October 20, 2005

In spite of reports that the rebuilding effort has come a long way,
you can't tell. I live in a thin stretch of homes that was spared
flood damage. And a lot of people living in those homes have
returned. But not all, and it's kind of creepy. Those that have
are for the most part eating out of ice chests. The red cross in
New Orleans was distributing Anheuser-Busch donated water, which
although it isn't for resale, I'm sure you can find on ebay by now,
the cans are kind of cute. Everywhere you go you see military. If
you weren't paying attention, you'd think there were a lot more New
Orleaneans in the city, but it's most military. At night, I visited
my regular neighborhood bar, The Rendezvous, which is located on a
hip, up and coming stretch of Magazine St. among various boutique
and antique stores. The entire neighborhood had been looted.
Doors were kicked in and class was broken, but clearly not by the
wind. Some antique stores had been looted for the sole purpose, it
seemed, of vandalism. The Rendezvous's 4 $9,000 TVs for sports had
been torn off the walls, someone did terrible things to the video
poker machine but eventually lost the battle, and the atm, i was
told, had been found in the middle of the street ripped apart by a
crowbar. Only a mile away toward the lake, the entire city was
destroyed. You could see the water line on the homes and every
home is spray painted, some with doors kicked in. One thing I used
to love about New Orleans was that it was green. The grass grew
like weeds and the oak trees were always lush and beautiful. But
it doesn't look like that anymore. Every plant in the flooded area
was dead. All the grass was brown, any bushy plant below 8 feet was
completely brown and dead.

It was strange. You could tell people were doing their best to
stick it out until things were semi-normal and the only way to make
them normal is to stay. But it's tough. You can't buy fresh food,
everything I ate was from a can and on stale bread. And the
national guard is EVERYWHERE. The first night I was there, they
came up to the door of the bar, 6 of them, heavily armed, to get us
to leave. The following night the French Quarter Bar owners got it
pushed back to 2am through good old fashion civil disobedience.
But what I found strange was that in the bars, the crowd was so
different. The gender ratio was 9:1 men to women, because of the
military, I guess. I talked to a lot of off-duty National
Guardsmen at the bar and the work they had them doing was bizarre,
and they were all staying in weird places, like 1000 cots on a
track in the Loyola Gym. The beloved (by my friend Jordan) Jewish
Community Center had become a Small Business Association Disaster
Relief Center. Which is pretty much how it was, things were there,
but there was something fundamentally wrong about everything.

I was moving my personal things out of my apartment and into a shed
in the backyard so that my landlord could rent it furnished to
someone. I was paying $500/month when I left. She told me she was
planning to charge $3,000. I can understand that contractors are
making a lot of money, but a lot of the people desperate for
housing are New Orleaneans trying to rebuild their homes with no
where to stay. The other crazy thing was employment. Driving into
the city, near the airport (not a cool place), there was a sign on a
Burger King advertising $13/hour and a $6,000 signing bonus. I know
that's a lot but for New Orleans, THAT IS CRAZY! But all jobs are
like that, picking up trash you could make $35/hour and I ran into
an old friend who was making $1100/day cutting down trees. I
started doing student loan calculations and that didn't sound half
bad.

The final weird thing is the information. In the Times, articles
about the hurricane have moved further and further back in the
front page section, but the entire Times-Picayune is devoted to the
Hurricane. And the stories are crazy. I hadn't even heard about
the doctor who mercy killed patients before the flood, but
apparently that was big news.

Erin Mastagni

Gulf Coast Recovers Member

Tulane Student

at Columbia University in New York City Fall 2005