capital of practical business and entrepreneurialism. It didn’t pretend to intellectual or moral standards, as did Brahmin Boston. And it wasn’t sports crazy, as was St. Louis, just 1,039 miles up the Mississippi River. Only in the latter pursuit did the city advance in the last third of the century, by attracting professional teams, including the football Saints and basketball Hornets. The 1960s, when the Saints arrived in town, were a time when, not coincidentally, sports were marketed as entertainment. New Orleans on the eve of Katrina still clung to its odd, old reputation as a roguish city saturated with what Newsweek called “indolent charm.”70 It had some of the best and oldest restaurants in America, like Antoine’s, Galatoire’s, and Arnaud’s, all housed in nineteenth-century buildings.71 It was the capital of the American roistering night. Whatever New Orleans’s inherent attractions, it wasn’t, however, a good place to do business. In 1960 it had a population of 600,000, larger by far than Houston or Atlanta. On the eve of Katrina, New Orleans had shrunk to about 460,000, and was home to only one Fortune 500 company (Entergy). By contrast, Atlanta had sixteen, Charlotte seven, and Memphis four. Farther up the Mississippi, Minneapolis–St. Paul—the so-called Twin Cities—had eighteen Fortune 500 companies between them.

  New Orleans simply didn’t draw business investment the way other American cities did and it didn’t spawn entrepreneurs, either. The city—the anti-Seattle—missed the high-tech boom of the 1980s and 1990s entirely. In business, New Orleans rested on its natural livelihood in shipping lines, particularly Central Gulf, Lykes, and Delta Steamship. Driving along the Mississippi just above New Orleans, you couldn’t help but see the humongous Avondale Shipyard, an industrial beehive of cranes and hard hats. After World War II, when engineers devised a way to build offshore oil rigs, New Orleans became a center for the moving and refining of oil. It was a world of cables, welding, barges, and pipelines that turned parts of the city into wild, roughneck territory. Through the years, there was nothing upstanding or elite about the general standard of business in New Orleans. Except for the addition of legal gambling in the city during the 1980s, the city was unprogressive and, in some odd way, seemed to like it that way. The old families with their old money hung on to their old power. Tourists were always welcomed and encouraged to leave.

  Up until the Second World War, New Orleans was content within its own borders. That is, suburbs were, by and large, late in coming to the Crescent City; much of the surrounding terrain was too marshy to support tract housing developments. In the 1950s, however, much acreage in St. Bernard Parish, to the east, was drained and Levittown-like developments sprang up in Meraux, Chalmette, and Arabi. The aluminum siding and sheet metal industries flourished. Also, in the 1950s, the long-standing dream of building a bridge across the gaping width of Lake Pontchartrain became a reality. With the completion of the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway in 1956—the longest bridge in the world, at twenty-four miles—Jefferson Parish, just to the west of New Orleans, was connected with the north shore. The days of ferry transportation were largely over. Suburban communities sprang up in and around Covington and Mandeville on the far side of the lake, which had once been a piney summer refuge for New Orleans families. With the bridge, though, the largest growth of all on the north shore occurred in Slidell, a city of many developments, built around recreation and some industry. Another factor, as always in New Orleans, was race. Black empowerment growing out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s unfortunately led to massive “white flight” from New Orleans, causing suburbs like Slidell, Covington, and Metairie to burgeon. In the late 1960s, the area on the eastern side of the Industrial Canal, known as New Orleans East—touted as a “city inside a city”—was the place for upwardly mobile whites to be. With its fine walking path along the Lake Pontchartrain levee and new state-of-the-art shopping mall, New Orleans East was marketed by realtors as cookie-cutter modernity at its white-bread best.

  By and large, though, New Orleans retained its upper-class, stately neighborhoods of the Garden District and Uptown. Both were located along the crescent that the Mississippi formed around the original settlement. The French Quarter, which was in the very crook of the crescent, was also home to many of the city’s wealthy elite. While mansions in other cities were often abandoned to Elks Lodges or medical clinics, in New Orleans they remained in private hands, the buildings well-maintained and the gardens fresh. The vibrant upper-class neighborhoods reflected the mood of the gentry inside. The blue bloods believed in a structured social life in New Orleans, where debutante balls were anything but passé, and membership in a Mardi Gras krewe was considered serious civic business. Being a member of the Boston Club was a matter of true prestige in New Orleans. Neither as independent as New York society, nor as determinedly casual as that of Los Angeles, New Orleans held out the prospect of participation in soirees and balls that few other cities could offer in the new millennium. It was fun to be part of the conscripted social swirl, as every Sunday the Times-Picayune ran a photography section featuring socialites smiling at fund-raisers or champagne parties.

  Tourists constituted a second social tier in New Orleans. For a city of only about 460,000 to host 10 million visitors each year is bound to give it another side, however transitory.72 The tourists were hosted, in a sense, by the 84,000 people employed in the hotels, restaurants, and convention attractions. On a monetary basis, they contributed $5 billion to the city’s revenues. More than that, though, they gave the city a swagger—and a reason to accentuate its traditional tendency toward hedonism. New Orleans was not a spruced-up, clean-cut city, but one in which the saloons stayed open all night, drive-in daiquiri shops were pervasive, gay culture was embraced, and raunchy strip joints were located in the very center of town. In the New Orleans that tourism helped to perpetuate, drunken debauchery was just part of the bohemian-anarchistic-libertarian mix of an international port city that tourists were urged to embrace, in one pleasurable pursuit or another. It was an “adult entertainment” mecca. Eccentricity was embraced as a virtue. Tourists also helped give a reason for the French Quarter (or Vieux Carré) to maintain its beautiful nineteenth-century buildings, clad in wrought iron. The new construction in the adjacent business district gave hardly a nod to the old style of French influence. Quite the contrary, the central business district, home to monoliths like Entergy’s h
eadquarters and the Shell building, was lined with the same type of postmodern skyscrapers found in Houston or Atlanta. Around the rest of the city, however, enough vintage buildings were left untouched, usually by economic stagnation rather than historical appreciation, that New Orleans had fast become a favorite location for Hollywood movies. Filmmakers could find practically any sort of backdrop in New Orleans, from Spanish colonial mansions and Creole cottages to American Greek revival, art deco European, and postmodern ranches. And then there was Mardi Gras, the annual cash cow: in 2003, for example, the city spent $4.7 million on parades and got a return of $21.6 million.

  Jazz was born in New Orleans and was cultivated in the Storyville neighborhood, where more than two thousand prostitutes worked in legal brothels from 1897 to 1917. The lively brothels served as the first jazz workshops for young, soon-to-be legends such as Jelly Roll Morton, Tony Jackson, Clarence Williams, and Joe “King” Oliver. Louis Armstrong, who grew up in what was then called the Back o’ Town neighborhood, was exposed to these lively halls and to the rough and violent underside of the city. Armstrong captured the character of the city in his impassioned improvisational trumpeting and his gentle, deep melodic voice. With songs like “West End Blues,” Armstrong was an icon by the 1940s and served as an informal ambassador of New Orleans all over the globe. The tradition has lived on: into the twenty-first century, live jazz was performed daily and nightly in the Crescent City, on street corners and in music halls—from the old Dixieland style of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band to the hiphop-infused jams of the Rebirth Brass Band, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and the Soul Rebels.

  The jazz personality of New Orleans, as distilled by the tourist segment of the city, was also the backdrop in a figurative sense for great literature. It was an irresistible setting for a story, with its crisscrossing impulses of age-old gentility and ribald nightlife. Most Americans were familiar with Stanley Kowalski screaming “Stella!” on Elysian Fields Avenue and enforcing the Napoleonic Code in Tennessee Williams’s steamy A Streetcar Named Desire. Then there was Ignatius Reilly pushing his hot dog cart around the French Quarter and epitomizing the eccentric spirit of the city in John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. A favorite among the elite was Walker Percy’s lazy, lilting narrative of the Uptown life of Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer. In addition to hosting these unforgettable fictional characters, the real-life Crescent City had bred and inspired countless writers: Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner wrote his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, while living in an apartment on Pirate’s Alley (and according to local legend, he first decided to become a writer when, on a business trip to the city, he had a chance afternoon cocktail with Winesburg, Ohio author Sherwood Anderson in the Napoleon House bar). Poet and novelist Charles Bukowski wrote Crucifix in a Deathhand while living in New Orleans, and today you can read his graffiti in the sidewalk pavement of Faubourg Marigny.

  More recently, Anne Rice, who lived in the Garden District, set her vampire tales, Interview with the Vampire and The Queen of the Damned among them, in the gothic city. Her First Street house was a popular tourist destination. Rice embraced the belief that time seemed to pass more slowly in New Orleans, and that people laughed more often at absurdity. “I was born in the city and lived there for many years,” wrote Rice in a September 2005 New York Times op-ed piece. “It shaped who and what I am. Never 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.”73

  The third segment of New Orleans was not necessarily composed of residents. In fact, the people who dominated it might well live on the other side of the globe. The shipping industry was generally hidden from the tourist areas and certainly did not impinge on the mansion districts, yet little money was spent on capital improvements to the city without this industry’s tacit permission. It controlled the boards that controlled, however loosely, the future of New Orleans. The reason was simple, if shortsighted. Without shipping and its younger sibling, oil extraction, New Orleans would lose its economic base. Tourism may have brought in $5 billion, but ocean shipping alone contributed $13 billion. The port of New Orleans had three harboring areas. The smallest of them lay on the Industrial Canal, which leads from Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River. Next, there were cruise ship docks along the Mississippi near the Convention Center. By far, though, the main portion of the port was located just a little way upriver at the Nashville Avenue wharf. In all, 107,000 people were employed in port activities.74 That figure didn’t even take into account the six major railroads and more than thirty-eight national trucking companies that used New Orleans as a regional hub. For all the activity, though, the city was more of a colony than a capital.

  For a while after World War II, it looked as though America’s domestic oil companies might make New Orleans their capital, but in the 1990s, those companies with a large white-collar presence in the city began moving to Texas or Oklahoma. In 2003, the number of oil-industry workers was 9,125, down about 45 percent from 1990. When ExxonMobil announced in 2003 that it was pulling the last of its operations out of New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin made a grandstand announcement that City Hall would give a $25,000 bonus to any engineer who would forsake the move and stay on with another New Orleans company. Over a year later, those few who took him up on the offer were still waiting for the check. One, Gary Wilson, called it “really just an empty political promise.”75 The relocation of Big Oil, however, put shipping in an even stronger position in New Orleans. While it had setbacks, including losing the position of number one in coffee imports to New York City in 2004, the port was secure as long as the American Midwest, served by the inexpensive barge traffic of the Mississippi, continued to require products from overseas, and to export them as well.

  The city that Big Shipping wanted New Orleans to be was, however, not the same one that most of the residents would have wanted—if they had the choice. With power on the side of shipping, federal moneys earmarked for levee improvement and other public safety projects often turned into harbor upgrades, canal dredging, and other initiatives that actually improved the chances for a hurricane to do even more damage.

  The fourth segment of the city of New Orleans—after the mansion districts, the tourism segment, and the shipping industry—was the population of poor people. New Orleans had a higher proportion of people living below the poverty line (27.9 percent in 1999) than similar-sized cities like Tucson, Arizona (18.4 percent), Kansas City, Missouri (14.3 percent), or Portland, Oregon (13.1 percent).76 In New Orleans, blue-blood tradition and big business had pushed the poor off to the side and kept them hidden. Once whites left for the suburbs, public schools in New Orleans became an abomination.

  Intertwined with the city’s poverty rate was its racial composition. African Americans constituted 67.3 percent of the population, whites28.1 percent. Those two groups alone accounted for 95.4 percent of the population, leaving a small number of Hispanics, particularly Hondurans, and Asians, especially Vietnamese. New Orleans was much more distinctly divided along racial lines than most cities.

  Another characteristic of the New Orleans population worth noting on the eve of Katrina was the proportion of the elderly. To compare cities of similar size, 11.7 percent of the New Orleans population was sixty-five or older, as opposed to Austin at 6.7 or Boston at 10.4.77 New Orleans poverty figures had to be juxtaposed against its proportion of elderly, which was above average, and its noticeably large percentage of African Americans. Many social historians have traced the lively cultural personality of New Orleans and its jazz music to that disproportionately large percentage of the city’s population, but in the face of a natural disaster, the world of the poor in New Orleans, particularly that of the poor black, and the poor elderly, couldn’t be romanticized in a Harry Connick Jr. croon or a Kermit Ruffins horn riff. For these overlapping groups, New Orleans was built on a kind
of isolation from the mainstream. The core of the city, built geopolitically in concentric circles around the mansion residents, the tourism world, and the shipping industry, rarely took the poverty-stricken neighborhoods into account. Poor neighborhoods occupied the majority of New Orleans’s 181 square miles, stretching mile after mile with dilapidated houses and people on the porches, people with nowhere to go. Bifurcated, if not officially segregated, New Orleans gave the impression of a city that didn’t even know itself. In metaphor, the city was a legendary beauty, but one that had refused to look in the mirror for a long, long time. Selling the world on the historic stage set that was so much of picturesque New Orleans, the city seemed not to care about its other decaying side. Citizens enjoyed being dubbed “the Capital of the Caribbean” and “the City That Time Forgot.” But such a laissez-faire attitude toward civic improvement was loaded with unhappy consequences.

  After nearly three hundred years, New Orleans had arranged its existence around those four segments, yet there was something hauntingly temporary about the arrangement. Always determined to squeeze the last drop out of midnight, New Orleans never looked to the future, except as a means of keeping things, right or wrong, the same. Something had to make New Orleans look hard in the mirror. Unfortunately, the one power on earth that could make it rise to see itself clearly was coming on fast, in the form of a Category 3 hurricane named Katrina.

  VII

  On Saturday afternoon, Mayor Nagin endangered the welfare of the poor and elderly as well as the tourists—and in the end, the city—by holding legal discussions about the impact of an evacuation on the hotel trade. At best, the mayor was being extremely shortsighted, exhibiting childlike leadership in an adult hour. He was thinking about the hotel owners’ profits, not the hotel guests’ lives. If New Orleans flooded, they would all be stuck in Radissons and Days Inns and Sheratons, with no electricity and no escape route, their lives in grave danger. Instead of worrying about having egg on his face if Hurricane Katrina didn’t slam New Orleans, he should have put the long-term interests of the city’s $5 billion tourism industry ahead of his short-term (and unfounded) fear of lawsuits for lost business. He had the power. There was time—not much, but enough to ferry all those out-of-towners right back out of town. Instead, he gambled with their lives, too. “The only thing I can say to the stranded tourists is I hope they have a hotel room and it’s at least on the third floor up,” Nagin said. “Unfortunately, unless they can rent a car to get out of town, which I doubt they can at this point, they’re probably in the position of riding out the storm.”78

 

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