TheAgitator.com
Pictures of New Orleans
Saturday, October 14th, 2006
I stayed in New Orleans last month when I went south to attend the Cory Maye hearing in Polarville, Mississippi. A few general impressions:
The city is a long, long way from recovered. In my short time there, I only explored the downown and the French Quarter, two areas that you’d think would be most rehabilitated by now. Every third of fourth building downtown is still boarded up. Even one of the skyscrapers is empty in abandoned, which is a pretty eerie sight. The Quarter is one of the more elevated parts of the city, and was spared most of the flooding. Even it is a shell of what it used to be. Bourbon Street still lights up at night, and there’s still plenty of sex, booze, and music. There’s also lots of construction and remodeling going on, which is a good thing. But just a block or two over on either side, and you’re looking at boarded-up buildings, untouched water damage, and general decay. It’s sad, because many of the rotting buildings are stunning. Or were, I guess.
The sex industry is doing quite well, which I guess is to be expected with a sudden influx of construction, repair, and maintainance workers. Judging by what I heard on the radio, gathered from personal conversations, and read in the Times-Picayune (a really stellar paper, BTW — at least post-Katrina), natives tend to take offense at outsiders who take a realistic view of the reconstruction effort. There was general contempt for the national media for focusing so much on the negative, though to be honest, I didn’t see much that was positive. The one bit of optimism while I was there was the coming Monday Night Football game between the Saints and Falcons. The city seemed pretty riled up to make its post-Katrina national debut. But even there, there was some ambivalence. Many questioned the amount of money the city spent rehabilitating the Superdome, seeing it as an extravagant exercise in little more than feel-good symbolism. They’d rather the money have been put to other uses than what they saw as rough equivalent of an ugly woman donning one of those Mardis Gras masks for the few hours the ESPN cameras were in town.
So the fixtures of New Orleans seem to be there. You can still get beignets and coffee at Cafe du Monde. You can still see co-ed boobs on Bourbon Street, hear streetside performers, or catch the dueling pianos at Pat O’Briens. But it’s really hard to see New Orleans ever again becoming anything more than a few attractions.
Lots more photos after the break.
This is I-10, headed west into New Orleans from Mississippi, via the bridge over Lake Ponchartrain. Ponchartrain provided much of the city’s flooding. The two photos below look out over the water. Took them as I was driving back from the hearing, at about sunset:
Here’s the Superdome, with the banner advertising the Monday Night Football game:
There are of course plenty of beautiful buildings still left in the French Quarter:
Unfortunately, there are also a lot of scenes like these:
The crazies in the Quarter have at least kept a sense of humor about it all:
What you expect to see in the French Quarter:
I was in the city in late September, which is still decidedly summer. Mornings are heavy with humidity. Doubly so on Bourbon Street, which gets hosed down each morning to dispose of the previous night’s festivities. The water creates a thick morning mist that sticks to everything on the ground. One morning I went out, I couldn’t stop my camera lens from fogging up. Oddly enough, it made for a few cool pictures:
