New Orleans, LA

It's Saturday 5pm when we exit Interstate 10 and enter the French Quarter. The narrow streets are teeming with tourists. I navigate the mob, through Bourbon St, onto Canal. This is no place for a vehicle. 

On Bourbon, college kids are crowding balconies,  jazz is seeping into the streets, and police are patrolling the scene on horseback. This is not unlike New Orleans in 2003, the last time I was here.

My dad and I check into a hotel on Poydras, eat at Antoine's, and take a walk down Decatur... all are packed, as they were then, and we're pleased to see it. Five years and one Category Five later, the place really seems to be as it was... on the surface. Underneath, there's an edge.

Every boarded building lends a reminder. Waiters are conspiracy theorists. The feds and the insurance companies, public enemies one and two. Cabbies know the death toll (1,704) and the number permanently driven from the city (165,000).

In general, New Orleans has lost the levity that made it the party capital of America. Debauchery seems out of place, disrespectful, frivolous. Still strongly in place though, and more appreciated now, are the elements that made New Orleans so unique and celebrated in the first place: architecture, food, music and culture.  It seems the prospect of loss has regenerated, even enhanced our esteem for the place. 

Sunday morning, we tour St. Bernard's Parish and the Ninth Ward. The destroyed houses are mostly gone now, a little debris here, a rebuilt house there. But it's mostly just tall grass, waving in the shadow of the levee that holds in the Mississppi, or is supposed to anyway. It appears to me that the emotional and financial damage here will long outlive the physical. 

On our way out of town, we drive St Charles, along the trolley line to the city's outskirts, a beautiful drive if you've never done it. Near Tulane, we pick up a couple po boys for the road. I don't wanna gush, but it's the best sandwich I've had in a long time. Dad agrees. 

Hell of a city, I say.

World class, says Dad. 

And we're quiet for a while.

I wonder if people are saying that about Las Vegas? 

Bourbon St at Toulouse, French Quarter. Untouched, though not unaffected by Katrina.

On the left, The Mississippi. On the right, the Ninth Ward. And separating them, the levee that famously broke in August 2005, spilling the one onto the other. 

Where homes stood, St Bernard's Parish. "The water covered the street signs..."