I was sixteen, traveling with my friend Ricky, who was half a generation my senior and my falconry mentor. He warned me about the place.
"No good looking women, either."
We were still half an hour's drive from our destination, a friend's home in the outlying neighborhood of Arabi, not exactly a suburb of New Orleans, in St. Bernard Parish. Flashing past the window of Ricky's 280ZX were chunks of Styrofoam afloat in flooded marsh. White egrets stood on one foot in the median and perched in low salt scrub along the highway. Whirling flocks of blackbirds mimicked smoke from the cooling stacks along the Industrial Canal.
What one could see then of New Orleans East was dirty, and anyone could be excused for finding other parts of the city in similar disrepair. But in fact there was nothing dirty about Arabi. It was a place merely lived in, a neighborhood like an extension of your living room, with the diner plates still on the TV tray in the morning. Here a population of working class people, roughly equal parts rural and urban stock, somehow found more in common with each other than with anyone else. That was how New Orleans looked and how it worked: one neighborhood at a time.
That New Orleans looks (and works?) different now hardly bears saying. Most of Arabi is destroyed and much of New Orleans East beyond recognition. The chief concern before rebuilding can be discussed is what to do with the wreckage. That story is told by Peter H. King of the LA Times (in You've Got to See It to Really Believe It):
"...Then they fell to talking casually about the scale of destruction. Sharafkhani said it looked to him like nine out of 10 houses in the flood zones would have to come down.
It was, he said, unbelievable.
The foreman nodded.
"It's like someone came through and dropped bombs every couple of blocks. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
"It's a bulldoze job," the hard hat concluded, "that's for sure."
"Back on the road, Sharafkhani started to work out a math problem aloud. He figured, conservatively, that 100,000 houses would have to come down in Orleans Parish. This number left out St. Bernard and other parishes in greater New Orleans, and also all the cars and boats and commercial structures that would require disposal somewhere.
"Each house, he said, would produce two or three truckloads of debris, for a total of as many as 300,000 truckloads— and the major landfills he'd visited earlier were straining to accommodate 400 or so trucks daily. He did not bother to divide the number of truckloads by the number of days, or weeks, or months it would take to handle them all. He reduced the calculation to a single word: "Years."
"We are talking years."
6 comments:
My impression of NO 2001 was that it was a very dirty, grimy city. The air had a petroleum stench to it as well. Baton Rouge was the same too. The debate rages over how much tax money should be used on a city 12' below sea level with a big lake to the north, the ocean to the south and the Miss. river in the middle.
There was a blogger writing from Ankara, Turkey right along those lines recently (my comments here); and there's something to be said for the argument.
But clearly, one can't decide the fate of a city on this basis alone. There are too many others built in equally perilous circumstances. Should we destroy them all, or should we abandon them when they're destroyed by whatever natural distaster will eventually strike them?
I don't know. But dirty as it is, New Orleans is a very special place. It's as valuable a city as any you care to show me in the world.
Not so much Baton Rouge...though I certainly don't hate this town and have lived happily here eight years now. BR and NO are, among other things, cities along a major industrial and commercial corridor in a poor state. We have all the problems you can imagine coming from that.
And yet---If you can't find a few good reasons to live here, or anywhere, I'd say you have a hard life ahead of you!
The trouble is, as Goesh says, that it will take 40- 60 BILLION in outside money to fix this "like it was", with every chance of its happening again. Some of the other disaster- ripe cities, like those in the California earthquake zone, can be fitted with sophisticated buildings that don't fall down, like those in Japan, but NO's situation itself seems the problem.
I am not saying the place shouldn't be rebuilt. Certainly historic places like the Quarter, which pretty well withstood the storm because it was built on actual land, should be. Also, though nobody seems to say much about it, we need a commercial port somewhere near there, for grain even more than for gas and oil (which have Houston), and the infrastructure to support it.
But two pessimistic thoughts-- or perhaps I should simply call them realistic-- remain.
First: do we really want to create a brand new flood- prone set of slums? What can we do to change the lives of the poorest there-- IF ANYTHING?
Second-- less dire-- won't a recreated Frrench Quarter etc. inevitably become a mere (!) Venice-- a ghost city for the rich and toursts? (Is this a Bad Thing?-- discuss among yourselves).
It wont be NOLA past, nor have much connection to the port we need. All that is gone, and despite the shouting and pandering of politicians, we have no idea what will replace it.
There's a strong undercurrent of that feeling here, of saving certain parts of New Orleans--the Quarter, ports and business district---but not others. The West Bank communities are pretty much fine, and the Garden District can be swept tidy. New Orleans East might revert to wilderness.
It's not really my issue, though I have real affection for certain of the lost places. I think market forces will chanel investment to the areas of greatest short term profit. The effect, regardless of good intentions and public policy, will be to make of New Orleans a playground for tourism and those commercial ventures tied to the port.
Many would say this has already happened and that Katrina just made the trend easier to complete. Again, I don't know what's right. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
There has to be some kind of New Orleans for the same reason Thomas Jefferson set out to buy it 200 years ago: We need a port at the mouth of the Mississippi.
And the workers need a place to live.
But is there the political will to (a) rethink the city and (b)rethink the whole environment--wetlands, barrier islands, all of it?
I don't have any faith in political will as a force for change. The phrase implies doing something no one wants to do, something that will take longer than one news cycle or one term of office to complete. We don't do that sort of thing any more.
What politician can afford to act with foresight? We can barely bring ourselves to speak about it. Whatever isn't immediately profitable is a plain liability.
I'm ranting now but my point is (or was) that whatever is to come of this situation---of maybe any situation in America---will be a byproduct of decisions made to generate short term profit. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, by itself, but it makes foresight (and political will) a moot issue.
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