When I was in Chicago for New Years, I visited Gary, Indiana, one of the country's saddest cities. I was with a bunch of architecture and urban planning nerds, and as we drove up and down streets, they explained the city's pattern of economic growth and death. The most surprising thing were blocks of apartment buildings with boarded-up doors, broken windows, and graffitied brick facades, directly across the street from brand new condos with well-tended lawns and freshly poured driveways. I saw a beautiful old stone cathedral surrounded by fencing, with the broken doors chained together and a tree growing out of the roof. I've never been to Sarajevo, but Gary looked like a war zone. I'd never had such an instant negative reaction to a place.
It was an odd contrast with New Orleans, which I visited a couple of weeks ago, and had an overwhelming (and unexpected) positive feeling. Gary's war has been an economic one; a diminished steel industry brought on a wave of unemployment, poverty, and homelessness that has led to a rise in crime. New Orleans, while it has its share of problems with crime, has fought a different war over the past few years--one against the destruction left behind by Hurricane Katrina. And yet, as things stand now, it looks like problems created by humankind are even harder to get over than those created by the seemingly inexorable forces of nature, because New Orleans seems to be thriving.
For a city renowned for their massive annual celebration, it was interesting to see death given such a central position in the city. Whereever we drove, we saw cemeteries, with raised graves and mausoleums dominating their walled-in landscapes. Since the water table is so high, they have to bury their dead above ground. I've never seen a cooler grave than one I saw in New Orleans; right at the end of Canal Street stands a huge mound covered in grass, with a door in the side of the hill, like a hobbit house, topped by a giant statue of a 10-point buck. Being surrounded by death like that is, in some ways, almost an affirmation of life. It's like New Orleans says, "This is where we're all going, folks. Let's enjoy it while we can."
This sense of balance, of New Orleans dancing on the edge of death and life, is also evident in their relationship to the encroaching gulf. The city is built on a delta, which by its very nature is ephemeral and ever-changing. It's kind of a precipitous place to build a city. And once I got away from downtown, I could see the marks of that relationship to the Gulf and its storms. Beautiful houses stand abandoned next to inhabited homes; the watermark on these structures is about as high as my head. As I sit here, I look around my dining room at everything that would be underwater right now. My dining room table, my bookshelves, the painting my grandma gave me, all the appliances in my kitchen--the only thing that the water wouldn't touch is a copper plate shaped like a sun that is hanging above the kitchen sink, near the ceiling. I would have lost everything else to water, dirt, and mold.
But when I was downtown, on the Riverwalk, I was overcome by the rawness and richness, the vibrance, of the place. Music seems to be on every street corner, in the form of some dude playing jazz on his saxophone or a small blues band doing Stevie Ray Vaughn covers. Men wear
hats in New Orleans, and don't look like they're trying too hard; I saw several guys walking around in fedoras like it was the most natural thing in the world. And the smiles . . . I saw one of the world's greatest smiles on a streetcar driver as I crossed in front of her at a stop.
It was raining most of the time I was there, but the weather was still great. It was warm and wet, the perfect subtropical climate for cypress trees, bougainvillea, water lilies. The sun came out once; I was at Jackson Square, calling some friends, and the clouds parted and the sunset lit up St. Louis Cathedral like a castle in a fairytale. I had just had beignets and hot chocolate at the legendary Cafe du Monde, and even though I hadn't showered for two days, I felt radiant myself.
Friends have asked me about the French Quarter. Is it still there? Has all the cast iron railing been taken down? Is it still beautiful? I don't know what it looked like before Katrina, but I saw no traces of a hurricane, just a beautiful, exotic, upper-class yet homey neighborhood. I hate being a cliche, but I felt like I was in Europe (which is probably the point). New Orleans combines so many cultures--Spanish, French, Native American, African, German, Greek--that the resulting gumbo seeps into every part of the local atmosphere, from the food to the architecture, to the street names to the "yat" accent which sounds like a cross between New Jersey and Dixie.
Natives call it NOLA; my melodramatic self now wants to name a daughter that. I want my daughter to be full of fierceness, light, music, heat, and emotion; I want her to be radiant, beautiful, and comfortable in her own skin; I want her to embrace tragedy and death while celebrating life, like the city itself.
