New Orleans Is Not Lost
Steve Beisner -- September 25, 2005
Rubbish: "New Orleans Gone Forever." In the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita I've seen the headline a dozen times now. The self-important newspaper editorialist will go on to say that perhaps New Orleans will be rebuilt, though he's not too sure it's a good idea, but in any case, it will never be the same. They just don't know New Orleans, hometown and adopted city to generations of writers, artists, and musicians.
At best, these self-appointed grave diggers have forgotten New Orleans' history, if they ever knew it. At worst they are engaged in a kind of careless Disneyfication of a great city, unique in the life of the United States and the world. But New Orleans is not Bourbon Street T-shirts and bare breasted women, nor is it some idea from a sociology term paper. New Orleans is what has happened there: three hundred years ago and last week.
The "it'll never be the same" argument hinges on a conception of New Orleans as a balance of historical and social factors so fragile they can't be disturbed without changing the soul of Crescent City forever.
The truth is that New Orleans exists and has always existed in a state of perpetual change. I don't mean the evolutionary development that affects all places, but cataclysmic, life-altering change. It is the city's embrace of its past, while accommodating catastrophe, that has forged New Orleans' soul.
Hurricane damage? In 1719 Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville cleared a bit of swampland next to the Mississippi, south of Lake Pontchartrain. Two years later a plan for streets for what is now the French Quarter was developed, but it could not be implemented until the following year, when a helpful hurricane cleared the way, demolishing most of the existing buildings. In the early days, residents expected floods, standing water in their houses every year, until the first levees made it a little less frequent. Katrina is an echo.
Did government abandon New Orleans in their time of need after Katrina? You bet, but so it did in 1762, when Louis XV gave the burdensome colony to his cousin, and the French citizens of New Orleans woke up one morning to find themselves under Spanish rule. The people were so rebellious and that the Spanish did not attempt to take control until 1766. Two years later, citizens banded together with a few Acadians, who we now call "Cajuns," west of the city, and the Germans, who had settled upriver, to throw the bums out. Charles III of Spain responded by sending in an Irishman, an O'Reilly, who entered with overwhelming force, tried and hanged a few ringleaders, pardoned the rest, and quickly came to an easy peace with the French Creole residents. The newly enlightened Spanish governors of Louisiana married into New Orleans families; they tacitly encouraged the trade in contraband, and the city flourished.
Katrina and Rita's one-two punch? Nothing new there. In 1788 a fire destroyed most of New Orleans, over 800 buildings. Three more great hurricanes assaulted the city in 1793 and 1794, and late that year a second fire destroyed the remaining French buildings, over 200 structures.
Political turmoil? In 1803, Louisiana was transferred back to French ownership, and then almost immediately to the United States under terms of the Louisiana Purchase. English became the official language, the new Governor Claiborne could speak no French, and New Orleans found itself ruled by people some residents considered little more than barbarians. (These barbarians were largely responsible for the construction of the now beloved Garden District.) Andrew Jackson's rescue of New Orleans from the British siege in 1814, made him a hero, and made New Orleans, with its polyglot culture, an American city.
Disaster after disaster continued throughout the 19th Century. Cholera attacked the city in 1832. Yellow fever epidemics struck twenty-three times, killing over 28,000 people, with eight thousand in 1853 alone.
The history of New Orleans is a litany of loss and rebirth, of traditions abandoned and newly created, of violence visited upon poor and rich by human invaders, local scoundrels, and forces of nature, of the city's indomitable spirit that sees injustice, accepts tragedy, and rebuilds, is never paralyzed in mourning what is past, but is eternally hopeful of future possibilities.
Sure, life is hell, but life is all we've got. Play your slow dirge to the pain of loss, to cruelty and incompetence, to the meanness of Nature and Man. Carry it all to the graveyard of despair and mourn for what has passed away. Then strike up our anthem to life, and when The Saints Go Marching In, you can be sure that New Orleans will be there showing us all what it means to be alive.