New Orleans after Katrina
They say whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. I’ve always thought of New Orleans as hanging in the balance, a sort of faded beauty. When I stepped out of the airport after being to Boston, Nantucket, the new Jet Blue terminal at JFK, I thought, “Oh my.”
Even before you are out of the plane, the smells are obvious – a sort of fecundness permeates the cabin, then you enter Louis Armstrong International Airport (big name for a little airport) and you hear the jazz playing instead of Muzak or top 40 and you know you are someplace different. Walk outside and if it is still summer, you receive a large wet wool blanket thrown over you.
Goodbye freshness, hello jungle.
But it’s the look – the sidewalks look like they were constructed a few centuries ago with cracks and stains and no newness anywhere in sight. The taxi driver pulls up in a maroon van and the entire inside is carpeted in the same color and smells faintly of beer and cigarettes.
And everyone is moving a very very slow pace.
Welcome to New Orleans!
After Katrina – we lost one large poor neighborhood (9th ward), one sizable rich neighborhood (Lakefront), and one expansive middle class neighborhood (New Orleans East) – but the other neighborhoods have come back together, have gotten in their routine of life, and with summer now over, and four years post Katrina, we’re still a backwater, a third world country, a banana republic and still loving every second of it.