In a Shell of a City, New Orleanians Wait For Return of Big Easy

Down Dumaine Street, Dewanda Dey and her husband, Steven -- "Quarter rats," as some French Quarter residents call themselves -- have spent many a night brainstorming about how they might rise up with the new New Orleans.

"What else do we have to do at night in the dark, but come up with ideas?" says Dewanda, 38, a hotel worker.

They are among the city's holdouts, those folks who refused to leave. And why should they have? Floodwaters in the Quarter never flowed above the curbs. So they lived on canned tuna, chicken, beans and donated MREs and listened to the news on their battery-powered radio.

"We'll just sit and wait and see what happens," she says.

Although many are looking forward to the city's future, the trauma of the past 2 weeks still underpins the order of life here. Streets, overpasses and highway on- and off-ramps where evacuees had encamped still are clogged with debris, chairs, bins, pieces of luggage, litter, even looted goods -- like the haul of sneakers abandoned on the side of a road.

In many residential areas, downed power lines hang low or lie on the streets, tangled amid fallen live oaks that block passage and are being cut and moved away by military and civilian crews. In some neighborhoods, city buses are randomly parked or stalled on curbs, as if hastily abandoned.

The city's trauma can be charted in the lingering signs of the siege: The Fort Apache sign still hangs from the roof of a police station that, during the flood's first horrid days, came under gunfire again and again.

At the Greyhound bus terminal, which became a makeshift lock-up in the early days after the storm, chain-link fences topped by barbed wire remain wrapped around bus parking bays, but the "cells" in recent days have been mostly empty. (They called the temporary jail Angola South, after Louisiana's infamous Angola prison.)

Peter Crow, 38, a French Quarter poet, says now is "the safest New Orleans has ever been," though he and his friend, Chris Love, 28, a hotel worker, complained about harassment from the city's heavy military presence.

Troops are everywhere -- Army and National Guard -- in the Quarter and throughout the city, often patrolling in groups of four, as if they were in Iraq and manning checkpoints.

Over on Elysian Fields Avenue in the city's Faubourg Marigny section, Terry Norman and his friend Lynne Lyons sit on the balcony of his second-floor apartment and watch the troops drive by. They, like Crow, Love and the Deys, refused to leave. The thought of it seemed just ridiculous. And they had no intention of leaving their pets.

Norman's landlord, Rodney Hoover, owner of the three-columned vintage 1840 townhouse, comes walking down the street with a box of MREs strapped on his back.

"It's my home, since 1718," says Hoover, 62, describing how his family arrived here centuries ago with New Orleans founder Jean-Baptiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville. "We started this city."

Shortly, a city bus pulls up, offloading a batch of Oregon National Guardsmen, bearing news of New Orleans's pivot from crisis to recovery.

"We'll be letting people back into the city Monday," a guardsman informs them, "so no reason to evacuate."

Norman has already heard the news on the radio. After the guardsmen leave, he deadpans: "I'll be giving a royal speech from the balcony at 8."

The streets fall quiet at night. A nighttime curfew still remains in effect. But it hardly matters, for this remains a city by and large without its population, a city, for now, suspended.