Each time we go on vacation, there’s usually a bus tour involved and since we didn’t rent a car, it seemed even more appropriate this time. It’s a great way to find or hear about the highlights of a strange city. New Orleans has almost no on street parking so when you rent a car, it costs an additional $24-$28 per day for parking. The bus tour took us to parts of the city we couldn’t walk to like the lower Ninth Ward, ravaged by flood waters when the levies broke after Katrina clobbered the city. Five years later, there is still so much devastation. For ever house we saw people living in, we saw 15 that were uninhabitable. For every house we saw, there were 10 empty lots. And while the neighborhoods are slowly coming back, they will never be the same. Whole neighborhoods, extended families of life long friends, have been bulldozed.
It took two years to get the electricity back on. Families lived in cramped FEMA trailers until they couldn’t stand it any longer, sometimes being made ill by the very “roof over their head“ that was supposed to help. Chain reactions became commonplace. The storm took their homes so thousands of families moved away and some will never return. Because the families moved, the schools and hospitals were never rebuilt. Businesses closed because either they had no employees or no customers. Areas unaffected by the flooding are still empty, boarded up and neglected because there just aren’t enough people now. We were told of 1300 acre City Park, larger than Central Park in NY, where there were once more than 300 people to care for the grounds. After the storm, there were only a handful to removed debris and layers of mud and silt. A high school student started an e-mail campaign and found a small army of volunteers who restored the park back to it’s original beauty. This is just one example of how the people of New Orleans worked together.
Brad Pitt, Christian Slater and many other celebrities are helping to put the city back together, to “Make It Right”. I’m not going to use this blog as a forum to address political issues. Let’s just leave it that help didn’t come in a timely manner, maintenance was lacking, government red tape took too long to get through and contractual agreements are still not being met. Eventually, the entire region will recover but there will be a cost. Will it be too high a price? I wonder.
The beauty and unique charm that is New Orleans still exists. There was a bar near Bourbon Street that stayed open during “the storm“, words that have come to mean Hurricane Katrina. Fact of the matter is, most of New Orleans escaped much of the devastation and is wide open for business, tourist business that is. That was the single message we were asked to take home with us. Without much needed tourist dollars, many more businesses will close.
Hollywood has found a willing partner in New Orleans. We saw countless movie trucks setting up numerous filming locations. Numerous films have been made here and countless others have used homes, streets or some part of a business in at least one scene. Just outside of our condo, Bruce Willis was filming “Looper”. although I didn’t get a chance to see him and we came upon a commercial being filmed in City Park.
And when the bus tour was over, Carl and I walked to Muriel’s on Jackson Square to have our 40th Anniversary dinner and then we walked back to our condo, holding each other’s hand.
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