Rebuilding New Orleans (Bill Bowden Editor’s Note)

“Luck is believing you’re lucky.”
— Tennessee Williams

On Labor Day, I watched ABC’s “Good Morning America” do a report on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

People were looting the Whole Foods store on Magazine Street. But they were only taking food so they could survive.

Then the television camera found an eccentric looking woman outside the store with her bicycle. She told the reporter she had been a nightclub singer in the 1950s. In addition to groceries, she had taken a bouquet of flowers. She seemed ashamed to have been caught, but the kind reporter told her it was OK — the flowers would have died in the store anyway.

I recognized the woman immediately. She rides her bicycle up and down the sidewalks in that block, usually against the tide of pedestrians.

It’s my old neighborhood, where I lived for four years in the late 1980s and where I still visit three times a year. I have pictures of that woman riding her bicycle, before New Orleans was a ghost town. I have pictures of that city as it will never be again.

I imagined her putting the flowers in the window of her home, which has no electricity, no running water. But it will have flowers. Bright, beautiful flowers. It was a sign of hope.

Many people don’t understand why that woman and others didn’t leave. For some, it was poverty. For others, it was the opportunity for a crime spree. (Looters must guard their booty, so thieves won’t take it.) For others still, it was sheer stubbornness. Some people had rather die in New Orleans than live anywhere else. And then, there’s the optimism that has pervaded the city for centuries. When you live below sea level, you have to be optimistic. But it will take months to pump the water out and return the city to anything resembling normal. So they must leave, all of them.

To many people across this nation, it doesn’t make sense to rebuild New Orleans. The city is sinking three feet every century. Besides killing an estimated 10,000 people, Hurricane Katrina may have done $150 billion in damage when it blew an eight-foot storm surge across Lake Pontchartrain to crash over the levees and flood New Orleans. Another hurricane will surely hit the city, and it could happen all over again.

But to most people in that devastated city, there is no other option but to rebuild. You can’t turn the lights off in New Orleans and move the city 100 miles up the road. It wouldn’t be New Orleans. Part of the charm of the Crescent City is the fact that it’s on the edge, in more ways than one. As Roy Reed of Hogeye wrote, “People are drawn to the place by the chance that something will happen to them.” That sense of adventure is reflected in Tennessee Williams’ quote, “Security is a kind of death.”

Those who have only visited the French Quarter and the Central Business District won’t really understand. That’s a small part of New Orleans, the part most tourists see. They come home talking about how dirty New Orleans is.

But the real New Orleans lies beyond the city center, beyond the tourist traps and T-shirt shops. New Orleans is a living museum of culture, architecture and history. It’s older than America itself, yet not really American at all with its African, Caribbean and Mediterranean influences.

Rows of historic houses in the Garden District and Uptown appear to have survived the storm, but thousands of homes throughout the city were submerged for days and will have to be destroyed, possibly as many as half of them.

Other states have opened their arms to the refugees. Texas has accepted 250,000. Arkansas will take 50,000. The generosity and kindness of the people of Fort Smith has been touching on the evening news as refugees pour into Fort Chaffee. Most of those people are poor. The affluent left before the storm, an exodus of SUV refugees.

The economic ripple effect will be felt in Arkansas and across America for years to come. But the intangible damage won’t be measurable in economic terms. It will be reflected in a sadness and loss that can only be cured by rising up and rebuilding.

Williams also said there are only three great cities in the United States: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. We can’t afford to lose one.

(Bill Bowden is editor of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal. You can e-mail him at [email protected].)