Special report A decade after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, David Uberti goes in search of the people who were at the heart of its recovery, to understand what the city has gone through – and where it might be heading

Maggie Carroll couldn’t sleep – not after what she had read earlier in the day. It was 11 January 2006, four months after the deadly floods triggered by Hurricane Katrina had swallowed many of New Orleans’ neighbourhoods.

Carroll and her husband were among the first to return after the storm and take stock of theirs, Broadmoor, a low-lying area whose raised bungalows and colourful shotgun houses had been inundated by up to 10 feet of water. The Carrolls’ home on Walmsley Avenue had been left structurally sound; its wood floors didn’t buckle. Still, the water had picked up pieces of furniture, carried them across rooms and left them ruined. It broke up the back deck and crushed the garage door, before submerging Maggie’s grandfather’s 1963 Chevy.

Renting an apartment off Magazine Street, a short drive away, for $1,300 a month, the Carrolls faced days filled with uncertainty. Then, on 11 January, the front-page story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune gave them yet another jolt. A mayoral-appointed Bring New Orleans Back Commission had sketched out a plan it hoped would open the tap of federal aid. Crafted by a team of outside consultants, the blueprint suggested concentrating redevelopment on the city’s higher, less-flood-prone ground.

The Times Picayune map showing the Bring Back New Orleans Commission’s plan for the future. Green dots show areas earmarked for parks or greenspace. Red rings show areas to be redeveloped

“FOUR MONTHS TO DECIDE,” the headline blared. “CITY’S FOOTPRINT MAY SHRINK; FULL BUYOUTS PROPOSED FOR THOSE FORCED TO MOVE.” Broadmoor was, according to the report, among a handful of low-lying neighbourhoods “that will have to prove their viability to rebuild”. An accompanying map showed the area where Carroll and her husband had bought their first home, in 2002, covered by a large green dot. “Approximate areas expected to become parks and greenspace,” the key explained.

“I cried,” Carroll recalls when I meet her this summer. “I thought: ‘This cannot be happening.’”



In Broadmoor, an area with a long history of civic pride, that green dot proved a symbolic turning point in the uncertain days after the flooding. “It was so intense that you couldn’t even describe the situation to a family member,” Carroll says, explaining how 400 residents crowded under a tent days later to try and make sense of it all. “We decided to deal with this just like we’d been dealing with all of this nonsense.”

The proposal to shrink New Orleans caused a massive public backlash, especially since countless residents remained scattered across the country with no say in the planning process. The plan bore out the fears of working- and middle-class New Orleanians – many of them African American – who tended to live in low-lying areas. They distrusted the city-elite’s motivation in rebuilding. The Bring New Orleans Back Commission merely made people wonder whether parts of the city would be brought back at all.

These people had, of course, already experienced severe trauma. Government preparation for and response to the humanitarian disaster had proven woefully inadequate. More than 1,800 died across the Gulf Coast region, which also suffered more than $100bn (£65bn) in damage. The flooding put roughly 80% of New Orleans under water and displaced more than 400,000 residents. Some who didn’t escape were drowned and entombed in their own homes. Others were stranded in squalid conditions at the Superdome, the city’s football arena. Orders circulating through the police department authorised officers to shoot looters as the city fell into a state of collapse.

The flooding put roughly 80% of New Orleans under water and displaced more than 400,000 residents

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A National Guard truck takes residents to the Superdome in 2005. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP

Small wonder, then, that the green dot rekindled a me-against-the-world mentality among many New Orleans residents. Unlike some other neighbourhoods, however, Carroll’s already boasted a well-established organisation to channel that energy. City plan be damned: the Broadmoor Improvement Association, coupled with no small amount of outside aid, helped the community bring itself back to life.

The residents of Broadmoor created a “block captain” system to track down neighbours and learn whether they planned to return. A grassroots marketing campaign made “Broadmoor Lives” lawn signs and bumper stickers to help show residents who was coming home.

The BIA shared basic information – how to get the gas turned on; which contractor to trust. Its members met multiple times a week at the nearby Church of Annunciation to fuse tenets of the commission’s proposal into their own plan to fully repopulate the neighbourhood. They partnered with university programmes and attracted millions in funding to rebuild a library and community centre. They marshalled state money to fund a $29m renovation of the neighbourhood’s Wilson School, which reopened in 2010.

By that point, Broadmoor had regained about 75% of its 2000 population. Carroll, for her part, renovated three homes on her block, turning this into her new profession. After three years of lobbying, she and her husband, an architect, finally qualified for federal housing aid. They’ve since moved in next door to their old home on Walmsley Avenue.

On a warm evening in early June, I join Carroll at a Broadmoor Improvement Association meeting on the back patio of the Rendon Inn, a local bar. Residents sip beers, swap news from the block, and begin embarking on yet another daunting task: deciding what comes next.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An abandoned house in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, 10 years after Hurricane Katrina. Photograph: Seph Lawless

*****



As many historians, planners and geographers have pointed out, New Orleans is not unique, despite its residents’ best efforts to convince themselves otherwise – both before and after Katrina. For decades, it has grappled with quandaries typical of declining cities across the United States, from depopulation and disinvestment to racial tension and public corruption.

Some corners of the city still bear scars – if not open wounds – of the great American urban crisis. Parts of the Lower Ninth Ward appear as forgotten by man and reclaimed by nature as any neighbourhood in Detroit. But that’s not all due to Katrina – she just washed away any remaining veneer that might have concealed those underlying trends, leaving a city in disarray.

New Orleans population The changing population of New Orleans

Local officials’ initial responses to the disaster – like those of their counterparts in Baton Rouge, the state capital, and Washington – often seemed to defy logic. Former Mayor Ray Nagin, now in federal prison on corruption charges, didn’t foresee the political divisiveness of the proposal to shrink New Orleans’ footprint. He distanced himself from his own commission and abdicated leadership on how the city should rebuild. “I’m confident that the citizens can decide intelligently for themselves,” he said in March 2006.

The ensuing chaos stalled federal aid to rebuild infrastructure and public property during the all-important first stage of recovery. “It is fair to say that planning to rebuild New Orleans has been a fiasco,” former city planning director Kristina Ford wrote in her 2010 book, The Trouble With Urban Planning. The city didn’t complete a comprehensive proposal that satisfied federal requirements for those funds until mid-2007.

At the same time, housing aid was only slowly dribbling from Washington. Just 31% of Louisiana residents who applied for federal housing grants through the state’s Road Home programme had received them by December 2007, according to the non-profit Rand Corporation.

“The only reason New Orleans came back,” the current deputy mayor, Andy Kopplin, tells me, “was that the people scrapped and clawed and figured out a way when there was none.”

“In the 10 years since Hurricane Katrina,” wrote Robert Collins, an urban studies professor at the city’s Dillard University, in a June report, “the citizens of New Orleans have become perhaps the most educated, best informed, and most active citizen planners in the history of the United States.”



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The impetus to rebuild New Orleans “better” gained steam almost immediately after the storm. As the chair of the city’s Regional Transit Authority bluntly put it to The Wall Street Journal about a week later: “Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically.” The statement stood out for its thinly veiled racism, though the opportunity to start over was indeed appealing to many. After all, New Orleans’ life cycle had mimicked that of many cities in decline.

For centuries, residents had been forced to cluster on natural high ground close to the river, land backing up to city-owned cypress swamps that went largely untouched. Seeking to create more developable area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city installed massive pumps and drainage systems to empty them. After additional infrastructure such as drainage canals and levees were put in place, huge swathes of land opened for new construction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sometimes the concrete staircase to the front porch is all that remains of a home. Photograph: Seph Lawless

“Just as high-speed elevators changed the geography of New York City by making skyscrapers possible, the Wood pump revolutionised the urban geography of New Orleans by suddenly opening to settlement areas which were thought forever closed,” Peirce F Lewis wrote in his 1976 geographical history, New Orleans: Making of an Urban Landscape.

In Broadmoor, a housing boom ensued in the 1920s, lining streets with a mixture of bungalows and shotguns – the narrow, airy homes that define so many New Orleans neighbourhoods. And by the 1940s, nearly 50% of residents owned their homes.

Expansion into low-lying tracts elsewhere was put on hold during the Great Depression and the second world war. But the economic boom afterward spurred massive population shifts, helped along with GI assistance and federally backed mortgages. The neighbourhoods they created proved to be far different from those along the natural levees.

“Because new ground seemed plentiful, houses were no longer clustered, and most of them weren’t raised above ground level, since flooding seemed ‘impossible’,” Ford wrote. They tended to resemble typical American postwar homes, built on concrete slabs amid sprawling yards. The suburban dream had come to New Orleans – and as early as 1976, experts including Lewis were already warning of the potential consequences. “Most of the newly developed land is built on muck and is sinking at various rates,” he wrote. “Much of the land is subject to extremely dangerous flooding.”

The city, uncharacteristically integrated for a southern metropolis, crept north toward Lake Pontchartrain, erecting many neighbourhoods either legally or financially off-limits to black residents. The drainage systems became “a powerful agent to accelerate racial segregation in New Orleans”, Lewis added.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An abandoned building in Lower Ninth. Photograph: Seph Lawless

As many people of means sprawled within city limits during the postwar boom, others spilled outside of them. In 1940, the city’s population was 70% white and 30% black; that ratio that had nearly flipped by 2000. White flight soon became middle-class black flight, and overall population atrophied from a peak Census tally of 627,000 in 1960 to 343,000 40 years later. The rate of departures accelerated in the 1980s after the price of oil collapsed, leading unemployment to shoot upwards and tax revenues to plunge.

In Broadmoor, where Ellarose Grey moved in 1978, “the neighbourhood changed as people moved in and out,” she tells me. “Not everyone was interested in keeping Broadmoor moving in the same direction. We had a lot of bad stuff going on that was all over New Orleans.” Crack and other drugs ruined neighbourhoods already weakened by massive disinvestment. By 1992, the metro area’s murder rate led the United States. As The New York Times declared two years later, “Murder is booming in New Orleans.”

The BIA had fewer active members back then, but Grey still credits it with helping Broadmoor weather the worst of New Orleans’ decline. “We kept moving,” she says.

Other areas weren’t so fortunate. Amid decades of depopulation, nearby Central City, once a nexus of black-owned businesses, became an epicentre of abandonment and violent crime. While scattered development is sprouting in parts of the neighbourhood, such longstanding conditions of blight made redevelopment doubly arduous over the past decade.

“Neighbourhoods that were already experiencing massive vacancy before Katrina — that was only heightened to an extreme point after Katrina,” says Jeff Hebert, executive director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and the city’s chief resilience officer, a position funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities challenge. “The disruption of a disaster only heightens pre-existing legacy city issues.”

Hebert formerly worked as the mayor’s blight czar, focusing cleanup and demolition efforts first around schools – “They’re really neighbourhood anchors” – and then large public investments. “You have to figure out a way to respond to needs but also triage that in a way that you can actually handle,” Hebert says. He pegged the current number of abandoned homes and properties citywide below 35,000, a total not seen since before Katrina.

“We’ve moved from Katrina recovery to the neighbourhood stabilisation work that was going on before 2004.”

An eponymous HBO series has helped the revival of Tremé

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tremé’s commercial corridor along Claiborne Avenue was bulldozed to make way for this bleak highway overpass in the 1960s. Photograph: Seph Lawless

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Some areas, such as Tremé, have already moved beyond that stage. Bordering the French Quarter, it was the city’s first community of free people of colour, not to mention its cultural soul. As a street mural looking out at Orleans Avenue still describes it: “From Congo Square [the birthplace of New Orleans’ musical tradition] to everywhere.” That heritage, along with the neighbourhood’s proximity to “the Quarter”, has made Tremé an appealing place for incoming residents and investors. An eponymous HBO series, meanwhile, helped turn it into a destination for tourists.

The area’s revival has come extraordinarily quickly. In the 1960s, Tremé’s decline accelerated after its bustling commercial corridor along Claiborne Avenue was bulldozed to construct an interstate. Gone was the boulevard’s grassy neutral ground, which had been a frequent meeting place for Mardi Gras Indians. Oak trees lining the street were replaced by the elevated highway’s support beams. Today, the only hints of the neighbourhood that was are painted on those cement pillars: an open-air market, local jazz musicians and Indian chiefs. The underpass has become a gathering place for homeless New Orleanians, some holding signs as they stand along Claiborne, asking for change as traffic rolls by.

Adolph Bynum, a pharmacist, has lived in a Creole cottage on nearby Henriette DeLille Street for more than 30 years. “Prostitutes would come down the street,” he says of the 1980s. “We had mechanics jacking up cars. We had heroin users in blighted houses … Before Katrina, there were a lot of random shootings.” Bynum began buying up Tremé property nonetheless.

His neighbourhood lies on relatively high ground, so flood damage was light compared to other areas. But Katrina had other ways of taking her toll.

Nearly 80% of Tremé residents rented housing as of 2000. But Louisiana, like neighbouring Mississippi, targeted a disproportionate amount of federal housing grants toward homeowners post-Katrina. State agencies provided some sort of aid to 62% of all homeowner units damaged, according to the Government Accountability Office. They did the same for just 18% of renters. “Although the proportional damage to rental units was greater,” the GAO wrote, “more federal dollars were awarded for homeowner units through the programmes.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Derelict flats in the Lower Ninth Ward. Photograph: Seph Lawless

That lack of aid, coupled with the city’s decision to close massive public housing projects on the other side of the elevated highway, led Tremé’s population to halve between 2000 and 2010. The housing vacancy rate, meanwhile, nearly doubled to 37%.

Bynum and his wife, Naydja, began organising meetings throughout the neighbourhood at the beginning of 2006. What would become the Historic Faubourg Tremé Association launched blight removal and beautification projects, established relationships with the police and lobbied city politicians. They also fought to clean up local drug culture, which they said had been conflated with the music scene.

Today, Naydja tells me, “mothers are rolling their babies in strollers and people are walking their dogs at different times of the night. Those are signs that the neighbourhood is becoming more comfortable. We see much more of that than we ever saw [before Katrina].”

Some in the neighbourhood have opposed the Bynums as first-wave gentrifiers – but newcomers would seem a greater threat. “People locally can’t buy houses because out-of-towners are coming in that can outbid them,” Bynum says. Adds Jessica Knox, the woman who replaced her as president of their neighbourhood group: “We went around knocking on doors to reintroduce ourselves and the association, and a lot of the doors we knocked on are people who are just in for a festival or something. You’re getting out-of-towners just buying the houses and renting them out, so the neighbours are going.”

Developers have also begun building larger apartment and condo buildings that stick out awkwardly on streets of pastel-coloured shotgun homes. As a result, Tremé has grown older, richer and whiter. Its under-18 population in 2010 was just a quarter of its 2000 level.

We don’t have the graffiti sprayed all over. We don’t have the hanging on the corner and the drugs. It’s totally changed Paulette Clay

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A public housing development is demolished two years after Katrina. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

When I attend a panel on gentrification at the nonprofit Tulane Hillel, hundreds of onlookers pack the uptown building. The tone of the discussion is one of urgency, if not dismay. Panelists argue this new beast threatened New Orleans’ greatest export, its culture, and seemed especially hard to control.

“It’s not too late in the City of New Orleans – it’s not too late,” says city councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, who had been president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association after Katrina. “People move to New Orleans for the culture. And you don’t change the culture, you become part of it. So the attitude has to be right.”

At least some local residents have benefitted from the changes in Tremé. I meet Paulette Clay near Faubourg Lafitte, the 517-unit mixed-income development that replaced the Lafitte Projects, an 896-unit public housing complex built in 1941. The 66-year-old Tremé native, who wears hoop earrings and angular glasses emblazoned with “D&G” in fake diamonds, is one of the few residents to have lived in both. The new structures, pastel homes designed to evoke traditional New Orleans architecture, stand in stark contrast to their barracks-style brick predecessors.

New Orleans incarceration rate New Orleans imprisons far fewer people than it did pre-2005

“I’d say they’re 200% better than The Bricks were,” Clay says of her new apartment, whose subsidised rent runs at $121 a month. “We don’t have the graffiti sprayed all over. We don’t have grease from old cars sitting around. We don’t have the hanging on the corner and the drugs. Now, it’s totally changed.”

“The Bricks” were one of four public housing developments controversially closed after Katrina and razed in 2008. Breaking up the concentrated poverty and crime within them had long been on the wishlist of some New Orleans politicians. But the move displaced about 5,000 households, most of them African-American.



Some residents, like Clay, managed to find spots in the new buildings. Still more received “Section 8” vouchers to put toward rent elsewhere. The theory was that individual households, physically untethered from the cycle of poverty, would gravitate toward areas with better schools, less crime and more jobs. From 2005 to 2013, the number of such vouchers used in New Orleans more than doubled to nearly 19,000, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But a July analysis by two Tulane University researchers for the Data Center, a local thinktank, suggests the assumptions underlying that decision proved hollow. Forty-two percent of vouchers clustered in just 13% of city Census tracts, the vast majority of which were high-poverty, non-white neighbourhoods. A “scarcity of rental units, historically high poverty rates, and the massive infusion of vouchers into the rental marketplace likely hampered the effort,” write Stacy Seicshnaydre and Ryan C Albright.

The city has continued adding housing through mixed-income developments to replace the old projects. The Central Business District skyline is silhouetted with cranes slowly but surely toiling over half-finished apartment complexes. NORA, the agency that assumed control of properties bought out through federal aid programmes, has sold thousands of homes and lots. Yet the housing market remains intimidating, as I mention to Clay in the Sojourner Truth Community Center near Faubourg Lafitte.

“Oh, lord,” she purrs, shaking her head. “To go outside [Faubourg Lafitte] to rent a house — I really couldn’t do it. I couldn’t afford it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man walks past destroyed buildings in New Orleans in September 2005. Photograph: Hector Mata/AFP/Getty Images

*****



Back in Broadmoor, I meet Carroll in the neighbourhood’s newly renovated Arts and Wellness Center, whose interior still smells of fresh paint. The Broadmoor Improvement Association partnered with the Archdiocese of New Orleans and Blessed Trinity Church to cobble together $2m for the project, creating space for arts organisations, non-profits and fitness classes, among other programmes.

Carroll was voted president of the BIA this year, her first as an active organiser after a five-year breather. “There was a lot of burnout, myself included, and people kind of phased out,” she tells me. “People became a little bit more complacent – they thought it was taken care of. We’ve been a little bit of victims of our own success in the past few years.”

In response, Broadmoor has tried to institutionalise its community organisation through a sort of hyperlocal neighbourhood government. Residents in 2010 voted to form a special improvement district, a legal construct that essentially allows the BIA to collect taxes. Each resident pays a $100 annual parcel fee, raising about $170,000 a year. Three neighbourhood sub-groups elect three representatives apiece to dole out the money to staff and various projects.

“Having this source of revenue for so many years has allowed us to not lean so much on outside help,” says Emily Wolff, who volunteered in Broadmoor during college, moved there soon after graduation, and is now executive director of the BIA. “We need to go back and have more of a balanced income model.”

But she also admits that winning big grants could be more difficult in the neighbourhood’s post-recovery stage. That problem is not unique to Broadmoor – nor to community organisations. Every government and non-profit official I spoke to similarly acknowledged the difficulty of maintaining such a high rate of change in the face of diminished funding and volunteer support. Post-Katrina New Orleans has become, simply, New Orleans.

On the other hand, residents don’t have to think far back to recall a time when their collective future still hung in the balance. And perhaps that memory is enough to continue motivating them. In early June, I joined Broadmoor residents in the neighbourhood’s gleaming new library as they began organising a Katrina 10th anniversary celebration.

“It’s going to be really cathartic,” Carroll tells me later. “It’s not just going to be cheerleading – saying that all is well – but to look back at where we came from.” Outside the meeting room, the Times-Picayune’s front page of 11 January 2006 hangs framed in the lobby. The green dot remains.

*****



New Orleans will celebrate its 300th anniversary in 2018. “Now the question is where we want to be in our city’s fourth century,” Kopplin says, painting it as an occasion to rethink how it will absorb future shocks and stresses that “are going to get bigger, not smaller”.

People became a little bit more complacent – they thought it was taken care of. We’ve been victims of our own success Maggie Carroll

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Futuristic modern homes are appearing in the Lower Ninth. Photograph: Seph Lawless

The deputy mayor refers repeatedly to the city’s “resilience”, a term increasingly making its way into the local lexicon: “Being able to deal with a lot of shit,” as one tired resident describes it to me. In less than a decade since Katrina, New Orleans has suffered through not just the global financial crisis but the BP oil spill, which devastated the Gulf Coast.

New Orleans’ government has become more responsive – the new administration has regained trust by tackling quality-of-life issues – and its regional economy more diverse. The city’s central business district pulses with new life, and tax revenues have consistently grown. New jobs at tech and information firms entice young professionals to flock in. The Crescent City now numbers an estimated 385,000 people, between 80 and 85% of pre-storm levels.

What’s more, Washington put $14.5bn into a new levee system, while city officials have rethought evacuation plans and bolstered storm-water management systems. “We’re getting to the point where people can feel a whole lot safer here,” says Cedric Grant, executive director of the city’s Sewerage and Water Board.

Yet long-term questions endure. Though educational outcomes have improved citywide, the wholesale move to charter schools remains a topic of fierce debate, with results varying widely between neighbourhoods. The city’s murder rate, which spiked earlier this year, is still among the highest of any major city in the country.

New Orleans, 10 years after Katrina: do residents feel more prepared? Read more

New challenges have emerged as well. Repopulation and redevelopment have proceeded unevenly across neighbourhoods, partly because of early government stumbles. And those disparities often fall along racial lines, as black residents were historically segregated into flood-prone areas. The city in 2013 counted 100,000 fewer black residents than it did in 2000, according to the Data Center.

Public policies after the storm tended to disadvantage the African-American community further. The city’s decision to shutter its crime- and poverty-ridden (though structurally sound) housing projects displaced thousands of black households. And with the federally funded Road Home housing programme, “the method of calculating grants penalised African-American homeowners in ways that reproduced longstanding racial disparities,” Tulane University sociologist Kevin Fox Gotham wrote in 2014. Since this programme covered homes’ pre-storm values or cost of repairs – whichever was lower – those who lived in depressed areas, typically African Americans, tended to receive smaller grants.

The housing market, devastated by Katrina, remains tight. Competition for the city’s diminished housing supply – it had 25,000 fewer units in 2013 than in 2000 – has driven costs ever higher. Median gross rent rose from $698 a month in 2004 to $925 in 2013, according to the Data Center. Other costs of living, such as flood insurance rates, have likewise risen.

“We’ve got a lot more work to do to make sure that the city of New Orleans remains affordable,” Kopplin concedes. Thirty-seven percent of residents now pay more than half their income toward housing, 11 percentage points higher than the national average. Gentrification has bumped “the footprint issue” from centre-stage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Twin brothers Donovan and Devon were born in the city a few days after Katrina struck. Photograph: Seph Lawless

“We thought we could do a lot of things differently after the storm,” says Robert Morris, a local journalist who runs the Uptown Messenger news site. “And we were successful with a lot of those things. But now we’re realising that we don’t like a lot of the results.”

“We need to pause now and look at where there’s been progress, where there’s been loss, and assess more critically what the next 10 years are going to look like,” says Sue Mobley, community engagement manager for the Tulane City Center, which partners students with outside groups on community development projects. “What does this look like when it’s not about whether we’re going to rebuild at all, but how we’re going to rebuild in a way that’s more inclusive, more equitable, and not perpetuating of the things that were damaging to us long before Katrina hit?”

TCC’s handiwork criss-crosses the city: a youth farm in City Park, a grocery store in the Seventh Ward, a skate park in Gentilly. None would have succeeded without buy-in from residents or local groups. And Mobley thinks the city might have an advantage in continuing such engagement as the spectre of crisis fades further. “Cultural capital,” she says, “that’s a point of entry for talking about working-poor and black communities within a context in which they genuinely are valued.”

*****



New Orleans: houses can be rebuilt, but can trust in central government? Read more

On a Sunday in late May, that capital – that energy – meanders its way through Central City in a traditional brass-band Second Line parade, one of New Orleans’ defining cultural traditions. A brass band’s trumpets scream down South Rocheblave Street, their clear melodies bouncing off houses, occupied or not, and filling up vacant lots. Dressed in pale purple suits, the Single Ladies Social Aid and Pleasure Club dances across crumbling asphalt, waving feathered fans to the hip-hop infused beats. Hundreds more people – “the second line” – informally march behind, dancing whichever way the music speaks to them, sipping beers and rubbing shoulders with people whose names they’d likely never know.

The Second Line turns down Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, only bringing more people with it. When it stops for a brief respite on South Liberty Street, dark storm clouds open and a heavy rain begins falling on the hodge-podge of paraders. A thunderclap draws a cheer from the crowd, and the music awakes once more.

The downpour only intensifies as the parade continues. Men wave water-soaked shirts above their heads, women twirl umbrellas in the air, and children dance atop front porches. The rain only seems to embolden the Second Line, to challenge people to dance harder with each subsequent bolt of lightning.

Every inch of my body soaked, I peel off from the parade and take refuge in the entryway of a church on Jackson Street. No one else seems to notice – let alone care – about the deluge.

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