New Orleans Lost and Found

Yet these pronouncements of "total destruction" and "nonviability" by questionable experts are causing a second kind of heartbreak. As my colleague David Babson put it, apparently "there is no injury so great that insult can't be added." New Orleans needs hope, conviction, and a hell of a lot of help, not pessimism and abandonment. But I am not surprised by the doomsday pronouncements about New Orleans – perhaps its gothic aesthetic encourages such views. Perhaps some view this "sin city" as getting what it deserves.

Recently while excavating a site in the French Quarter known in the early 19th-century as the "Hotel Rising Sun," I was struck with how many people harbor fantasies about New Orleans as a place outside the usual moral order, although the demand for 'good times' has long come from those just passing through. The media's prurient focus on looting and disorder as opposed to the many stories of heroism and cooperation also echoes through the archives. During the Storyville era at the beginning of the twentieth century, the supply of titillating journalism and moralistic editorials about "underground" New Orleans were plentiful and perhaps explain why the city was deemed unworthy of the New Deal. We have heard it all before. We have been abandoned before.

Back in the early 18th century, the French talked of abandoning New Orleans within 10 years of its founding due to hurricanes and political-economic disasters (Katrina also being a combination). Then, the 1731 French novel Manon Lescaut became one of the most popular novels of its time, describing New Orleans as a place where free love reigned but social order was barely maintained. By 1735, for all practical purposes, the French government did abandon New Orleans. Still, people stayed, rebuilt, and prospered in their own way.

A Heritage of Disaster

Will this disaster wipe out New Orleans' heritage? Actually, disasters, their aftermath, and recovery are an important part of New Orleans' heritage. It wouldn't be what it is without them. Hurricanes and floods ravaged the city in 1722, 1831, 1874, 1915, and 1965. Fires decimated New Orleans in 1788 and 1794. Yellow fever and cholera epidemics killed tens of thousands of residents in 1832, 1853, and 1878. The city has essentially been erased two times in its history (1722 and 1788). It has survived the protracted tragedy of slavery, the Civil War, race riots, oil busts, and post-Civil Rights white flight. It has survived being "the city that care forgot," a city that the nation often forgets. I have faith it will survive again.

For many people, New Orleans' historic architecture is symbolic of its traditions and its uniqueness. Certainly, it is vital to its tourist economy. There was some ground-floor flooding in the French Quarter and certainly some looting of contents, but most of the structures there stood up fairly well -- after all, they've been through quite a few of these. Same is true of the Garden District.

But little do people realize the historic value of the hard-hit lower 9th ward and the neighborhood of Holy Cross, an extensive community of small, lower-income shotgun houses from the 19th and early 20th centuries largely spared the 'urban renewal' of the post-war era. Still, I'd lose all those houses again in exchange for just one of the lives lost within them.

Unfortunately, the political geography of the past will probably dictate historic preservation in the future. Since its founding, the wealthy in New Orleans have crowded their estates and buildings along the high ground of the natural levees, leaving the swampy swales to the poor. So all those mansions and fancy townhouses valued by tour guides and blue-haired architectural boards are probably in relatively decent shape, but they will also receive the lion's share of reconstruction assistance.

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