If New Orleans Is a Blank Canvas, Many Are Poised to Repaint

NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans has gone retro -- way retro. It is, in a fundamental sense, as it was long ago, 287 years ago, when a French aristocrat named Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, decided it would be a nice spot to have a city.

Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina brutalized the city, much of the inviting high ground tucked into the big Mississippi River crescent that so entranced Bienville is dry and inviting, confirming that he was one smart Frenchman. Most of the rest of the city is abominably uninviting -- underwater or soggy or mud-crusted and foreboding; its future is uncertain, much as it was when Bienville showed up.

New Orleans is bankrupt. Its population of nearly half a million is scattered around the country, banned -- for no one knows how long -- from returning. Its dry streets are spookily empty, and its wet streets may take a month to pump out. Yet all anyone in Louisiana seems to talk about is putting it back together again. The question -- the one with no answer yet -- is, how?

"We're on a journey here, and we don't have a road map," said Ralph Brennan, scion of a New Orleans restaurant empire built on the elegance and charm of the venerable Commander's Palace in the city's Garden District.

Rebuilding and resurrecting Bienville's town -- the town he left for Louis Armstrong and Winton Marsalis, for Tennessee Williams and the French Quarter stripper Belle Starr -- is turning into an obsession here. The powerful business interests who talk of speedily reopening the French Quarter are trying hard to show confidence, saying that what they consider the best of the city, its graceful mansions and its French Quarter, is intact. Others think of the best of the city in different terms, and they fret that its sultry, elemental vibe may be lost forever if the poor now stashed about the nation in evacuation centers don't return to make music and stitch Mardi Gras Indian costumes and send off their dead with jazz funerals.

"The soul of New Orleans is gone -- they're dispersed in Texas and all over, and a lot of these people might not come back," said Deacon John, the New Orleans guitar legend whose distinctive, bluesy riffs play like a soundtrack for his home town. "We don't want New Orleans to turn into another Disneyland."

The breadth of the devastation makes New Orleans an irresistible palate for urban planners, who see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent a major city, something akin to arriving in Chicago after its Great Fire or San Francisco after its Great Earthquake.

The plans being tossed about range from the modest and safe -- nascent discussions among city officials about offering citywide wireless Internet service -- to the seismic and controversial: bulldozing the flood-prone lower Ninth Ward, a bastion of New Orleans African American culture, and turning it into a park that could absorb floodwaters.

"There's no sense rebuilding in the areas that are lowest," said Pres Kabacoff, a prominent New Orleans developer known for converting old warehouses and factories into hipster condominiums. "You have an opportunity, sort of like a Venice, to protect the center and build out."

But Kabacoff and others who favor converting the city's most perpetually soggy neighborhoods -- most of which are predominantly African American -- into green space will surely encounter massive opposition, both from preservationist groups and from black leaders in a city that is 67 percent African American.

"It may be necessary to bulldoze homes, but then we've got to build them back -- I'm adamant about that," said Danatus King, president of the New Orleans NAACP. "It's the right thing to do."

With no clear direction from the beleaguered city government, the wealthy of this town have begun to rev up New Orleans on their own. Brennan plans to reopen his French Quarter bistro, Bacco, as soon as next week, even though he hasn't been able to reach anyone with the city to find out if that is okay. "I will probably cry," Brennan said, envisioning the first meal he will serve there.