A Neighborhood Staggers to Its Feet

Come hell or high water -- and there’s been plenty of both around here -- Summer Anderson was going to give birth in her beloved New Orleans. Even her insurance adjuster, who is not in the habit of persuading clients that their homes are uninhabitable, told her to stay away. You’re too pregnant, he told her. There’s nothing here for you.

“But the house was in good shape,” she said. “And there’s no place like home.”

Two weeks ago, she and her husband, Mark, returned from exile. And Thursday night, she brought her baby home from the hospital. Isabelle Cortina Anderson, all 8 pounds, 15 ounces of her, became the 12th resident of Elysian Fields Avenue, which was home, not long ago, to hundreds of families.

Elysian Fields is not the worst street in town; there are houses, not far away, still entombed in 10-foot piles of mud left when the levees broke after Hurricane Katrina. Nor is it the best street; it is not in the French Quarter or Uptown, neighborhoods that have declared themselves open for business.

It is just another street clinging to life. There are suggestions of hope. But a walk down the avenue provides a vivid reminder that the exhausting slog has only begun here -- a reminder that New Orleans, when it is a city again, will be smaller, wealthier and whiter, none of which is welcome news to many of those who loved it.

When Isabelle came home, Summer’s mother had pork chops simmering on the stove. Two-year-old Luke was more interested in the red bicycle he had received as a consolation prize than in meeting his new sister.

For a moment, it was easy to look past the spray-painted Day-Glo “X” left by a search-and-rescue team on the front door, surrounded by hieroglyphics indicating that they had found no bodies inside. It was easy to forget that a few blocks away, there was a car sitting in the limbs of a tree.

The Andersons -- she a 29-year-old teacher whose career is on hold, he a 31-year-old dentist -- are pioneers. Of the 438 homes on Elysian Fields, six are occupied. Of the 131 businesses, 13 are open, if you count the enterprising man selling barbecue in a parking lot. Of the 11 churches, one is open.

And that is where the walk begins, at the northern tip of Elysian Fields, in a small chapel where the priest will run the organ off a diesel generator this morning; where the faithful, when they come at all, come to cry.

If New Orleans is a geographic bowl, as is often said these days, Elysian Fields runs from one rim to the other, from the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, above the city, to the Mississippi River below. It is a storied avenue with a wide median -- known here as the “neutral ground” -- where a train called the Smoky Mary once carried wealthy visitors to lakeside shows featuring Danny Baker and Louis Armstrong.

All but the north and south ends of the 5-mile-long avenue were flooded for weeks with as much as 10 feet of water. The water stopped three blocks from the Chapel of the Holy Comforter, the Rev. Roger Allen’s Episcopal church, which served the neighborhood as well as two nearby colleges.

Allen’s story would seem odd in another city, one less welcoming to eccentrics and idealists and self-starters. For 21 years, he practiced maritime law in New Orleans, defending shippers and oil rig owners. He had a good life, lived in a nice Uptown house. Three years ago, at 48, he gave it up to attend seminary in Tennessee. He was ordained July 2, less than two months before Hurricane Katrina.

The church was a bustling little place with an ethnically and socially diverse congregation -- college professors, urban kids, immigrants and the elderly couple who brought doughnuts every Sunday. Allen wears jeans with his tab-collared clergy shirt, and recently had the church wired with high-speed Internet so students could come there to study and, hopefully, drop in for a prayer.

The church sustained only mild damage, but it is fair to say Allen’s mission has changed.

His own house, and everything in it, was destroyed. He only located the last member of his congregation last week. No one died -- an enormous relief -- but only six of the congregation’s 66 families are back.

He starts each day with a prayer, “whether there is anyone here or not.” He wants his church to be a beacon of serenity, so he cleans all day -- his staff is scattered in various states -- and waters the grass incessantly, giving him the only patch of green grass for blocks in any direction.

He spends the rest of the day cruising the streets, offering his church to anyone he finds as a place to wash up and rest. Most take him up on the offer. Most wind up sobbing on his shoulder.

“People are angry,” he said. “They are angry at God, angry that this happened, that their lives are screwed up. They are exhausted. A lot of people are self-medicating with alcohol, myself included.”

A month ago, he held his first Sunday services; he unplugged the organ from the generator after the service so he could plug in the coffeepot. Four people were there.

He was expecting 17 or so this morning. He’ll muster words of hope; New Orleans has a soul, he says, and if you have a soul you don’t have to worry about dying. But privately, he harbors doubts, not just about the city, but about whether he is up to the task ahead.

“Am I the right person to press forward over the next ... however long it takes?” he asked. “Maybe. There is a lot that we can do to provide for people who are hurting. Maybe I’m here for that reason. But I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

*

The dark lines that remain on every home in the flooded zones, showing how high the water got, have become known as “coffee stains.” Walk down the street from the church, down an imperceptible but critical hill, and the stains start to show themselves, first at the clapboards close to the ground, then at the windows, then close to the roof.

Every day, hundreds of men -- they are all men; there are very few women in New Orleans -- descend to haul away debris. And every morning, it looks virtually the same. As of Friday, workers had taken away 2.7 million cubic tons of debris. Officials estimate that there are 10 million more tons to go -- and the amount of trash littering the streets only seems to grow as people empty the rotting, moldy contents of their homes onto the sidewalk.

On Elysian Fields, there are washers and dryers, pieces of furniture, piles of soggy insulation. On one corner there is a comforter, printed with soccer balls and footballs. On another, a page from a cookbook with a recipe for four-bean salad.

There are scores of destroyed cars, some parked in the middle of traffic lanes. There are abandoned boats that became grounded, leaning grotesquely against telephone and light poles, after they were used to rescue people from rooftops.

All of this has created its own economy. Major intersections are littered with small signs stuck in the ground, mostly advertising home-gutting services with names such as Dajon’s Disaster Master and Gut-Busters. Outfits that can’t make signs take advantage of the refrigerators that are tossed about; they have painted “GUTTING” on the side, along with their phone numbers.

In the 3400 block of Elysian Fields, Aubrey Cheatham, who has spent 30 of his 54 years working as an electrician, worked feverishly to rewire a duplex.

Cheatham’s list of troubles is long. His home was flooded, and his insurance company doesn’t want to pay. A tree crushed his fishing boat -- the one he used in more temperate times to catch red drum and speckled trout. His wife and three children are scattered around the country; two of his children were attending New Orleans colleges that, for now, do not exist.

He rented a house with three other electricians until the landlord abruptly kicked them out after finding a tenant willing to pay more money. Though Cheatham hasn’t been in his home for 10 weeks, he just received a $300 bill from the electric company; he would fight it if he could get someone to answer the phone.

Still, Cheatham doesn’t have much time to fret over all of that. Like most contractors here, he is working seven days a week.

The duplex job is emblematic of the struggle ahead.

The house had been gutted by the time Cheatham arrived, reduced to a ceiling, a floor and the studs, all of which were pressure-washed and coated in bleach to kill mold. That can cost upward of $10,000. Cheatham’s job comes next; he is expected to rip out the flooded electronics, from the sockets to the ceiling fans, and replace them. The job will cost his client $8,000.

Most homeowners haven’t even been back to town to see what could be salvaged -- many will never come back -- and few homeowners have gotten their house in good enough condition to start the electrical work. The only reason the work was underway at the duplex was that the owner had returned and had enough money to pay for it out of pocket while he bickered with his insurance adjuster.

The job will take a week. Then the sheetrock people have to come in, then the carpet guys. The house needs a new kitchen, a new water heater, a new central air system. Cheatham will come back three times to make sure everything is working, and two inspection teams must approve his work before they will turn on the power.

If everything goes well, the owner will be back in the house in a month.

This process must be repeated tens of thousands of times in New Orleans.

“Give us 10 years,” Cheatham said, with no hint of irony. “We’ll be back.”

*

Two more miles toward the river -- past a Walgreens from which a team of men in white protective suits exits ominously, past a McDonald’s whose golden arches are upside-down -- Elysian Fields passes over the railroad tracks and offers a glimpse of the downtown skyline and into the devastated Gentilly neighborhood.

Most Gentilly houses haven’t been entered since the storm. On some, the front door is marked “DB,” meaning searchers found a dead body inside. Many who returned home broke out windows or removed front doors -- there is nothing inside worth stealing -- and then left again.

Peggy Lewis came home, but only under duress.

Lewis, 53, owns a duplex in the 1300 block of Elysian Fields. The home was handed down in her mother’s will, a routine occurrence in a city where, before the storm, 88% of African American residents were also born here.

Before Katrina, Lewis lived in half of the duplex with her husband and stepson. She rented out the other half for $600 a month to supplement the salary she made working in an elementary school cafeteria.

Lewis’ story is extraordinary only because of how ordinary it is here. She rode out the storm at a local hospital that was swamped by the flood. She waded out through chest-deep water five days later, holding her 8-month-old grandson above her head. A boat carried them to high ground, and days later they caught a ride to Baton Rouge, where she stayed with relatives.

About a week ago, she returned to New Orleans and got a room in a small hotel. She got kicked out to make room for Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, slept in a truck for a night, and then, on Wednesday, gave up and came home.

Unlike most homes on Elysian Fields, hers was raised on blocks, so the water only made it to the third of five front steps.

She is home, but it is an unfamiliar place. Her job does not exist because there are no public schools. There are no restaurants or grocery stores open nearby. She has relatives two doors down -- the only other family on the block.

She has running water, but no hot water. She has no gas to cook with. In a reflection of the confounding pace of recovery, the power has been turned on to half of her duplex but not the other -- and not the half she used to live in. There are no streetlights. Every task seems monumental; her cousin had to drive to Kenner, 13 miles away, to buy ice last week.

This is the neighborhood she was born in and, she figures, the neighborhood where she will die. Life was never perfect; her block is across the street from a rough area where drug gangs ran the streets and contributed to a startling murder rate.

“But this is home,” she said. “It’s all I know.”

Most of her neighbors, she believes, will not be back. In their place will be people she does not know, including, chances are, many whites, who are expected to make up a far greater share of the population than they did before the storm.

This, on its face, does not bother Lewis. She is no racist, she said, and gets along with just about everyone. But she fears, as many here do, that the city will change.

Saturdays, for instance, were grand days, days of eating, an occasional nip, playing spades on the sidewalk. It seemed like there were grills smoking in front of every house.

“You’d see somebody and you’d get all country on them,” she said. “You’d say: ‘Come on over and get something to eat!’ And everybody would just talk and laugh and have a good time.”

She wonders, she said, whether those days will come again. She wonders whether the block will ever be so full of life. She wonders what will happen the first time she waves to one of her new white neighbors and tells them to come on over for some chicken and a game of cards.

*

A mile and a half down, Gentilly gives way to Faubourg Marigny, a funky neighborhood of artists, jazz clubs and Creole cottages. The coffee stains are lower here and, mercifully, fade altogether around Rampart Street, seven blocks from the river. Here, the once-bustling commerce of Elysian Fields is coming to life, slowly.

New Orleans, not a rich city before Katrina, is in desperate financial straits. Officials estimate that they can afford vital city services only until March. The Port of New Orleans, once lauded as a springboard for recovery, is handling less than half the business it used to.

Bill Dailey, 60, and Rich Sacher, 64, own a sprawling plant nursery and gift shop at the end of Elysian Fields. They are trying to do their part -- to conduct a little commerce, to pay the salaries of eight people. But they are not getting much help, and they are getting cranky.

After sneaking back into the city in September, they found their shop, American Aquatic Gardens & Gifts, relatively intact, though several trees had fallen, and every plant that was not a waterlily or a cactus was dead. They managed to reopen quickly.

But the power still fails routinely, for hours at a time, forcing them to scramble often for candles. The business relies on quick mail deliveries, but UPS, they said, refuses to deliver to the 70117 ZIP Code. There are not enough city workers to mow the grass in the median out front, so they are doing it themselves.

To survive, they need customers. But, even as several buyers milled about Friday among blue impatiens and yellow cassia, the city’s once-ambitious attempts to repopulate the city have stalled, leaving New Orleans, for now, with a sad, scattered population of fewer than 90,000.

In his office, Dailey, whose duties include buying the store’s merchandise, stared wistfully at his computer screen.

“You don’t want to talk to me,” he muttered. “I’m one of the angry ones. Go talk to Rich. He’s much more reasonable than I am.”

Sacher was in his office next door.

“I’m concerned,” he said, unsolicited.

“I’m concerned that the federal government is only trying to rebuild the levees to the level they were before. I’m concerned that FEMA is an immobile bureaucracy stuck in red tape with idiot political appointees at the top.

“I’m concerned because, for far less money than we have spent in Iraq -- for 10% of what we have spent in Iraq -- all of this could have been avoided. I’m concerned that we have worked like demons to get back into the city and to get back to business and to create a little pocket of normalcy, and I fear it was all for nothing.”

“Sorry,” he said. “What was your question?”

Dailey poked his head in the door. He couldn’t help himself. Everyone here wants someone to listen.

“We have a nation out there that thinks we have healed,” he said. “We have not. We are not OK.”