“Katrina… that bitch!”

The French Quarter is filled with stores selling colorful t-shirts, many of which have recently taken on a Katrina-related theme (“FEMA – the new four letter word”). Since we had rented a car, we spent some time exploring the city, including some neighborhoods that took a particularly heavy beating during the hurricane(s). The first was Lakeview, (which used to be) a reasonably nice neighborhood on the north side of the city (bordering Lake Pontchairn). The most notable feature was a scummy water line cutting across every house, between 6 and 10 feet off the ground:

Most houses had already been gutted,

although a few were still filled with the remains of their original contents:

For sale signs were everywhere, as well as various advertisements for demolition companies, “we buy houses” posters, and political statements (“Hold the Corps accountable”). Maybe 5% of the houses seemed to be in the process of being rebuilt. A few people were picking through what remained of (presumably) their possessions, and a fair number of other cars appeared to be driving around at random (like us!) scoping things out (with some NOPD cars scoping them out). What a mess!

The day after the wedding we drove over to the Ninth Ward, a lower income neighborhood that was also also hard hit. Although Lakeview seemed pretty grim, it looked like a fair number of residents were trying to pull it together and rebuild. The Ninth Ward was less encouraging. The first thing we saw was a large tree that came down on the front of a house, smashing it to smithereens:

We started out near the river, which looked somewhat similar to Lakeview damage-wise, except with much cheaper and older housing. Once we moved a bit north, though, everything changed. Instead of nastified houses, we found houses that had moved (often smashing into other houses),

been cut open, broken in half, just smashed, or (more often than not) were sufficiently jumbled up with everything else that it wasn’t clear where one stopped and the next began. Yikes!

It looked like a total loss. It didn’t look there there was much to be done except bulldoze the entire thing and start over. Which made us wondering what was going to happen. It didn’t look like almost any of the residents had come back (or that there was anything to come back to).