Do you know what it means? -- New Orleans, part 3

Raul the Bellhop

I wake up early on Friday morning, so I go downstairs to ask the concierge about nearby bike rentals. While I'm waiting for the concierge, the bellhop asks what I'm looking for. When I tell him I'm looking for a bike rental, he sighs. Things haven't been the same since Katrina, he says. He tells me the Ritz-Carlton won't open for another two years. They've just found out the Fairmount Hotel will never re-open.

I might have been able to rent a bike easily in the Quarter before the hurricane. But many businesses have had to close up shop. At the furniture store across the street, a sign says re-opening soon, but Raul says they're never going to re-open.

Rent on the small fine art gallery across the street is $14,000/month, way beyond what the gallery can pay now. The landlord is giving them one more month before he evicts them. The Gray Lines tour company just returned to the hotel a month ago, and whereas they used to do a brisk daily business, they can now only afford to man the desk three days a week.

Raul shows me pictures of the house across the river that he and his wife had bought in full before the hurricane. They had homeowner's insurance but no flood insurance, so the insurance company refuses to pay him. The house in the pictures is a wreck covered in mold spores. The pictures, which he keeps in his jacket pocket, are permanently crumpled in the shape of his thumb. A Catholic charity, not FEMA, has been working on clearing the debris.

He tells me about his two hellish days stuck on the interstate without food in the intense Southern heat. He points out other people in the hotel lobby who have lost everything -- the salt and pepper-haired white woman concierge with the garbled Cajun accent, the young white bellhop in his 20s who lived in St. Bernard's Parish, the young black bellhop Reggie who also lived with his family across the river. He tells me that twenty employees of the hotel still live in the hotel because they have nowhere else to go.

Bon Ton

My friend Jon, who comes to New Orleans frequently, recommends the Bon Ton Cafe, just outside the French Quarter. "But you have to go right now because they're not open on the weekends."

I rush over there in the hopes of making it for lunch service. I arrive about 5 minutes late but enter anyway. "Are you still open?" I ask.

A gray-haired gentleman greets me at the door. "Of course." He seats me at a table by the window. The restaurant is all dark wood and red and white checked tablecloths. Every table has a basket of packaged crackers. The waitresses are wearing old school white button down dresses and pad around in orthopedic shoes, while the waiters sport white chef's jackets. I love this place already.

On the waitress's recommendation, I order crawfish etoufee with parsleyed rice. Probably 60 smothered, peeled crawfish are laid in a ring around a mound of converted rice. It's buttery, extremely garlicky and rich, and it comes with a side of crisp fried onion rings. It's incredible, and despite the fact that I've got a stomach full of beignets, I manage to eat half of the huge plateful.

All around, I hear Southern accents, but my untrained ear can't pick out where they're all from. But everyone talks about Katrina -- what was it like, where were you, where's your home now? I remember on the anniversary of 9/11 thinking about where I was that day, thinking about how things had changed. It was still very raw, very real -- like it'd happened one day ago, not one year before.

The man who had greeted me at the door is now seated at another table. He and his female companion seem to be the proprietors, and they're having lunch with a gangly teen who looks like their son. The kitchen doors swing open a few times, the cooks and several children casually streaming in and out to chat with the proprietor's family.

Outside, a summer storm has started and it's pouring. I have my rain boots but no umbrella. My lovely waitress comes to reassure me that they're not going to lock the doors or anything, so I should just take my time. I stare out the window at the sheets of rain, waiting for it to let up. These days, when I see the belly of a low-flying plane, or when the weather is particularly gorgeous in New York and the sky is that perfect shade of blue, I think about 9/11. I wonder, whenever it rains hard here, as it must during hurricane season, do the people in Louisiana and Mississippi have flashbacks about Katrina?

The Bon Ton Cafe
401 Magazine St.
New Orleans, LA
504-524-3386

The Lower Ninth Ward

Our old friend Rick moved to New Orleans from New York before Katrina. He and his girlfriend Sarah come to the show and promise to drive us to the lower ninth ward on our last day in New Orleans. At about 10:30 on Saturday morning, we pile into his Jeep and head out of the French Quarter.

As we drive through Bywater, the landscape begins to change. Here and there, we see more piles of debris. The buildings look empty, unused. Then, suddenly, the buildings start to look completely abandoned. Every building, from garage to home to restaurant to dentist's office, now has spray-painted markings, usually next to the doorway. Sarah explains that the symbols refer to who has searched the building, when they searched the building, and what they found. It's eerie to see these marked up, abandoned houses, row after row, block after block, empty.

Then we drive across the bridge that separates the Lower Ninth from the rest of New Orleans. Sarah and Rick point out the area where the levees broke. When we get off the bridge, we see construction workers working on what will probably be a monument. After that, we see very few people, and very few signs of human life.

We turn into the neigborhood that bore the brunt of the damage. On the left, there's the house from the New Yorker article, a baby blue wooden slat covered home crunched on top of an overturned car. Over there, a concrete slab that was once the foundation to a home. On the right, a glimpse into former lives -- rotting couches, broken windows, abandoned. Everywhere, nature has taken over, feral vines and weeds and grass reclaiming the broken land.

The only other people we see in the neighborhood during the hour that we're there are a contractor or two, a car full of teens, and a film crew with its camera sticking out of the passenger's side window. The heat is intense, and I think about all of those people who were begging to be rescued from their melting rooftops. Every single one of these houses, or house lots, was a home to a family, maybe a large family. Where have they gone?

I think about how the country rallied behind New York after 9/11, coming to visit, to remember the devastation, to support New Yorkers and support our businesses, to bring our economy up and to show their sympathy. But where are those people now? Where is our anger? Where is our sympathy?

I regret that I never saw New Orleans before Katrina, but I'm really glad I got to see it now. It's important to see how a whole city, a whole region can be broken by neglect, by inequity. It was shocking. It broke my heart.

Help

Share Our Strength is having a Gulf Coast fundraiser -- 100 restaurants in New York City are donating part of their sales on Tuesday, August 29, to hurricane relief. People in the area, people displaced from the area, still need a lot of help.

If you can afford to visit the area, you should. Talk to the locals, bring your business to the city and see what is happening for yourself.