Leaving You

August 28, 2007 Eve Troeh

Last summer I was the poster girl for New Orleans . My picture ran in the Sunday paper with the headline Generation K. I smiled, flanked by hot pink oleander and golden hibiscus.

In the interview I praised the city for its social warmth and tropical elegance. I declared my goal to tell stories about its stumbling, slow recovery. I'd quit bussing tables at an Uptown bistro so I could report full time.

I've reported for this network and others on crime, housing, insurance and tourism. But unlike most reporters who fly in for a few weeks at a time, I've LIVED here. So, when I go to the drug store, and chat with the drug store clerk ...she recognizes me. Last year on Labor Day she was crying. In the past, she'd have thrown the family picnic. Her house flooded to the roof. Some of her family died; the rest, left. No more family, no more picnics. Then there's the family I met at the mechanic. They were waiting for an oil change. They were part of the crowd at the Superdome after the flood. A bus took them to Arkansas. That's where they live now. They had a cooler of andouille sausage to bring back. No more hot dogs in the gumbo!

I've taken fierce pride in being a local. When I travel I'm a junky for talk about the city. Someone will ask "So, how is it down there?" I launch into a litany. There are busted traffic lights, leaky sewer lines, mountains of debris, the skyrocketing murder rate, miles of desolation, and the levees still aren't fixed. But you should come, I say. It's like a battered beauty queen. Hard to look at, and messed up even more on the inside, but still so regal and charming. This is where the listener I've taken hostage turns away slowly to engage someone less insane.

They don't understand that I'm in love. I talk to friends about New Orleans like a dysfunctional romance. I gush over it one day, then call up bawling and heartbroken the next. Why can't it change? Stop being self-destructive and violent? It has so much potential.

Recently, my blinders started to come off. It was building for awhile. My friend Helen Hill was murdered in her home;other friends have been mugged. We don't go out much any more...

But then there was this hot Friday night last month. I went on the perfect date with New Orleans . Saw live, local music, danced with friends on the stage, then headed home through my neighborhood of craftsman cottages and angel trumpet trees.

A block from my door, I was attacked from behind by a stranger. I escaped, with the help of my roommate. The case is moving forward, so I can't say much more than that.

Now I'm a jilted lover of the city. I'm angry and confused. Which is the real New Orleans? The one that's violent and desperate? Or the one that coos softly, and caresses me? The answer, of course, is both.

I just hauled my things out of New Orleans in a big truck. I am still in love with the city, but it's hard to trust it. Maybe we'll both heal, and the relationship will rekindle. I don't know what - or how long - that might take.

Eve Troeh is a Katrina Media Fellow at the Open Society Institute.

August 28, 2007 · For many of us, the picture we still hold in our minds of New Orleans, two years after Katrina, is one of a flooded city — of desperate people on rooftops or at the Superdome, of mounds of garbage and debris. It's understandable, given the power of the images that were burned into our brains in the weeks after the most destructive storm in U.S. history laid waste to one of America's most distinctive cities.

In the months after Katrina, I covered the story in New Orleans. It's hard to recall exactly when, for me, despair about the city's future began to turn into hope. As urban planners converged on the city, as the Bring New Orleans Back commission began its work, as old residents and newcomers arrived, many of us began to see the devastation as an opportunity to create something better than what we had lost.

Because the fact is, long before Katrina, New Orleans — a unique gem, with its own architecture, food and musical styles — was in many ways a broken city.

Poverty was endemic, the schools were among the worst in the nation, public housing was a mess, streets and other infrastructure badly needed fixing, and political corruption was a fact of life that led many to believe things couldn't change for the better.

But all people—even reporters—need hope. It says something about the human spirit to recall how eagerly we read, and reported, each news story as a sign that out of the rubble, a better city would emerge.

Standing in Jackson Square, President Bush said the federal government would do whatever it takes to bring back New Orleans. Mayor Ray Nagin talked idealistically about a city rebuilt higher and on a smaller footprint, in consultation with engineers and urban planners. Proposals were drawn up for a federally funded redevelopment agency that would buy and sell properties, helping residents relocate and shape the new city.

Then political realities began to settle in. President Bush and his coordinator of Gulf Coast recovery said rebuilding would be driven by the private sector, and that the federal government would only play a supporting role. Mayor Nagin quickly backed away from his comments about a smaller city, as residents of the most devastated neighborhoods and their political representatives began to scream. And soon, the idea of a powerful, federally funded redevelopment authority also dissolved — leaving in its place a weaker and troubled state-run authority.

As people returned to New Orleans, other realities also emerged, taking a toll on hope. Crime, a perennial problem in this tourist-dependent city, resumed with a vengeance. The murder eight months ago of Helen Hill, an acclaimed Canadian filmmaker shot in her Marigny District home, made national headlines, underscoring the dangers that lurk on streets that, two years on, are still patrolled by military Humvees.

A shortage of affordable housing kept many from returning. Fixing the levees turned out to be a project that was more difficult, expensive and iffy than many expected. Key projects — a new hospital complex downtown, revamped public housing, a long-promised Trump hotel and condo project — seemed pipe dreams.

But New Orleans is, if anything, a town that doesn't believe in pessimism. "The Big Easy" and "Let the good times roll" are slogans of a city that doesn't spend time dwelling on unpleasant realities.

While outsiders shake their heads about the many parts of the city that are still unlivable, people who live in New Orleans are too busy to spend time worrying about what might have been.

Walking through still largely empty streets in a section of New Orleans East, a block south of Lake Pontchartrain, I met Joseph Perique. He was fixing his son's car outside of the only habitable house on the block. He was realistic that most of his neighbors wouldn't be back. But that didn't stop him from fixing up his home.

"One thing about New Orleans," he reminded me, "we're strong."

Yes, crime is still a problem. Housing, especially affordable housing, will remain an acute need for years to come. Political corruption hasn't gone away. But such is the draw of the Crescent City that people and businesses continue to flow back, exceeding expectations. Estimates now put New Orleans at between two-thirds and three-quarters of its former population.

And in retrospect, dreams of a federally funded, rebuilt New Orleans designed by urban planners weren't just unrealistic, but maybe also unwise. After all, the strength of New Orleans, the reason it's such a unique place, is that it grew organically — a cultural stew reflected in its food, music and neighborhoods.

It's a mix that was created by Spanish, French, African-American, Creole, Italian, Irish and Cajun influences. Add to that mix the Vietnamese of the Versailles neighborhood, who have pulled together to rebuild their neighborhood without waiting for outside help. New Orleans continues to defy planners, just as it defies order. If you want nice, go to Disney World.

Which is why, two years after Katrina — for me, at least — there's new reason to hope about New Orleans' future. Visions of a shining city on a hill — or below sea level, as the case may be — are long since dead in New Orleans. But after the worst of nature and government neglect, it's becoming clear that you can't keep a good city down. .

NPR correspondent Greg Allen was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, reporting on the initial devastation and rescue efforts. Since then, he's returned to the city on a regular basis to report on rebuilding efforts.

September 8, 2005 · The reporting on Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has focused on the many people who were affected by it. That's as it should be. It will be weeks before we begin to understand how many lives were lost. In the first days after the storm, estimates of thousands of deaths seemed hyperbolic. Now they're expected.

But I worry that along with untold lives, there may have been something else lost when Katrina devastated New Orleans -- something less tangible, but also precious in its own way.

It's often been remarked that New Orleans is not truly an American city, but a Caribbean one. Even the casual visitor knows how different it appears from anything else in the United States. The city's architecture, its design, the people and civic culture are all distinct to New Orleans -- and unlike those found in any other American city.

I've heard folklorists and commentators attribute this to the city's history -- first a Spanish settlement, then French, and finally American. Also, people of many races and ethnicities lived side-by-side in many neighborhoods. Black, Italian, Irish, French, Cajun, Creole, Honduran -- those cultural ingredients and many more were mixed together in the big stew that is, or was, New Orleans.

The great pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton -- one of many in a long line of New Orleans musicians -- often claimed to have invented jazz. History does not necessarily bear him out. But the first jazz recording released was not by Jelly Roll, Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory or any of the great African-American musicians we associate with New Orleans jazz. It was done in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a group of white musicians.

Still, it's clear the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was influenced by black musicians. And that cross-pollination speaks to one of New Orleans' contributions to American life. From the earliest days, when enslaved African Americans gathered and made music on Congo Square, through the darkest days of Jim Crow, New Orleans had a reputation as a place where people of different races and backgrounds... mixed. Especially during the first half of the last century, there was an atmosphere of tolerance in New Orleans, unlike any found elsewhere else in the South. Danny Barker, the great jazz guitarist, said many jazz musicians were afraid to tour outside of New Orleans back in the '20s and '30s. For them, going across the state line into Mississippi was like going to another country. So they stayed home and created one of this country's greatest indigenous art forms -- jazz.

But jazz is just the most obvious way in which New Orleans is deep in the soul of America. Long before Emeril Lagasse or Paul Prudhomme called it home, New Orleans taught us not just how to prepare wonderful dishes, but also how to enjoy them. Again, it's about the blending of cultures. I love beignets, gumbo and crawfish etouffee, but my favorite New Orleans food is the muffaletta, that wonderful sandwich with cheese, salami, cappicola and olive salad that could only have been invented by an Italian -- or at least with one close by.

You can hear the blending in the way people talk. There are so many different accents there, even the people who live in New Orleans have trouble understanding one another. The way people talk in the Irish channel neighborhood -- many swear it sounds like a Bronx accent -- is different than the way they talk in the Ninth Ward, Gentilly, or other neighborhoods. You see it in the Mardi Gras Indians and African-American carnival troops, whose costumes pay homage to the area's first settlers. It's in the shotgun houses, in the French Quarter, out on St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District.

When I left New Orleans, nine days after the hurricane struck, water and power were already coming back on in some parts of the city. Despite dire predictions, I'm confident New Orleans is going to be rebuilt sooner than many expect.

Some of the first neighborhoods restored will be the areas most visited by tourists. One reason that the French Quarter and the Garden District emerged from Katrina relatively unscathed is that they're on high ground. Before Katrina, those neighborhoods weathered many other hurricanes, and undoubtedly will do so again.

The biggest questions surround the Ninth Ward, a large section of middle-class housing, much of which was totally flooded. There's already talk of razing the neighborhood and rebuilding. Gentrification looms over the horizon. Except for a few holdouts, the people who lived there are all gone now -- living with friends and relatives, maybe in shelters, maybe the Houston Astrodome.

I don't worry about the French Quarter. I worry about New Orleans' neighborhoods -- and whether the places that created jazz and the muffaletta will ever come back.

A few days after the hurricane, I was riding on the "Iberville," a ferry that was pressed into service carrying evacuees from their flooded homes to dry land and waiting buses across the river on Algiers Point. I asked one young man on the ferry about himself -- how long he'd been stranded, how he got out. He only wanted to talk about the city and what he worried may have been washed away by Katrina's floodwaters. "Man... New Orleans," he said, shaking his head. "We can't lose this. This is the spice that flavors America."

Greg Allen reported on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath from New Orleans and Baton Rouge. He's been fascinated by New Orleans' culture since 1988. That's when he and his wife -- Maeve McGoran, a Morning Edition editor -- produced a radio documentary exploring the origins of the city's culture.