I Remember New Orleans

I visited New Orleans this past week for the first time since Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005 and came away saddened by what I found. It is certainly not the city I remember visiting decades ago as a teenager and not the place I saw during a visit a few months before Katrina brought devastation.

If money really has been spent rebuilding New Orleans, my guess is that it’s been going to the hospitality industry – casinos, hotels, restaurants – or into the pockets of notoriously corrupt politicians, not to the people of the city.

Even before Katrina, the hospitality industry had created a modern day “plantation” environment in New Orleans in which people of color and others were locked into low paying service jobs … cleaning rooms, sweeping floors, etc. It seems worse today. The gulf between the haves and the have nots is greater, and the have nots are in the majority.

Once proud neighborhoods north of the downtown historic district lay in ruin today, boarded-up or burned down.

The historic French Quarter has become a sort of sodom place of crime, open prostitution, filth, sex shows, drugs and corruption. That’s the kind of “hospitality” that came to New Orleans after Katrina.

Police are not to be found on Bourbon Street at night even as naive families and children on holiday walk between the sex shows. Bourbon Street always was bawdy but today, it is different.

I think that what has really bothered me most was that on my flight out of New Orleans, a lady across the aisle had seemingly casually asked about my visit and when I told her, she became angry and labeled me as “one of those people …”

The woman – a middle-aged lady with a strawberry blonde ponytail and married to a guy who owns 3 restaurants in the city – said that “those people” got a disproportionate amount of hurricane recovery funds and that people in her hospitality industry had to fend for themselves.

She said – twice – that I should have seen improvements in the (predominantly affluent and white) Garden District where she lived and not judge New Orleans on what I had seen in the 7th and 9th Wards. I took it that the Garden District is New Orleans’ Green Zone. She said that just as soon as they could get rid of the current mayor, a democrat, everything would be okay.

She made it clear that she did not like my opinion about the city even though she had asked what I thought.

I got the impression from her that her New Orleans would be a lot better off without “those people” but she knew that “those people” were needed to cook over hot stoves and carry out the garbage and mop the floors at the end of each night at her husband’s restaurants. And, who would clean her house and tend the lawn and do the laundry?

That’s where New Orleans is today … not the place I remember.