New Orleans

I just got back from my first ever visit to New Orleans.

For the Fourth of July weekend, the firm hosted a cookout in that city as part of the Essence Music Festival celebration.

Most of the staff of the firm stayed in a nice house on Tchoupitoulas Street, about a five or ten minute drive from Bourbon Street. Tchoupitoulas Street borders the Mississippi River, and I could see the ships at the loading docks and the huge cranes around them.

One of the places that I visited was the 9th Ward- the hardest hit area by Katrina, though it was evident that the whole city was hard hit by that storm. The 9th Ward felt eerie. As we drove through, I could imagine what it must have been like before Katrina. There were lots of nice houses, the weather felt great, and I'm sure people spent a lot of time outside socializing with each other.

Now, most of the houses are abandoned. Many appear not to have been touched since the storm, as litter and debris remains strewn across their yards. The most eerie aspect was seeing the dates spray painted on the houses. After Katrina, crews went through checking the homes for bodies. When they checked a house, they marked it with an X and the date. About one in three or four houses still has that mark. I saw "9/13 X," "9/25 X," "10/1 X", etc. haphazardly spray painted in orange on the walls.

I also spent quite a bit of time on Bourbon Street. On the morning of July 5th, at about 2:30 am, I was walking down Bourbon Street with thousands of others. Just ahead of me, I heard the "Pop! Pop! Pop!" of gun fire. It was a unique sensation and sight to see hundreds of people suddenly turn toward me and begin running. My initial fear was not of being shot, but of being trampled. I darted sideways and leaped up on a windowsill of one of the clubs. Leaning back against the glass as far as I could, I watched as hundreds of people ran past me. It also interested me to see a police officer across the street just casually watching all of this from the entrance to a restaurant. Eventually, people stopped running. I peaked around the corner of the window and hopped down. Police officers on horseback slowly made their way up the street toward the site of the shooting. I headed in the other direction and caught a cab back to the house.

I like New Orleans. It is a city that I want to visit again. After spending three days and nights there (without much sleep), my impression is that this is a city with soul, a city whose main inhabitants are unapologetically poor, but who know how to have fun and enjoy life. They sit in the streets and on their porches as the sun goes down, laughing and talking. Many of the buildings here looked old and dilapidated, but not run down. They teem with life.

But Katrina continues to have this city reeling. The French Quarter and Bourbon Street will stay a thriving force due to tourism, the incredible architecture, restaurants, hotels, clubs, and its reputation as a place to have fun. And New Orleans will continue to exist because of its location as a port city for the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. But driving along the levy wall in the 9th Ward, I felt that this place is not safe. The 9th Ward and the city remain a "soup bowl" below sea level, just waiting for another strong storm to come in a wipe it out again.

As one cab driver told me, "Everyone here now lives off of Uncle FEMA." Indeed, I saw the FEMA trailers clustered together in the 9th Ward. Another cab driver, a native to New Orleans, had an interesting perspective on Katrina and New Orleans. "When they blew the levies," he said, "they made it so the French Quarter stayed dry and the poor people got flooded."

I hope New Orleans can recover. I would have loved to see the city before Katrina. Bringing it all back is a problem, though. Restoring New Orleans is taking and will take massive amounts of money. And it is all so fragile. . . At least the river, the gulf, and Lake Pontchartrain were all beautiful and calm during my days there.

Universal Health Care Now,

Nathan Marshburn