New Orleans Is Back, and Stronger Than Ever

A decade after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is back, stronger than ever.

- Mimi Swartz

The Katrina crosses can still be found all over New Orleans. Rescue teams spray-painted the X’s on homes across the city after the 2005 hurricane and ensuing flood caused by the levees collapsing. That graffiti told a bleak story, revealing when each house was searched, the team that searched it, and how many bodies had been found inside.

As New Orleans began the seemingly impossible task of rebuilding itself, the crosses became part of the city’s multilayered historical landscape. When owners applied fresh coats of colour to their cottages and frame bungalows, they sometimes chose to paint around the crosses. Or to reapply the crosses, once the restoration was done. Or to affix a wrought iron version to the spot where the painted cross had once been.

New Orleans is not about to forget 29 August, 2005, the nightmare that was Katrina. Eleven years out, along with the swamp tours, cemetery tours, plantation tours, French Quarter tours, food tours, riverboat tours, and haunted tours, tourists can view, for a fee, what remains of the devastation.

“People want to do those tours and they should,” said John Pope, part of the Times-Picayune [a local newspaper] team that won two Pulitzers for its Katrina coverage in 2006. Pope is a tall, thin, decorous man who seems born to wear a bow tie. He’d invited me to a restaurant called the Upperline, a New Orleans institution run by septuagenarian JoAnn Clevenger. A classic Uptown crowd had filled the converted 1877 town house and while most of the patrons were white and prosperous, they radiated that seductive mixture of Southern gentility and florid eccentricity so unique to New Orleans.