Spirit of Mardi Gras Shines Through Katrina’s Enduring Shadow in N.O.

By Darien Bates and Rachel Kranz

The first Mardi Gras after Katrina may have been run on a skeleton crew — but it happened. Yet amidst the elaborate costumes, colorful parades, and 150-year-old ceremonies, the effects of the hurricane’s devastation could be felt everywhere, from the reduced staffs at restaurants, hotels, and car-rental agencies to the vastly diminished crowds along the parade routes and on Bourbon Street , long known as Party Central for Mardi Gras tourists.

“Everybody just had to put in double time,” said Teddy Johnson, who has waited tables at the city’s famed Rib Room for 15 years. “The guests didn’t know how short-staffed we are, ‘cause things are getting done.” Normally, there are eight or nine people working in the kitchen; this year, there were only three. From 10 waiters, the restaurant made do with four. Instead of eight door staff, the hotel had only two, so that restaurant workers like Teddy had to help pick up the slack — and so did managers. Over at the Inn on Bourbon Street, the manager could be seen vacuuming the lobby.

At first glance, though, the casual viewer might not have noticed the strain. The French Quarter, the city’s oldest neighborhood, was built on high ground and survived remarkably well the physical effects of the hurricane and subsequent flooding. Standing on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse, a visitor would see only hordes of tourists, decked in layers of green, purple, and gold beads, holding giant plastic green “hurricane” tankards or white plastic cups of margaritas, wandering through the street to the accompaniment of blasting rock music from Bourbon Street’s dozens of bars and strip clubs.

But a little ways down Toulouse at Miss Hillery’s, a beloved French Quarter fixture, the effects of Katrina became apparent. The restaurant, operating normally with a staff of 31, was making do with only four people to handle the Mardi Gras crowds, causing it to forego its famous breakfasts and to serve its reduced Mardi Gras dinner menu with plastic ware and Styrofoam pods. The food was reliably delicious, but the harried waitress repeatedly reminded her roomful of tables to be patient with the slow service.

Restaurants weren’t the only institutions operating with reduced numbers. Firefighter Wayne Williams, when asked about the department’s readiness to handle Mardi Gras, acknowledged that “there are a few missing here or there.” Spoken to at 4 a.m. Mardi Gras night, he had been on duty since 7 a.m. that morning, almost 24 hours straight.

Madi Gras attendance was down a reported 15 percent this year — a surprisingly small decline, given the negative publicity surrounding Katrina — but crime was down even further. Normally, a Mardi Gras celebration engenders more than 1,500 arrests; this year, there were fewer than 600.

Whether or not the city’s already overburdened and understaffed police and fire departments would be able to handle the strain on the city’s resources was the subject of intense debate leading into the Mardi Gras this year, as was the question of whether or not the city should go forward at all with the two weeks ofparades, ceremonies, and celebration that culminated on February 28, “Fat Tuesday.”

Was the city foolish to waste its money and resources on what was essentially a big, boozy party? Or was holding Mardi Gras a point of pride, a proclamation to the world and to the city itself that New Orleans will survive? Was Mardi Gras primarily a way of bringing money into the city and reassuring nervous tourists that they could once again bring their business back to the Crescent City ? Or, as Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Elie wrote, was the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras a chance to remind the New Orleans diaspora of all the good reasons to come home?

The debates over Mardi Gras evoked the larger debates over the future of the city itself. Although New Orleans’ most historic neighborhoods — the French Quarter, the Faubourg Marigny, and the Garden District — survived the hurricane and the flooding that followed, some 80 percent of the city was devastated by the storm. New Orleans Parish, with nearly a half million people before the storm, is down to something like 150,000. These numbers mask a demographic shift as well: a city that was once 68 percent African American is currently only about 50 percent Black.

At first glance, the streets looked normal, if deserted. A surprising number of houses appeared intact. The neighborhoods, it seemed, are only waiting for their residents to move back in.

But then it became clear that block after block is abandoned, from the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Lakeview to the working-class Ninth Ward. House after house is marked with the red spray-painted FEMA “X,” the X’s quadrants showing when the house was inspected, what condition it was in, how many living people remained in it, and how many dead bodies were found.

A still closer look revealed that many of the houses are gutted. Many more reek of mold and are rotting from within. A wide ochre bands, the water line, run horizontally along each house, indicating that the toxic sludge mixed with river or canal water finally settled at four or five or six feet after initially rising several feet higher. The street lights still don’t work. Neither do the traffic lights.

Here and there, a white trailer sits in a yard or driveway, one of the temporary homes provided by FEMA for residents to live in while restoring their houses. These FEMA trailers have been the subject of many complaints. Some residents claim that they waited inordinately long to receive their trailer, had to submit multiple requests, or were made to wait for trailers far longer than were residents of wealthier neighborhoods. Other residents point out that the trailers are not habitable unless they can be hooked up to water and power, which is not always possible in the devastated areas.

Electrification is a significant problem, though, ironically, it may be one of the few concerns greater in the wealthier neighborhoods than in the less prosperous ones. In upper-middle-class Lakeview, where the lines run underground, power must be supplied with extreme care. With so many houses in questionable shape, restoring power to an entire block could spark fires. In the working-class Ninth Ward, where power lines crisscross the sky attached to wooden poles, it’s much easier to hook up an individual house or trailer.

Yet should some in the city have their way, the Ninth Ward will be written off or at least relegated to last place in the development queue. A controversial proposal by the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Land Institute (ULI),released last fall, suggested rebuilding from high ground to low, which would favor the wealthier neighborhoods over the poorer ones. James Reese of Bring Back New Orleans, the influential business coalition formed in response to Katrina, was quoted in the September 8, 2005 edition of the Wall Street Journal as saying that the city would have to come back demographically different, that wealthy white investors would pull their money out of the city if they could not be assured of reduced crime, a problem which many commentators have implicitly or explicitly associated with the city’s African-American residents.

A few weeks later, Alfonso Jackson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), was quoted in the Houston Chronicle as saying that post-Katrina New Orleans would not have as many Black people, and that as a result, HUD would not be funding New Orleans public housing at pre-Katrina levels.

Thus, f or a time it seemed to many that New Orleans might be reshaped into a “Disneyland on the water,” a much whiter city, perhaps with Latino or Mexican immigrants replacing the city’s Black workforce. But the controversy that greeted the ULI’s plan, buttressed by the determined efforts by African-American residents to return to their homes, seems to have scuttled that proposal, at least in its original form. As for prospects of a “whiter” New Orleans, while some business interests may support that vision, the hospitality industry, the city’s economic mainstay, relies upon the largely African-American waiters, kitchen staff, chambermaids, and janitors, and there seems little evidence that this portion of the workforce can be substantially replaced with other ethnic groups. Indeed, low-wage jobs at fast food restaurants, formerly hovering around $6 per hour, are now being advertised at $10 or $12, with a $6,000 signing bonus for workers who remain employed for an entire year. Severe labor shortages plague the entire city even as African-American residents try to restore their houses or find rents affordable enough to allow them to return.

The problems facing skilled African-American workers and professionals are more complex. Just after the hurricane, the city took advantage of the crisis to implement a five-year charter schools program to replace its public schools. As a result, all 10,000 members of the city teachers union, largely Black and female, were summarily fired, with no union recourse and without pensions. Other Black professionals and managers report being asked to return to work but without being able to find affordable housing. With 80 percent of the city uninhabitable, a severe housing shortage has given rise to skyrocketing rents.

Meanwhile, to the casual viewer, it’s immediately apparent that a great deal more restoration effort is taking place in the Ninth Ward than in the more expensive neighborhoods. Trailers dot virtually every block. Tacked to the wooden power poles are printed signs advertising “House Gutting” and “Mold Removal.” On weekends, residents return from their temporary lodgings in Baton Rouge and Houston and Little Rock to gut, disinfect, restore, and rebuild.

“This is a guerilla war in which people are fighting house by house, block by block, to save their neighborhoods,”says Wade Rathke, chief organizer for ACORN, a nationwide community organizing group that before the storm had 9,000 members in New Orleans, including a member on virtually every block of the Ninth Ward.

The efforts to restore New Orleans — not just in the Ninth Ward but in Gentilly, Bywater, Treme, Uptown, New Orleans East, Holly Grove, Upper Carrollton, and many other neighborhoods — has produced a number of local heroes.

There’s Brian Lewis, a former offshore oil boat captain and part-time pastor who decided, after Katrina struck, to take a year off, live on some investments and a salary bonus, and volunteer for ACORN. The manager of his family’s contracting business, Lewis has devoted himself to helping New Orleans home owners make their houses livable, sometimes by finding affordable contractors, sometimes by making his own crews available at bargain rates, occasionally even by investing his own cash into a neighbor’s home. Twice a month, he meets with former colleagues from the oil boat who also make regular donations.

Lewis works frequently with contractor Pauline Pinelli. Pinelli originally came to New Orleans when her home city of Houston was overrun with workers fleeing Katrina. Frustrated by the business she was losing to former Louisianans, she started doing projects in the Crescent City and found herself profoundly moved by New Orleans’ efforts to rebuild. Now she’s relocated, traveling every weekend back to her mother’s house in Houston to see her children that she’s raising as a single parent. In New Orleans , she hires local crews, provides them with housing, and, for $25 a week, keeps their pantries stocked. She, too, makes her services available at bargain rates to New Orleanians trying to come home. “I feel real bad for the city,” she says. “When I go home, I break down every day.”

Soleil Rodrigue and Suncere Ali Shakur also came to New Orleans in response to Katrina. Both work long hours as full-time volunteerswith Common Ground, a group formed a few days after the hurricane to provide aid and services to poor and working-class New Orleanians, including the operation of a clinic in the neighborhood of Algiers that has served some 20,000 people, and the raising of $27 million in grass-roots donations, used to distribute food, clothing, blankets, and other necessities to New Orleans’ poorest neighborhoods. Common Ground has also helped residents bring suits on a variety of issues, such as successful efforts to delay evictions from the hotels where they had originally been housed by FEMA.

As of this writing, New Orleans has no comprehensive development plan and is still awaiting the new FEMA flood maps that will presumably reassure homeowners about where it is safe to rebuild. But homeowners fear moving forward without definite assurances that new building regulations won’t render their efforts futile. Without a development plan, it’s unclear what those regulations might be. Nor are there yet assurances that the levees and canals have been sufficiently fortified for the next hurricane season, now only two and a half months away. Also, no comprehensive emergency-response system yet in place, a problem that New Orleans public officials blame on a shortage of state and federal funding.

Clearly, President George W. Bush’s policy of reducing the scope of government and allowing private enterprises to take the lead has significantly affected the city’s ability either to respond to the last hurricane or to prepare for the next one.

Organizers on the ground are well aware of the challenges, but they refuse to give up. “More than 300,000 people — that’s a lot of folks who are just not home,” said ACORN’s head organizer in New Orleans, Stephen Bradberry. Yet when asked about the prospects of rebuilding the city and preserving its neighborhoods, he said, “You can’t even allow yourself the luxury of thinking that it’s not possible.”