NEW ORLEANS: U.S. 'unimaginable' without unique city
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There is no other place like New Orleans. For many, the very idea that the flavor and culture of the place could be lost is heartbreaking -- and unacceptable.
By ANDRES VIGLUCCI
Columnist
The Miami Herald
Sep. 05, 2005
aviglucci@herald.com
It is a gumbo, naturally, of peoples and cultures, French and Spanish and African, Anglo-Saxon, German and Sicilian, all simmering together for 300 years to give America some of its greatest figures, some of its greatest and most beloved places, some of its greatest music and literature, and always, every day, a great good time.
Even if some of you can't remember it the next morning.
There is no other place like New Orleans. There can be no other place like New Orleans, where America comes looking for its soul and finds at least an easy welcome.
N'awlins is jazz and Louis Armstrong; The Saints Go Marching In and A Streetcar Named Desire; the Neville Brothers at the Jazz and Heritage Festival; Greek Revival mansions cheek-by-jowl with humble shotgun homes, a vast and intact storehouse of historic architecture.
It is muffulatas at Central Grocery, beignets and cafe au lait at Cafe Du Monde, Oysters Rockefeller at Antoine's. It is streetcars on St. Charles; drunken fratboys and breast-baring sorority girls on Bourbon Street. And, of course, it is Mardi Gras, in which children still yell at the masked men on the floats: ``Hey, Mista! Throw me something!''
Or should we say was? Can it all be truly gone forever, wiped out just like that by wind and water?
Unthinkable.
''America is unimaginable without New Orleans,'' said Anthony Barthelemy, New Orleans native and professor of literature and African American studies at the University of Miami. ``If you can imagine 20th Century literature without Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, or 20th Century music without Louis Armstrong, maybe you get a sense of what New Orleans has given to the country, just on cultural terms.
``I mean, can you imagine American cooking without New Orleans?''
Many people are beginning to, however reluctantly.
Even as the country's attention is fixed on the struggle for survival of New Orleans' stranded and scattered residents, devotees of the city wonder whether New Orleans itself -- emptied of its people, with many of its buildings destroyed or imperiled, and whole neighborhoods facing demolition for reasons of health and safety -- can possibly endure.
Some fear they are witnessing the destruction of a national treasure, one of the last authentic -- indeed, wonderfully peculiar -- places in an ever more homogenized country.
''I have felt bereft,'' said Kristina Ford, New Orleans' former planning director, who lived in the city until last year with her husband, Pulitzer-winning novelist and short-story writer Richard Ford. ``The city Richard and I knew and loved, that city's gone, I think irrevocably.''
Ford wishes fervently that New Orleans will be rebuilt, and like many others believes it will be. But few think it will be quite the same.
The worst fear: a replica New Orleans, a ghost town given over to tourism, all of it Bourbon Street.
The best hope, they say, is that the spirit of New Orleans can somehow be rekindled.
ASSISTANCE NEEDED
And that, Ford said, will depend not just on whether the French Quarter or the Garden District are refurbished, but also on whether New Orleans' people, in particular the poor, largely African American families that make up the city's essential fabric, can return home to the Lower 9th Ward, to Hollygrove and Carrollton -- a goal she said will require strong determination and massive assistance.
''The thing that gave New Orleans so much of its joie de vivre, and what made it seem exotic, was in the parts of town where people were poor,'' said Ford, now teaching at Bowdoin College in Maine. ``They are not monolithic -- two or three beautiful mansions, and in between or down the block Creole cottages which might be inhabited by very poor people. That may be gone.
``What isn't lost is the people, their cultural attitudes, their willingness to forgive, not to be judgmental. Once they get on their feet again, which will take a long time, that will start to emerge.
``These are huge extended families. It's a city of families. These aren't people who cut and run.''
New Orleans' best days may have been behind it even before Katrina. Losing population to white flight, it had become a place of high crime and poverty. In spite of its advertised tolerance, racial animosity was never far from the surface. And the urban revival and gentrification other U.S. cities have experienced had largely eluded New Orleans.
Yet it could still put on a daily display of joyful exuberance, a down-at-the-heels genius unequalled in America -- San Francisco with funk, without the preciousness, but with first-rate food and drink both cheap and dear.
''I think of New Orleans as a gift from heaven for a writer,'' said James Lee Burke, a Louisiana author of literary mystery novels, many set in a vividly evoked New Orleans.
``It's a city in which all forms of eccentricity were not just tolerated but always welcomed. There is no way to shock people in New Orleans. Tennessee Williams found a home there, and it's no coincidence.''
The explanation may lie in New Orleans' place and role in U.S. history, which gave rise to a singular blend of cultures and a generally liberal outlook on life.
Settled by the French in 1718, it was sold first to Spain, which built most of what we know today as the French Quarter. It reverted to France in 1801 before being sold again two years later to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. French, Spanish and African mixed to create Creole culture, Catholic and French-speaking as late as the early 20th Century.
Anglo settlers followed the U.S. purchase, and in the late 19th Century New Orleans became an immigrant haven for Catholic Europeans, especially German and Italian.
New Orleans was a principal port for the slave trade, but paradoxically also had a large population of free blacks. Until the mid-18th Century, slaves gathered at a spot later known as Congo Square, where the Creole overlords permitted African drumming and dances.
Later the enormous popularity in New Orleans of brass bands combined with surviving elements of African music in the form of blues and spirituals to make New Orleans a cradle of American jazz. It flourished in the bordellos of its legendary and long-vanished red-light district, Storyville, where many a visitor from the north heard it for the first time. And it was then taken to New York and Chicago by seminal figures like Jelly Roll Morton, a colorful character who hyperbolically claimed to have invented jazz, and Armstrong and his mentor, King Oliver.
A TROUBLED PAST
There was a dark side, too: besides slavery, natural catastrophes, war, human cruelty. New Orleans was the setting for the final defeat of the English Redcoats in the War of 1812, and a redoubt of the Confederacy for one short year until Union occupation. It was an early U.S. foothold for the Sicilian Mafia. All manner of vice and exploitation and political corruption flourished for decades. New Orleans was home to Lee Harvey Oswald before he assassinated John F. Kennedy, and some believe he was part of a conspiracy hatched there.
''New Orleans was always America's netherworld, a sexual playground, like the Baths of Caracalla at the bottom of a Puritan country,'' novelist Burke said. ``Its history is emblematic of every event that has occurred in our history -- the pre-Revolutionary colonial era, the age of exploration, and slavery, extermination of native Americans, and then of course the war between the states, it's all right there in the city of New Orleans.''
And that past seemed a breathing, pulsing thing in New Orleans, ruled by a calendar that kept old traditions alive -- Carnival and Mardi Gras, the Jazz and Heritage Fest, the Sugar Bowl, annual family reunions.
''New Orleans is a strange time warp,'' said Barthelemy, the UM professor, who returns every year for Mardi Gras and family reunions. ``When you go to New Orleans you're going back in time.
``If you walk down Bourbon Street what you see is caricature of New Orleans. But all you have to do is go off the beaten path and find 12-year-old kids who are playing trumpet and trying to make names for themselves.''
So can it be saved? Will it be saved?
There is hope in history, the experts say. Chicago and San Francisco rebuilt after terrible fires.
So did numerous European cities leveled during World War II, including Leningrad and Warsaw, whose residents were reduced to scavenging to survive. Warsaw, largely and deliberately razed by the Nazis, was reconstructed in detail from building drawings secretly and heroically made by architects during the occupation, said Anthony Tung, author of Preserving the World's Great Cities.
Giving up on New Orleans now, he said, would be shortsighted and premature.
New Orleaneans' fierce pride in their city, and the value it holds for America as a whole, virtually demand reconstruction, Tung said.
``People find solutions. That's what happened in war-torn cities after World War II. They had problems that were impossible to solve. National economies had been devastated. Nothing was working. End of the story: Most of the cities got rebuilt.
``People have deep attachments to the places where they live. I don't see New Orleaneans loving their city any less. I don't have any question they will want to save what is singular about New Orleans.''
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