Guest Blog: New Orleans and the Damage Done

Hugh Cutler is a dear friend and inveterate music lover who wouldn't think of missing the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

This year was different, however. The festival was on, but how about New Orleans itself after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina? Should he go?

Why, of course!

Hugh posted this commentary after returning home:

Heard some great music, ate a real good meal, hit my favorite taverns, saw some friends, rebonded with my younger son and his pal down from the Northeast and enjoyed m'lady Carla's fine company one more time.

Then Monday, we bought a two-hour minibus tour of the levee devastation. I hope I never see anything like it again. Much as I -- and so many others -- want that town to recover every bit of its former soul and lifeblood, seeing what we did makes me know that can never really be. I imagine that post-war Dresden is a fair comparison. It'd take a Marshal Plan plus the W.P.A. to put things right in any reasonable time.

Still, one could do the fest as usual -- hitting traditional wateringholes in the Quarter, Uptown in Carrollton and throughout the Arts district, then head out to the racetrack fairgrounds daily and see sights no more remarkable than any serious storm anybody's seen. As a tourist, it's possible to have your stereotypical passing good time in New Orleans even now, though it's apparent that every restaurant and hotel could use a lot more service help and some of them are just not opened yet or won't ever be. But the musicians came back, and the fest itself was what folks there would call a passing good time.

It's when you get near the levee breaks that your heart really breaks too. How does one cope with seeing a car peeking out beneath a hopelessly damaged house? Or a Mack CL heavy-duty dumptruck upended? Or a gas station signpost bent like a soda flexistraw, its top sign through the station roof? Or hundreds of block s upon blocks of row houses with no power and nobody at all home, or swaths the size of a dozen pro football fields where row houses once stood, now -- still, nine months after the storm -- just rubble?

After seeing that, it was hard to work up as much empathy for the guy near the lakefront whose half-million-plus manse looked as if it'd been caught between opposing militias in a downtown Baghdad firefight, the garage and front side wrecked and light shining through it. On the front, he'd spray-painted, like ghetto graffiti, "Allstate gave me $10,000 for this."

Nor much pain for the couple I met at an incredible Allen Toussaint show at Harrah's Casino whose home had sustained damage enough to make them decide to move, but also to renovate it as an investment property. They lost substantial household goods, she said, but when her husband first came back to see the hit they'd taken, "I told him to save the artwork and the wine."

* * * * *

In New Orleans, there's an innate preservationist sense, of course, for all things in the French Quarter and the Garden District. Nowadays, there's obviously a sense that the soul of the city that gave rise to Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funeral processions and second-line parades and the marching brass bands -- the community that birthed Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong and, more lately, Kermit Ruffins and Irving Mayfield -- is the one embodied by the former denizens of the Lower Ninth Ward, now a diaspora in Houston, Atlanta and God knows where.

And there are warring factions in those who believe their neighborhood streets, now so fully decimated, must somehow be reconstituted to a semblance of that fomer community, and the others who think the cost is just hopelessly prohibitive, that the destruction should just be razed and cleared and the area either turned into greensward or left vacant because of the ongoing risk.

Before this tour, I was squarely in the former camp. Seeing the extent of the carnage, and knowing realistically the unlikelihood that this present regime would undertake a Marshall Plan for these deprived folks, I am wavering about what can actually be done to salvage this scene. It may take me some weeks, and a look at who actually is elected mayor May 20, to decide for myself what is really possible to fix this. It might be that the likes of Bill Gates and his foundation or some series of similar entities will be the ultimate salvation, if there is to be one. Caring music-lovers like myself will continue to pitch our nickle-and-dime assistance toward the musicians' side of the ledger, yet that's just a pittance compared with the extent of the community need.

* * * * *

Yes, some things about New Orleans will stay the same as ever. But significant parts of it will never be the same.

Yet the music lasts. So many others had to see every awesome note that Boss Springsteen's new hoedown aggregation lent to the proceedings Sunday afternoon til sundown. But I felt a pull to cross the fairgrounds to get to the far stage to see the original Meters regroup one more time, to hear once more the free flight of Leo Nocentelli on the break of Ain't No Use, to join the chorus on "People Say" and to boogie til we dropped on the closing "Hey, Pocky-Way," George Porter Jr.'s loping bass laying down the groove while Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews sitting in switched over to trumpet to add his Gabriel touch to the sunset proceedings.

It was then I knew for sure I could always find my funky second home again.