Michael Leeden at NRO on New Orlean’s historic dance with death
The combination of a rich culture of death with the looming threat of catastrophe is an intoxicating mélange for the spirit, and it no doubt explains why so many great writers have been drawn to these two southern cities, both of which have developed a unique version of Catholicism, often to the consternation of Rome. As Starr observes of New Orleans (and it is equally true of Naples), "all this frivolity occurs in the very city which, for over two centuries, Death visited more ruthlessly than anywhere else on the continent."
Doomed cities with an intimate relationship with the dead are special places, incubators of exceptional qualities of spirit and thus of extraordinary inventiveness. If we have lost one of those cities to the forces of nature, it will impoverish our world far beyond the enormous human tragedy. Even if it was long foreseen.
Can it rebuild? This author has doubts:
The truth is that even on a normal day, New Orleans is a sad city. Sure, tourists think New Orleans is fun: you can drink and hop from strip club to strip club all night on Bourbon Street, and gamble all your money away at Harrah’s. But the city’s decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can’t take care of itself even when it is not 80 percent underwater; what is it going to do now, as waters continue to cripple it, and thousands of looters systematically destroy what Katrina left unscathed?
A city blessed with robust, professional police and fire forces, with capable government leaders, an informed citizenry, and a relatively resilient economy can overcome catastrophe, but it doesn’t emerge stronger: look at New York after 9/11. The richest big city in the country in more ways than one mustered every ounce of energy to clean up after 9/11 and to rebuild its economy and its downtown—but even so, competing special interests overcame citizens’ and officials’ best intentions. Ground Zero remains a hole, and New York, for all its resources, finds itself diminished, physically and economically, four years on.
In New Orleans, the recovery will be much, much harder.
Founded by French explorers and fur trappers, evangelized by Ursuline nuns and Jesuit fathers, rebuilt and reorganized by Spaniards (who constructed the French Quarter as we know it after a devastating fire), purchased and expanded by Jacksonian Americans, the city grew great on the commerce of the Mississippi, filling up with "free persons of color" and exotic hybrid Americans who called themselves "Creoles."
The city also accepted many thousands of Irish, Sicilians and Jews, who defined its unique, near-Brooklynesque accent, and built the countless small shops and thriving businesses on the "American" side of Canal Street — the dividing line in the 19th century between the Anglos and the French.
It was in this city that jazz was born, in the whorehouses that served the Navy, at the fingertips of piano players whose names have not come down to us, but whose music uniquely wove together the themes of sin and repentance, joie de vivre and Schadenfreude, that define the city to this day.
I call friends who live outside the flood zone, and try to learn the fate of those still among the waters: the brilliant chef who made Parisian pastries in the Quarter, the nurse who cared for old French-speaking ladies at a hospice behind Bourbon Street, the priests at St. John the Baptist — the battered but beautiful parish on the "wrong side" of I-10, whose golden onion dome greeted me every time I drove into the city.
And I mourn the places I know I may never see again — since some, if not all, of them are now submerged beneath nine feet of contaminated water:
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