New Orleans

It's been a full week, and I still haven't written about Hurricane Katrina's effects on New Orleans. I'm not the news addict that my friend Jim is, so I haven't been following the ongoing tragedy all that closely, certainly not closely enough to dissect just how inept the governmental response to the disaster has been.

Still, I've been meaning to write something.

Readers who don't know me personally may not know that I went to college in New Orleans. Indeed, I went to Tulane University, graduating with a Computer Science degree from there in 1991.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Tulane and I were a pretty bad mismatch, and I wasn't especially fond of the city either.

New Orleans is a party city, and Tulane is a party school. And I am just not a party kinda guy. I don't dance, I dislike beer, I'm certainly not a heavy drinker in any event, and I had no interest in the fraternity scene. I'm a thinker, I have these weird, fringe hobbies (science fiction and comic books), and I had a better study ethic than many of my peers in the incoming freshman class. When I declared my major sophomore year in computer science, I ended up having a pretty good time immersing myself in geek culture, but frankly I felt closer to some of the faculty than to most of the other students. It's probably telling that I'm only in contact with two college friends: John Keating and Dan Aharon, both roommates of mine. John was another CS geek, while Dan was a theatre guy who later became a computer guy.

I spent much of my time on campus, sometimes venturing out to the nearby restaurants, and New Orleans Original Daiquiris. I enjoyed Audubon Park and Zoo, and spent many afternoons lounging about the former. My regular comics shop was Gold Mine Records on Magazine Street, until the manager left and I switched to mail order for a while. And I often made a Friday afternoon outing to downtown where I'd eat at the Jackson Brewery, buy some music at Tower Records or a used store, and perhaps stop at the Cafe du Monde. (An after-midnight trip to the open-all-hours cafe was also a fun trip.) And of course uptown (where Tulane is) and downtown were connected by the historic St. Charles Avenue streetcar line.

I was more interested in the art galleries and stores on Royal Street than in the drinking and music on Bourbon Street. (In retrospect I regret that I didn't visit the jazz clubs once in a while, but at the time I had no interest in jazz; this was an age of The Who and Jethro Tull and Roxy Music in my musical tastes.)

But New Orleans was also a dying city. Word was that the city's last boom period came in the oil boom of (I guess) the 1960s, but I don't know if that was true. By the late 1980s it was a city mainly propped by through tourism, and its main efforts at civic improvement were to attract more tourists: Revising the famous zoo (by 1987 it barely resembled the zoo in Cat People), building a new aquarium, adding a riverfront streetcar line, building upscale malls downtown, and so forth.

But crime was terrible. Just before my senior year, a graduate student I'd been working with that summer was shot dead outside a bar in a botched robbery. Friends of mine also knew people who had been murdered just off-campus, sometimes in broad daylight. One year the newspaper, the Times-Picayune (what a wonderfully southern name!), ran a graphic of a city map with a black dot where every murder in the city that year had occurred; it was an ebbing-and-flowing sea of black with a little haven of white where Tulane was located.

My senior year someone from industry (meaning, the computer biz) came in to advise us on looking for jobs after school. His main advice: "Go to the airport and go anywhere else."

The city streets were riddled with potholes. There simply wasn't enough money to maintain the infrastructure. Some streets had potholes as big as my car. In my four years there, I only saw one street that looked newly-paved: The street outside a hospital, which I suspected the hospital had paid for itself.

And then there was the heat, the humidity, and the politics. I can't stand southern politics (which are far, far to the right of my own), and that alone probably would have sent me elsewhere once I graduated.

So, New Orleans: Nice place to visit. Glad I don't live there anymore.

We had two big rainstorms that I remember when I lived there, including one the final summer (of two) I stayed in the city. Both times, many roads throughout the city flooded. I remember people canoeing down St. Charles Avenue. My and Dan's apartment that last summer fortunately had an elevated driveway, so my car was safe; I knew people whose cars were effectively destroyed, sitting in four feet of water. We were keenly aware of the fact that the city is below sea level. (Check out the Cross-section of New Orleans at Wikipedia.)

I don't think anyone who knew the city was under any illusions that New Orleans would be at dire risk in the case of a major hurricane, especially if the levees were breached. (Diane Patterson has written some good rants on the Bush administration having its head up its asses, here and here.)

The parts of New Orleans I know reportedly got off pretty easy: The French Quarter and uptown got a decent splash of water, but didn't actually get submerged. It's not clear to me how badly they got looted, and of course there are the downtown fires. But I've lately heard reports that the police and National Guard are more firmly in charge of the city and that order is being restored. Of course, there's not much of anyone left there, so by now the forces of order may actually outnumber the rest of the populace.

I'm also pleased to read that the animals at the zoo fared reasonably well, all things considered. (I doubt most people consider that animals at zoos are completely reliant on humans in disasters such as these.) Sadly, the Aquarium of the America fared less well.

I know hardly anyone in New Orleans anymore. An APAhacking acquaintance of mine apparently drove up to Madison. I haven't heard from any of the faculty members at Tulane - actually haven't heard from them in several years. I'm hoping they're all okay. Some of the may be retired by now, which means they may not have evacuated with the rest of the Tulane staff. When it looks like things are returning to normal, I will try to drop them a line.

This disaster hits me closer to home than the World Trade Tower attacks, but it's still a weird mixed feeling. My reaction to death and disaster is always oddly detached and not really at all what other people feel. It's one reason I tend not to socialize much with folks who are reacting strongly to a disaster; my own reaction is generally not appreciated.

Some have suggested that it might not be a good idea to rebuild New Orleans, especially without going to the effort to raise it above sea level. (How much dirt would that take, anyway?) This has mostly met with howls of outrage: How can we not rebuild? Isn't it human nature to defy the opposition and rebuild in the face of devastation?

I have a simpler question to ask: Can New Orleans be rebuilt?

I don't mean the physical buildings. Even the massive engineering feat of raising the city ten or twenty feet is probably achievable. What I mean is whether the people will come back and make it a city again.

New Orleans is not an especially big city, and as we've learned it contains a huge number of poor people. The citizens of New Orleans have now been scattered around the country in a strange modern diaspora. Will those people return? If it takes three or six or twelve months to make the city habitable again, what happens to the poor? Unless they're trapped like criminals in their shelters in various cities, they're likely to disperse into the local environment and may not have the means to return to New Orleans - not that there's likely to be much waiting for them.

And how about those with money? How many of the rich and the middle class will say, "Screw this, I'm going to go live somewhere safer?" Many retail businesses survive on a pretty thin margin - certainly so thin that weeks, never mind months, without any income will drive them right out of business. How badly will the tourist trade fall off? Heck, they were talking on ESPN today that the New Orleans Saints practically had one foot out the door before the hurricane. How much government assistance will be needed to get the city back to being barely-livable again?

What makes New Orleans different from almost any other major city that could have been hit is this: New Orleans was already a dying city. It's not a place people flock to live. To be sure, many people live there because they love the city. But are there enough of them?

My outlook may be colored by my dislike of the city. But, I think these are legitimate concerns. This isn't New York or San Francisco which got hit by this disaster, this is a much smaller, much poorer city with a much weaker economy, and which faces some unique challenges due to its geography. Can it survive?

I just don't know.

John sent me this photo under the subject, "Bucket night at the Boot."
The Boot is a dive bar just off-campus, about 2 blocks from the Tulane library.
I used to live about 4 blocks from here.