Upbeat notes from a city that’s down but not out

MARGUERITE SMITH has seen a few sights in her 34 years in the French Quarter, but the jailbreak at the buggy barn ranks among the most memorable.

To hear Smith tell it, the carriage horses and mules were hungry and jittery after being cooped up during Hurricane Katrina. After the storm passed, they kicked down the doors and dashed — or walked, some of the older ones — to the nearby Mississippi River in hopes of finding food and a modicum of freedom. Like many Quarter residents even in the best of times, they were ornery and in no mood for authority figures.

“You shoulda seen it, the sheriffs chasing the mules through the dog park,” said Smith, a painting contractor and musician.

The posse eventually caught up with the herd near the riverfront warehouses at the Governor Nicholls Street Wharf.

In the aftermath of Katrina, those who are here are as full of kick as those mules, stubbornly insisting they can rebuild a tourist infrastructure to be better than ever.

“New Orleans will bounce back,” said John Hyman, who has lived in the Quarter for 30 years. “There is no question the French Quarter will bounce back. A few chimneys were knocked to the roof…. There was no high water.”

A tour last weekend of New Orleans attractions, large and small, found them largely intact, spared the sort of wrath that destroyed so much of the rest of the city. At first blush, New Orleans’ hospitality industry appears poised to find its way out of the barn — and maybe even to bring back the 10 million visitors and 93 trade shows it hosted last year.

New Orleans has always been a strange location for a tourist mecca, plopped between a lake you can’t drink and a river you can’t swim. Know where the city gets its drinking water? The septic end of the Mississippi. It’s a hearty populace that can drink the silt and insecticide flushed from nine agricultural states. It’s a hearty horse that can slurp such stuff, then pull a carriage full of tourists through the sweaty brick streets.

Longtime haven for misfits, malcontents, literary geniuses and trumpet prodigies, the city is better suited to mirth than self-pity. So far, the word on the streets is mostly positive.

“Honestly, the French Quarter is cleaner than it’s ever been in 22 years,” said resident Mike Howell, who has a doctorate in political science and tells fortunes for a living in Jackson Square, the bustling core of the city.

As the Quarter goes, so goes the future of New Orleans, where 14% of the city’s total jobs have some connection to the travel industry. The Garden District, the elite neighborhood of gracious Southern homes, is also an important tourist draw, and its ability to bounce back will be a bellwether for recovery.

Along St. Charles Avenue, a streetcar route that connects downtown to the residential Uptown area, the majestic live oaks had a haunted, Halloween look. As evacuees awaited the word to return, the silent streets were mostly passable, and the large Italianate and Greek Revival homes seemed to have weathered the storm, roof inspections notwithstanding.

Tipitina’s, the famed club on Tchoupitoulas that touts a rich stew of music from Cajun to reggae, was still locked tight 12 days after the storm. Nearby oak trees that could have knocked the nightspot out of business stayed put, and the yellow clapboard siding was unscathed. Shiny Mardi Gras beads dangled from a high branch.

Farther uptown, the Spanish moss-draped oaks of Audubon Park sustained wind damage, and branches were strewn across the popular recreation site. Across St. Charles, Tulane University’s historic campus looks to have suffered neither wind nor water damage, although classes have been canceled till spring semester.

On the other side of the park, the renowned Audubon Zoo lost only two otters and a raccoon out of its 1,400 animals, officials said.

Around the Garden District, tourist haunts appeared to be in good shape. Ironically, the Garden District’s lush vegetation is partly the result of an epic 1816 flood that destroyed some plantations but left behind rich alluvial soil. This time around, the levees that hold back the nearby Mississippi held, and block after block of some of the nation’s most impressive historic homes escaped the flooding that ravaged other parts of the city.

From the ground, it appeared the Prytania Street townhouse where author F. Scott Fitzgerald once fought with wife Zelda sustained some roof and gutter damage. Commander’s Palace — perhaps the finest restaurant in a city of sensational food — suffered minimal awning damage and a couple of broken windows. (It had been reported that a wall was down, but construction work in front was mistaken for storm damage.) Inside, the dining room was set, linen napkins fanned out elegantly across the plates.

At nearby Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, which dates to the early 1800s, magnolia branches littered walkways, but crypts sat undisturbed, although some of the city’s other above-ground cemeteries were underwater.

Getting on with it

BACK in the too-quiet French Quarter — also nearly empty — portable generators hummed at the big hotels while managers waited for power to return. The bigger spots were beginning to show signs of life, and smaller innkeepers who stayed through the storm began what would likely be, for most, a quick cleanup.

The grand Omni Royal Orleans lost doors to three of its 345 guest rooms and sustained some roof damage. Two diesel generators kept power on, and two giant chillers kept humidity at bay.

A walk down Bourbon suggested that the party street prepared well for the storm. (Apparently, strippers are used to fleeing town quickly.) The Unisexxx Club’s sign still teased/threatened tourists with “World Famous Love Acts by Men and Women.”

At Big Daddy’s lounge, one of the street’s biggest and most-raucous strip clubs, a generator was keeping the iconic mechanical swing, featuring a fake pair of showgirl legs, dancing in and out of a window.

Overall, the damage to Bourbon Street was minor; some balconies were amazingly unscathed by winds that reached 140 mph. In fact, Mardi Gras garlands hanging from a second-floor blues club sparkled as though nothing had happened.

The flags at the 186-room Ramada Plaza Hotel, popular for its balcony views of Bourbon Street, were shredded, although its wrought-iron balcony was in pristine condition. Down Bourbon, the 500-room Royal Sonesta, another landmark, was in good shape as well, pending roof inspections sure to create anxious moments for building owners across the Quarter.

In his Bourbon Street apartment, artist Tom Gallagher, who resisted evacuation orders and rode out the storm with some friends who dubbed themselves the “Bourbon Street Baker’s Dozen,” was upbeat.

“By October, you won’t even know that a hurricane hit this place,” he said.

Late October seems to be a target date to reopen for many of the managers and owners in the Quarter, because Halloween is a major event and thus a big moneymaker.

Johnny Chisholm, owner of the Oz nightclub for 14 years, was assessing roof damage to his Bourbon Street site two weeks after the storm. He and manager Tommy Elias hope to reopen the sprawling nightspot in two months. Meanwhile, they were keeping track of the 40 employees who fled the city.

“Everybody we talked to is coming back,” Chisholm said.

Such issues loom large for the city. Will the bartenders return? What about the tenor sax players, the oyster shuckers, the original souls who drive the carriages and the cabs?

Nimble and eager

ALONG the 900 block of Royal Street, owners and caretakers of several independent inns — the Cornstalk, the Nine-O-Five Royal Hotel and the Andrew Jackson Hotel — were pulling bent flashing from roofs and sweeping up palm fronds last weekend. They predicted that the small inns would fare better than the large corporate hotels.

“The Royal Orleans and the other big ones are going to have trouble because they need a huge housekeeping staff,” predicted a caretaker at the Nine-O-Five Royal Hotel. “The housekeepers all left. We’re ready [to reopen] right now.”

Being upbeat about the underdog is an easy bandwagon to board here in the French Quarter, where independent innkeepers and renters needed some good news in the wake of a hot corporate condo market in recent years that had threatened to transform the cost of living in and the character of the Quarter. It also plays well to a contrarian population that tends to shun shaving, big money and anything that smacks of a conventional lifestyle.

“Let America live in a gated community,” bearded bar owner Jim Monaghan barked at Molly’s on Decatur on the second Thursday after the storm. “We live in a free country!”

Locals are stubborn, more than a little different, and sure that such qualities will see this eccentric city through.

Finis Shelnutt, owner of the building that houses Alex Patout’s Cajun restaurant — think crab cakes, crawfish étouffée — was sweeping debris from the sidewalk and hosing it down on a recent sweltering morning. He kept the place open during the storm, serving reporters and police officers who happened by. Food was scarce, and the ice was going quickly.

“If we get power back on, we can reopen immediately,” he said. “I’m all excited about New Orleans now. It’s going to be good for property values.”

Only time and FEMA may tell. Meanwhile, Jackson Square glistened in the September sun, oddly quiet, only pigeons walking its famed sidewalks.

The city’s centerpiece, the majestic St. Louis Cathedral, is sealed tight, and the adjacent Louisiana State Museum withstood the storm (again, assuming the roofs held). Not a single pane of glass is gone from the Cabildo museum’s checkerboard of fine French windows.

Preservation Hall, tabernacle of traditional jazz, is closed indefinitely but appears undamaged. The Café du Monde looked in need of nothing more than a leaf blower before it could begin serving its powdery beignets again. Assuming the roof’s fine, Pat O’Brien’s popular courtyard bar could reopen quickly.

The awnings were torn at the French Market, usually bulging with produce and almost anything else at its riverfront location, but the stalls were intact. Central Grocery, revered home of the muffuletta sandwich, was broken into by looters who appear to have quickly moved on; a giant jar of olives still sat on a counter. Antoine’s, a New Orleans eating institution, lost a fourth-floor wall to the wind.

But other restaurants — the historic and casual Napoleon House, elegant Galatoire’s and popular K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen — have nary a broken window nor any other apparent signs of distress.

It’s the little places like the Central Grocery you worry about most here, the tiny cafes that serve up the most memorable gumbo, the most ribald conversation. Can the little oyster houses survive? What about places like Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, one-time outpost to pirates, built not long after the French sent thieves and prostitutes to populate its new territory?

There’s no doubt the little spots will be back, the survivors here say. You can wash away much of New Orleans, but not the character — or characters — that make it special.

Joshua Clark, a writer who watched the storm swirl up the river from a perch in the Pontalba Building across from Jackson Square, is hoping this second reconstruction may even improve the area’s selection of businesses. Perhaps, he says, it will weed out the tacky tourist traps.

As he, Ellen Harris and a few other friends awaited the outcome, they grabbed brooms, rakes and other tools to clean up debris. Behind the cathedral, in a courtyard with a statue of Christ, they cut branches away and brushed the slate walkways clean.

Among the holdouts, there is no self-pity, only optimism and — perhaps most important of all — the city’s trademark sense of merriment. When they were done cleaning, they hooked a sign to the wrought iron gate.

“Jesus swept,” it said.