Down Yonder in New Orleans

I had to work last weekend, but don’t cry for me. The assignment was a magazine conference in New Orleans.

I was lucky to be able to spend a pre-conference afternoon with an old New Orleans friend, Nick Marinello, his daughter Grace, and his remarkable new wife, Noelle. Like most outsiders coming to New Orleans these days, I was interested in seeing first-hand what scars were left from Katrina, the hurricane that devastated the city on August 29, 2005.

If you just visited the French Quarter, you'd barely be aware of the catastrophe that was Katrina. As is widely known, the French Quarter was spared of flooding and remains as boisterous and inviting as ever. The downtown business district also looks untouched, but for much of the rest of New Orleans, the recovery process has a long way to go.

But let me digress and tell you about Noelle. She’s a Californian who was living in Santa Barbara and came down to New Orleans after the hurricane to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. So moved was Noelle by what she saw, that she picked up and moved to New Orleans and now works as a construction supervisor with Project Homecoming, a Presbyterian relief organization.

Through Project Homecoming, Noelle has been involved in refurbishing ten severely damaged homes in the past year. Overall, the group, which uses volunteer workers from around the country, has worked on at least 100 of the 200,000 homes ravaged by the hurricane.

We started our tour in Gentilly, a neighborhood of modest one-story slab homes. Here there has been much progress, but many of the rebuilt or refurbished homes still stand side-by-side with boarded-up wrecks. Locally, they call this the “jack-o-lantern effect.” And like most of New Orleans, many of the homes that remain standing bear the eerie tattoo of coding left behind by search authorities in the aftermath of the storm.

We dropped in on Paul J. Buisson, a writer and construction worker who had just moved back into his home two weeks earlier. The house, which formerly sat on a slab, is now raised up on cement piles in an effort to avoid a repeat of Katrina. Like much of the new construction, Paul’s house is brightly painted inside and out. During our visit, his daughter was painting some trim, while his wife, Cheryl, endeavored to straighten out their belongings. For Paul and Cheryl, it has been four-year nightmare. They moved seven different times, once sharing a two-bedroom house in Texas with seventeen other Katrina refugees. All the while they have had to deal endlessly with banks, insurance companies, government bureaucrats, and unscrupulous contractors.  

The ordeal has carved deep grooves around Paul’s eyes. But he remains unbowed. “I feel like I died and went to heaven,” he says as he ponders the help he has received from Project Homecoming.

Next we visited Lionel, whose damaged home is but a few blocks from Lake Pontchartrain, a huge body of water that overran its levee, sending a 10-foot wall of liquid havoc through the streets. Lionel is chatty and cheerful these days. His home is a work in progress, but far enough along that he has been able to move back in. He shows me the blackened spot on the short front drive where he sat in a lawn chair for what must have seemed like an eternity in the months after Katrina, stoking a fire and awaiting assistance.

Finally, we drove to the Lower 9th Ward, among the hardest hit areas of New Orleans. Here the Industrial Canal breached the levee and swept away most everything in its path. Where once there were tightly packed rows of homes, now there is a wasteland of overgrown weeds. Broken up cement foundations give the appearance of tumbled headstones. The remaining utility poles are covered with hand-written signs with messages for the forlorn homeowners: “We cut tall grass”; “pile-driving and cement removal”; cheap electrical work.” On one wrecked wall someone had scrawled a simple epitaph: "Home This Was."

Hope has come to the 9th Ward in the form of Musician’s Village, a neighborhood of new construction spearheaded by musician Harry Connick Jr., and actor Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation, where local and national architects are incorporating hurricane-resistant features and extreme design touches into the traditional shapes of New Orleans' shotgun shacks and Creole cottages. The results are surreal but reassuring.

Depending on whom you ask, the death toll from Katrina ranged from 2,000 to 4,000. I'm told many more -- particularly the elderly -- have died from the stress of displacement in the ensuing years. For every empty lot or boarded up home, there are souls scattered to neighboring towns and states. Many still want to come back; some may never return.

Katrina may be fading from the headlines, but the tragedy is still unfolding. Somehow the folks down yonder are enduring -- through a combination of true grit, faith, and human kindness. Think about that the next time you are cursing traffic on the Turnpike.

|  Print This

Tags: Hurricane Katrina | New Orleans | French Quarter | Project Homecoming | Musician's Village

Tools: Share | Ask a question