Saving New Orleans: Big, but not so easy

City neighborhoods one year after Katrina form a patchwork portrait of progress - and despair

BY J. JIONI PALMER | Newsday Washington Bureau

August 27, 2006

A view along Canal Street in New Orleans, on Monday, August 21, 2006. (Newsday / Jim Peppler / August 26, 2006)

NEW ORLEANS - Bryan Block returned home in December, eager to be in the vanguard of the Big Easy's revival.

An architect, Block and his partner, Jeff Keller, began repairing the nearly 100-year-old three-level, classical-revival style home they had turned into a bed and breakfast a few years before, despite the lack of heat and functioning street lights.

"It was very cold and dark," Block recalled of life along Canal Street in the Mid-City neighborhood a few months after Hurricane Katrina unleashed a torrent of misery on the Crescent City and destroyed the bottom four rooms of his establishment.

Not enough has changed since then to suit Block, who had evacuated to Dallas. No longer upbeat about the future of New Orleans, he says pessimism now grips his spirit. With their perception that crime is spiraling upward, annoyance with the city's political leaders and lack of faith in the levees that keep the surrounding waters at bay, Block and Keller have decided to move to Boston.

"There is a sense of stagnation. We've finally said, 'Enough.' I don't feel like owning a million-dollar property in Atlantis - it's not worth it," said Block, his voice laden with sadness.

"We came back with the intention to be part of the rebuilding, but we can't do this without there being a heavy personal burden. Little by little, I felt my resolve being chipped away."

The story of New Orleans a year after Katrina is a tale of hope and resiliency mixed with frustration and despair. To peer out over this city - a unique cultural milieu of French, Spanish, African, American and American Indian influences - is to see a patchwork of neighborhoods on the mend and others that are just as paralyzed as they were when floodwaters first receded.

It's not like living in a normal city, Block said, citing the ominous spray-painted X's on homes, partially collapsed buildings and piles of trash that still dot the cityscape. "How normal is this? This isn't normal, but to us it is."

These days, that also means that fewer than a third of the city's schools are open. New Orleans has half as many hospital beds as it did a year ago. And while there is no reliable data, anxiety about crime has gripped residents after a series of gruesome murders.

Such stark figures also highlight New Orleans' uneven recovery for some residents. "The city isn't moving at the same pace," said Arnold Johnson, 38, a postal carrier.

Uptown, where Johnson lives, escaped the worst of the flooding but did sustain considerable wind damage. Things aren't noticeably different from how they were pre-Katrina, he said, although electricity can sometimes be intermittent.

In Mid-City, where Johnson works and Block runs the bed and breakfast, the flooding was extensive, but the neighborhood is showing signs of a comeback. Postal routes, he said, are two and three times larger than they were before Katrina because there aren't enough residents and businesses to sustain normal routes.

Today, despite the blocks slowly springing back to life, those routes remained combined because of a shortage of letter carriers, he said.

The comeback hasn't come

With the exception of the occasional pile of debris and the intermittent boarded-up building, things look pretty much the same today as they did before Katrina along the stretches of Canal and North Broad streets that Johnson works. People linger at bus stops in the muggy mid-August heat waiting for the next No. 42 to come along. The streetcar is up and running, and vehicles zip to and from downtown.

But in the Lower Ninth Ward, where Johnson owns rental property, the comeback is glacial. His two-bedroom house is only half gutted and he's rushing to meet a Tuesday deadline, stemming from a municipal order requiring property owners to clean up buildings or run the risk of condemnation.

Nearby, sitting in a patio chair on a small slab of concrete that is his front porch, Albert Walker, 74, is determined to move back into his modest three-bedroom home as quickly as possible.

"This is where I'm at, what you see here," said Walker, who has lived on Tennessee Street since 1967. "That's where we're at right now, waiting for this to get ready. Hopefully, it won't be too long."

Where progress is possible

Walker, who has been retired more than a decade, spends his days overseeing a crew working on his house. They recently put a new roof on his garage, while the old one still sits in the backyard of an abutting property. The internal electric wiring is finished, and last week wallboard was installed on the walls and ceiling.