Ever-Resilient New Orleans Ignores That Sinking Feeling

In Shea Penland’s worst-case scenario, muddy water from the Mississippi River bursts through the levees of New Orleans and turns the French Quarter’s narrow streets into canals.

The roof of Preservation Hall is left poking out of the water, and a few miles away, Fats Domino’s house is submerged. The shadow of the Louisiana Superdome falls on lagoons instead of slums.

New Orleans is sinking, and as a coastal geologist, Penland needs to figure out how long the city has left before it looks like Venice. He reckons 50 to 100 years - sooner if flood and hurricane contrive to deliver a one-two punch.

But he feels he might as well be blabbering about Atlantis.

‘People here in New Orleans have this false sense of security and think we can withstand anything,’ he laments.

No surprise, perhaps. As the T-shirts never cease to remind you, this is the Big Easy, where people have always partied like there’s no tomorrow. Bars don’t have to shut off their taps - ever. Drinking on the streets is legal.

Jazz, blues, zydeco and Cajun music blast from the open doors of bars, and young women lean over wrought-iron balcony railings, baring their chests. Among the merry throng on Bourbon Street, it seems the only guy without a drink is the one holding a 10-foot cross and passing out pamphlets about damnation.

The fun is at its peak these days as Mardi Gras fever grips the city. But even on an ordinary day, Bourbon Street looks like a carnival.

‘If they know they’ll be drowning soon, they’ll just have a party,’ said Betty Guillard, the former society columnist credited with popularizing the Big Easy tag.

The entire city lies on a swamp flanked by the Mississippi River and brackish Lake Pontchartrain. Parts of it are as much as 10 feet below sea level. The French Quarter, the city’s highest elevation, has sunk two feet in 60 years.

New Orleans lies in the path of hurricanes from the Gulf of Mexico, although it hasn’t taken a direct hit since Hurricane Betsy in 1965, when parts of the city vanished under seven feet of water.

‘A certain combination of natural forces come together and the city will flood,’ Penland said. ‘The change may be dramatic.’

New Orleans has been living with catastrophe ever since 1718, when explorer Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville ignored the advice of French engineers and founded what became the French Quarter.

Fires twice leveled the city in the 18th century. Epidemics killed tens of thousands in the 19th century. Downpours regularly drop sheets of rain and turn streets into rivers.

‘You’re never certain about your existence here,’ said Terrence Fitzmorris, a lifelong resident and history professor at Tulane University.

During its first 100 years, New Orleans was ruled by France, then Spain, then France again, before finally becoming American. That may help explain why there’s no consensus on pronouncing New Orleans. ORlins or ORLEE-yins are acceptable, but not orLEENS. Unless, of course, you’re referring to the parish or avenue.

Originally named La Nouvelle Orleans after the Duke of Orleans, its Frenchness lingers in surnames (Boudreaux, Duplessis, Brouillette), fleur-de-lis symbols, and culinary words like remoulade, etoufee and those sugar-dusted doughnuts called beignets.

‘People in New Orleans are looking to the world with French eyes,’ said the French consul general, Bernard Maizaret. ‘It’s a different view than Anglo-Saxon. We feel that cuisine is very important. Music is very important. Fine arts are very important.

The 30,000 to 40,000 French tourists who visit yearly don’t hear much French but still feel at home, Maizaret said. And they do recognize the French words Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday), which falls on March 7 this year and climaxes a wild week of parties and parades of floats and people in costumes.

Mardi Gras is when the city of 1.5 million is reminded that it still has an aristocracy of sorts. These are the krewes, private societies of the haut monde who throw carnival balls costing up to $100,000 each.

The wealthy live in brightly painted Victorian houses surrounded by deep poverty - a holdover from slavery times when the whites wanted their servants living nearby, and perpetuated by the shortage of land.

There was a lot of money in honky-tonks and brothels, and by the turn of the century, New Orleans’ reputation for decadence was well established.

It never legalized prostitution but required all prostitutes to live within the 64-block district of Storyville. The district was eventually torn down, but a long row of bars sprang up nearby in the French Quarter, alongside brick-and-stone homes with Spanish-style terraces and courtyards.

Here Tennessee Williams penned ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ in a third-story loft. William Faulkner wrote his first novel, ‘Soldier’s Pay,’ in a row house a block away.

Anne (‘Interview with the Vampire’) Rice is now the city’s most famous literary citizen, and owns the St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage, a sprawl of elegant buildings where she holds parties and keeps her huge doll collection.

A few blocks away, singer Chris Owens still sings the blues at the club she has owned for decades. In her dressing room, she raised her voice above the roar of drunken young men outside yelling for drunken women to disrobe.

‘Anything goes, baby,’ Owens said, fluttering, her fake eyelashes. ‘I think Bourbon Street will always be the Main Street as long as we don’t have that major hurricane.’

The street that never sleeps is actually a good place to sit out storms. When other neighborhoods are flooded, it usually stays above water. Alex Beard, an artist, remembers wading waist-deep through water to get to a bar a few years ago.

In Beard’s neighborhood, near the mansions of the Garden District, kudzu vines spread over fences and small lizards crawl around porch lights and garbage cans, changing color. Thumb-sized cockroaches scuttle or take wing.

Every May, swarms of Formosan termites take to the air to mate around glowing street lights. They lay their eggs underground or inside homes and eat their way through house frames and even the insides of huge, moss-festooned oaks.

‘New Orleans is at the edge of a tropical wasteland,’ says Beard, who uses the city’s pests as inspiration for some of his paintings.

But there’s a whole other New Orleans, all blacktop and concrete, looking like any American business district.

Skyscrapers built by Gulf Coast oil money loom over Poydras Street and the flying-saucer-shaped Louisiana Superdome, home to the abysmal New Orleans Saints and, in 1998, a shelter for 14,000 refugees from Hurricane Georges.

But the landscape changes quickly. On one side of the Superdome is a glitzy mall and corporate offices; on the other side lie two housing projects for mostly poor blacks.

Whites fled to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s, leaving blacks in the majority in New Orleans proper. Blacks have controlled city government for years, and their ranks now include Mayor Marc Morial (son of Ernest) and Police Chief Richard Pennington, who was lured here from Washington D.C., reformed a notoriously corrupt force, and introduced techniques that have cut the crime rate almost in half.

But blacks still work the low-paying jobs as supermarket clerks, hotel doormen and chambermaids, while ‘many of the financial institutions and other institutions remain controlled by non-African-Americans,’ said Silas Lee, a political consultant.

The city’s schools remain among the country’s worst. This year, New Orleans became the latest American city to hire a military man - a former marine with no public school experience - to turn the system around.

Critics say the schools may never get better until people are willing to pay higher local taxes. But property owners who send their children to private schools are reluctant to pay more for schools they don’t use.

To Penland, the city’s biggest problem is the potential shrinking of land supply. Unless the levee system is shored up and the wetlands that protect New Orleans are restored, he says, the city could be overwhelmed by flooding, causing real estate prices to rise and people to be squeezed closer together.

‘The politicians have to realize unless they are willing to throw an extraordinary amount of money at the problem, they’re setting up a catastrophe,’ the geologist said.