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December 06, 2006
New Orleans, Post-Katrina
It looks like Dresden at the end of World War II."
–My uncle Bob, preparing me for New Orleans
Where I last left off was at my scooter's 7,000th mile, which occured 10 miles or so northeast of New Orleans. It being dark and not knowing what to expect of the city, I was originally thinking of finding a cheap motel and staying the night in Slidell, but since my route didn't take me there, I met the city at night. The outskirts were pretty quiet, as I mentioned there was virtually no traffic on Hwy 90, but once I was near I-510 I started to see more strip malls, small industrial sites and more residential neighborhoods. I noticed a pronounced Vietnamese flavor to many of the businesses for a mile or two (and noticed another pocket of Vietnamese businesses and restaurants upon leaving town, just across the river in Gretna or Harvey). I started to see a few dodgy-looking motels, I stopped at one to inquire and was quoted around $45/night. Thinking that I could always come back to this one if nothing else panned out, I proceeded on into the city.
New Orleans can be a confusing town to the uninitiated and I was no exception, only having passed through a couple of times before and never for more than a day or two. Hwy 90 did some weird things and put me onto some sort of Interstate, though I couldn't tell if I was headed toward downtown or not, so I got off again pretty quickly. The part of town I found myself in was dark and foreboding, a tangle of industry, soaring highways in the sky, underpasses and a few businesses. Lost with a totally useless map, and now probably at least 10 miles from the motel mentioned earlier, I stopped at a well-lit intersection across from a McDonalds to check my guidebook for hostel listings. I called a few that were booked-up but the least-appealing of the lot did have a vacancy and I had until 10pm to get there and check in. I headed down one street that I thought might get me somewhere but it turned out to lead through a mostly-abandoned, totally-unmarked (roads) and very frightening Upper 9th Ward (I found this out later on my tour with Chris when we took the same street). After passing block after block of despondent boarded-up houses, I did a U-turn and stopped at a gas station to ask how to get downtown. The woman working didn't speak English well, and told me the route by Interstate (I hate it that most people, and online mapping programs, only think of travel in terms of Interstates).
Eager to get out of this grim area, I followed her advice and got on the Interstate, taking the cruelly ironic "Superdome" exit downtown...just seeing that word on a sign put images of horror and misery in my mind. I shot through some rough-looking downtown areas before getting to Canal St., which I recognized as a main thoroughfare. Now at least I was somewhere on the maps that I had and could get myself going in the right direction toward the hostel (after some false starts and frustration, of course). The downtown appeared to be in better shape than the more outlying area I'd just come from in the northeast part of the city, but it was still pretty quiet compared to my memories of it from previous visits.
I eventually found the place, The Marquette House. It was unlike any other hostel I'd ever seen; it was a large collection of buildings that might've formerly been crappy apartments, laid out around a sort of pathway, with several hundred beds in total. Most were full with itinerant workers doing various construction and manual labor jobs around town. When the hurricane hit, it took out a very large percentage of lower-rent housing stock, so now there are very few habitable places and consequently rents everywhere are quite high. My roommate at the hostel was a worker in town from Houston and he was paying something like $600 a month to sleep in a hostel, with no privacy and just a bunk in a bunkbed to himself, strangers coming and going constantly and kind of a rough crowd overall, not your typical backpacking European teenagers.
The strange guy at the desk of the hostel had told me where I could find an internet cafe, so in several trips I hauled my heavy gear to the room, which I couldn't find on the first try, I mistakenly went into some other dark rooms where people were already sleeping; I had to go back and re-check the directions at the desk. Such a weird setup. When I first got there my roommate was gone and the other two bunks were empty so I was able to lay out my bunk with the lights on, on later returns to the room at night it was always dark. I rode out to find this internet cafe, and hopefully find something to eat, because I was hungry. The cafe ended up being a lot farther than I thought, it struck me then that New Orleans is a bigger city than I'd remembered it before, it probably took me 15-20 minutes to get to this place that didn't seem far at all on the map. I think that all of the vegetarian-friendly restaurants I passed at that hour had just closed so I opted for a cookie or some other baked good with my tea at the coffeeshop. It was smoky and there were nerdy gamers sitting right behind me playing Magick®, but I was able to get an internet terminal and spend a few hours checking the e-mail and writing an update. This place was open 24/7 so there were no worries about time, I probably stayed until 2 or 3.
On my ride home the streets were dark and quiet and bumpy (and this was on a main road, New Orleans has some of the worst streets I've ever seen outside of India, the only other city that gave it a run for its money was Brooklyn/NYC). Apparently these ball-breaking and treacherous roads were a fixture in the city long before Katrina, New Orleans is reported to have very poor public services in general. After nearly being ejected from my seat several times these roads got me to standing on the floorboards of my scooter, knees sprung to absorb the irregularities. I got back to the hostel, locked my scooter to the metal stairs out front (off the sidewalk and road but in plain view) and prayed that it would still be there in the morning. I found may way to the room in the pitch dark, when I got there the AC was cranked, there was a radio on broadcasting Fox News(!) and my roommate was snoring. I quietly got into bed and tried to fall asleep, which didn't take too long since it had been quite a full day. I probably dreamt of rogue highwaymen and deserted shotgun houses, with snippets of right-wing talk radio drifting in improbably, in typically nonsensical dream fashion.
I awoke late in the morning, hung around the hostel for a bit and finally met my roommate Brian face to face, he'd only worked half a day that day. We chatted for a while, I asked him about living in New Orleans and what he did there, he said he'd come a few months earlier because he'd heard that there was a lot of work to be had. So he just took a bus and showed up and started asking around, eventually he found some work...I believe it was hauling rubble or some other kind of relatively unskilled manual labor. Brian appeared to have virtually no belongings with him, he worked hard in the day doing various jobs and then spent most of his money at night drinking. I asked him if he was saving any money and he said that he wasn't. He made a decent wage (I can't remember what exactly it was, maybe $15/hr.) but as I've mentioned, he paid a lot of that in rent to the hostel and spent the rest of it on food, drinking and entertaining himself. I imagine one could save a little if they had full-time work and watched their money, but as usual it's not the workingmen who really profit, it's the contractors they work for (more on them later).
I headed downtown for some lunch, remembering a good Indian restaurant called Tandoori Chicken on Canal St. that I'd eaten in with Draplin the year before. After some vexing one-way streets and unintentional detours, I found the place and was heartened to see that it was still in business. I had a hearty trip to the buffet (or two) and talked with a nice woman who worked there about the state of their business since the hurricane. She said that they'd sustained some damage and hardship, but they're on the second floor, so it wasn't nearly as bad as so many others had gotten it. I noticed that most of the downtown area still seemed relatively "open," though it was certainly missing a lot of the vibrancy that I saw in it before. I didn't see people dancing in the street, there was only one vendor selling wares (incense, jewelry, etc.) on the sidealk on Canal, and several businesses looked ready for the wrecking ball.
After surveying the downtown for a while and standing in traffic on Canal St. for what seemed like an eternity, I went over to check out the French Quarter. This is the part of town that I'd seen the most of before, and as I'd heard, it fared pretty well during Katrina due to being built on higher ground than other parts of the city. Almost all shops and houses appeared to be open and inhabited, a smattering of tourists (and the myriad of tourist shops, now selling ironic post-Katrina shirts in addition to the usual tasteless, shocking, and "I Got Wasted in New Orleans!!!" variety) were about and I'd say it was 75% "business as usual" in this part of town. I parked my scooter and went into several tourist shops, sweating in my riding jacket as I walked around in the oppressive 90+ degree heat. I found one computer place that offered internet terminals, and even though it was overpriced I spent the minimum 15 or 20 minutes cooling off with their air conditioning. As an aside, I'm always bummed at how little the Cajun and Zydeco cultures are visible in NOLA, you'd think it would be more prevalent but I suppose New Orleans has its own musical traditions and cultures distinct from those other southern Louisianans. Most of the Cajun influence you see in NOLA seems to be relegated to hot sauces, language jokes and a few cheesy compilation CDs.
I strolled for a while and took a few pictures, but didn't really buy much. Oh, I almost forgot, I went into a stripper club on Bourbon St., but it was pretty pathetically dead on a weekday mid-afternoon, the few guys who were there when I entered soon left, and I was the only one remaining. Not a good vibe, that means getting the collective attention/pressure of however-many girls are working, on you, to pay their wages. Unfortunately for them, I don't throw down for lap dances, they're a waste of money and don't do anything for me. I'd rather dispense several dollars to a number of dancers and look at a variety of bodies (and bask in a range of cheap perfumes) for my money.
After handing over a fistful of dollars to the local sleaze economy I felt like finding a coffeeshop for some reason. I swore that I'd passed a few in the Quarter before, but went up and down seemingly every one-way street numerous times on my scooter trying to find one, to no avail. During this quest it started raining, and the roads got a little slick, so I pulled over and took shelter for a few minutes under someone's balcony. I've heard that these brief, sudden showers are commonplace in this part of the country, and fortunately it soon passed. Having seen the doubledecker porches, gingerbread French houses, street artists and bare breasts, passing innumerable vendors of daquiris, shiny necklaces and the occult, and smelling the bile of human upchuck, I had gotten my fill of the French Quarter, and sought to see the uglier side of the coin.
I got lost trying to drive in a direction I thought might have been devestated, but had the good fortune of calling a local scooterist named Chris who had contacted me by e-mail. His combination of timing and kindness was perfect, he came to meet me where I was, cutting across town in great time during rush hour. He led me from the Greyhound station where I was, up to the northwest part of the city where one of the levees had been breached. We only had a couple of hours of daylight and there was so much to see that we didn't spend a long time in any one place, I just got the "sampler platter" if you will. The scenes that unfolded in front of my scooter will haunt me forever...as we got away from downtown we saw more and more abandoned businesses and houses with piles of rubble near the street, huge sections of low-income housing that had been boarded up and the tenants never allowed back, other apartment buildings standing vacant, and eventually whole middle-class neighborhoods devestated, quiet and empty. We stopped near where one of the levees broke at 17th St. and took a look at some houses. Here you can see me pointing to a water line on the outside of a house, some 8 feet high. A look into a missing window revealed a snapshot of someone's bedroom, most everything still molding and rotting away in place. Some fared better than others and will be gutted and reclaimed, but many of the houses in this area had major structural damage and will have to be torn down. On the way out we saw one house that had drifted entirely off its foundation and planted itself partially over a road.
From this neighborhood we traveled about 3 miles east, past City Park to the New London area, another levee breach. Here was a very similar story, middle-class neighborhood with your typical ranch-style suburban houses, obliterated in an instant when a levee nearby gave way. As we drove I started noticing the numbers and symbols spray-painted on the outside walls of the houses, in some cases they were near the roofline, this indicates a search done by boat when the area was still underwater. Many of these had a second set of symbols from a later date, spraypainted lower, from when the waters had receded. Usually there was a number "0" in the bottom quadrant of the X symbol, this position indicates dead bodies found inside. However in this New London section, we happened to be stopped in front of a house with a "5" in that quadrant, and that blew my mind and really disturbed me, especially seeing the inside. These scenes reminded me of reading The Stand as a teenager, visions of Americana gone horribly wrong, with mass deaths and people and places left abandoned and rotting. Horrific.
After this stop Chris led me along the southern edge of Lake Ponchartrain and over to the area where I'd been lost the night before. I'll tell you, it wasn't much more optimistic in the daytime. We headed south into what is known as the Upper 9th Ward, an area that didn't get it quite as bad as the famed Lower 9th (but still got it really bad). One of the strangest sights I saw was this ghetto of townhomes, I don't recall exactly what the story was with them but maybe Chris can tell me again. In any case, it was really, really a strange and desolate sight. As we continued the tour of the Upper 9th we came upon the black neighborhood. The doors were wide open so I took a peek inside, hoping not to encounter anyone squatting or living in there, as far as I could tell the place didn't see much traffic.
At this point is was getting dark, so we headed back somewhat toward the downtown, taking in a few more sights along the way. Chris led us to a small neighborhood bar that he liked, which seemed more like a speakeasy to me since you had to be buzzed in by the bartender (they'd gotten robbed a few times recently and had to take this measure to stop it happening). I tried to absorb what I'd just seen and asked Chris a handful of questions on the state of things in his town.
Here are a few statistics about New Orleans, gleaned from conversations with Chris and other sources:
The city of New Orleans has lost nearly 2/3rds of its pre-Katrina population, more than 60% of the people are gone and have not returned in the 15+ months since the storm. Imagine your town or ANY town instantly losing that percentage of people and think about how city services and other quality-of-life matters would suffer. Something like 60,000 poor blacks were evacuated and have no means to return, and not much to return to if they could.
The cleanup process is painfully slow, out-of-town workers and contractors don't always have New Orleans' best interests at heart and the infrastructure is still not back to normal (garbage pickup is irregular at best, and some areas still don't have water or electrical service). Apparently gentrification and land-grabbers aren't as bad as some people had imagined (visions of New Orleans being rebuilt as a luxury resort for affluent whites), though the population demographics have shifted from a strong black majority to nearly half-and-half black and white.
Chris is frustrated and has grappled with depression over what has happened, but he implores people to visit if they can, and to help any way they can, to defend New Orleans and rebuild her.
I don't think I could say things as well as Chris has said them in a recent e-mail to me, so, in the words of a native New Orleanian:
PJ,
Not too much has changed here since your visit. New Orleans is still dirty and debris covered - and they (the powers that be - city hall - Mayor Nagin - FEMA - and the rest) have decided to stop debris pick up in several parts of the city (by ZIP code). By fucking zip code. I live in 70115 but that stretches in a weird shape across the city. Me and Dorie's neighborhood is somewhat clean - but a house just 4 houses down is just getting around to renovation so a big pile of wood and plaster sits outside on the curb. Four or so blocks away in the same zip code there is pile after pile of debris and Andrew's street is much worse. Weeks ago when FEMA was still collecting debris they busted a water line in front of the house next to him so water is bubbling up from the lawn. Anyway the city is a mess and is suffering from really poor planning and leadership.
The National Guard is still here (thank God - some people don't like it but I do). A friend of mine made stickers "U.S. out of New Orleans" I'll see if I can get you one. PJ sorry I'm a little scatterbrained - I guess I'm suffering from a little bit of depression. It's not easy living here sometimes. Anyway back to the National Guard (it's the LOUISIANA National Guard) they are patrolling the areas like the Lower Nine and New Orleans East the areas where not very many people are living. They seem to be helping to keep crime down - since the New Orleans Police Department lost some 200 officers post-Katrina. (pre- and post-Katrina, just part of our vocabulary now).
For a while there crime was getting out of hand again - multiple killings every day but things are slowing down again. The murder rate will be lower than it's been in 25 years. Murder is just something you get use to living around - I lost a friend 10 years ago but that's a story for another time. Traffic lights - the city can't keep them running - either faulty wiring or drunk drivers knocking them down. Drunk driving is way out of hand here. Part people drowning their sorrows and part out-of-town workers living it up and drinking it up.
Don't get me started on the fucking out of town contractors - ripping people off for doing half-ass work. Some of these people are outright crooks. Some of my friends hired some contractors to hang new sheetrock in a home they bought before the storm (we
gutted it the day before Katrina hit - once again long story and a story for another time). Anyway my friends have been having a hell of a time hiring contractors - they finally found some to do the sheetrock work and when they where there they stole a bunch of their shit that they had salvaged from their apartment that took 6 feet of water during the storm. Rotten fucking bastards - stealing from my friends who lost damn near everything in the storm - and they can't find construction workers to finish their house. This house is raised 6 feet off the ground, every other house on their street took on water. Their street is covered with piles of debris. Oh wait there's more about them - a couple of weeks ago some petty thief tried to steal the copper water pipes from under their house - attached to the house - you know scrap copper is like $2.50 a pound right now. So you can see some of what we have to deal with here.
Andrew - hell that's another story - told you that he was hit by a truck, which destroyed his TwistN'Go - he's been fighting with his insurance company over his flood insurance/home owner's insurance - fighting for every penny - many many people are forced to do this - but they won't give you the money until you get some work done...but there are nothing but crooks here taking money and doing shitty work. The same day Andrew was hit a guy was hit in the French Quarter on his Vespa - Somebody ran a stop sign and plowed him down - didn't know the guy - but he's pretty bad off - broken arm, ribs etc. Two weeks later I had to lay my ET4 down to avoid being hit from somebody running a broken traffic light on my way to work - skinned knee, twisted ankle - scratched the paint in several places but no REAL harm done - the bitch didn't even stop.
Anyway I hope this helps, I'll write more later if I think of anything else - I guess you can say I'm angry - angry at the out of town workers - the slow pace of recovery - the fact that petty crimes are slowing the pace of recovery.
Oh one more thing, a study from the University of New Orleans published a poll stating that 1/3 of people in the Metro new Orleans area (the city and all the suburbs) stated that they either plan to or would consider leaving the area in the next year if conditions don't improve here soon. 200,000 people living in the city now - almost 550,000 living in Metairie (one of the suburbs) that number is up post-Katrina.
I just saw on the morning news that they found another body in the Lower Ninth ward yesterday. 16 month after Katrina and they are still finding bodies.
I will always be here - I was born here and intend to die here - this is my native land and I will fight for it.
Defend New Orleans
Thanks, Chris
This post has been far too long in coming. I urge everyone to take a look at all of my Katrina Aftermath photos on Flickr. The photos are nothing like being there, but they give you an idea. If you can go to New Orleans or the Gulf Coast, and see it firsthand, you should. If you can donate something to the relief effort that is still very much underway, you should do that too. Chris recommends the Red Cross, Common Ground, and Catholic Charities as good organizations. New Orleans needs people, it needs supplies, it still needs a lot of help. In lieu of anyone I know giving me a gift this winter holiday season, I would ask that you instead make a donation to Common Ground.
Chris and I met up with his girlfriend (in the photo) at a bar in the French Quarter, then rode over to meet another scooterist named Andrew for dinner at a middle eastern restaurant near the internet cafe. Andrew was a big guy on a little scooter, but for some reason I don't seem to have any photos of him (though I did interview him on video). After I parted ways with Chris and Andrew I went to the internet cafe and did another update, and got back to the hostel pretty late. The next morning I got up an hour or so before checkout (probably 11am) and hauled all of my stuff back down to the scooter. I cruised around a little more, went back downtown to send a FedEx package of videos to Craig, couldn't find anywhere decent to eat, and headed across the bridge and over the Mississippi, following 90 west for a while toward Cajun country.
Posted by pj at December 6, 2006 03:22 AM