Auld Lang Syne in the Big Easy

The structure and soul of the emerging city are up for grabs. The city is outsourcing most of the cleanup, and Mayor C. Ray Nagin's office is reviewing bids that total in the billions of dollars.

Joy Hodges, who grew up in New Orleans but now lives in Durham, N.C., returned for the holidays, emboldened to help determine the city's destiny. "All my friends and I, we are trying to get on the boards," said Hodges, a 1981 graduate of Newcomb College at Tulane University. "Everybody who went to Tulane and Loyola needs to come back and help rebuild this place."

The re-imagination of New Orleans has drawn sharp criticism from those who worry that they will have no say. City inspectors have tagged about 5,500 houses for demolition, but in the past week a judge delayed the razing of as many as 2,500 houses after a coalition of citizen groups filed a legal challenge. Most the properties targeted for razing are in the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood of working-class blacks that suffered the worst of the storm's ravages.

The St. Claude Avenue bus that traveled into the Lower Ninth was empty most of the past week as it chugged into a wrecked world. Everything was brown, upended, twisted, ashen, a people-less landscape of shells of what once were the modest homes of schoolteachers, beauticians and musicians. A piece of insulation rolled down a deserted street like tumbleweed on a windblown prairie.

But at 6116 N. Roman St., there was Brent Hernandez, 26, reading a book on his front yard while his mother, Marietta Williams, 60, put on rubber gloves to see if there anything else to salvage. Inside the rooms of mold, she found a photo album on Hernandez, her only child. "Look, I even found your nursery-school pictures," she said.

Hernandez, who recently received his master's degree in classics from the University of Maryland, smiled at his mother. "That's good, Mom," he said.

Williams perspired in the sun. She was a social worker for the Orleans Parish School System, now with no job and no health insurance and, of course, no home. Her house was in the area of homes set to be bulldozed, a plan she found suspicious.

"I don't want the Corps of Engineers to touch my house," said Williams, her voice steady but angry. "It's like the fox guarding the hen house. They want this land."

Nearby, an American Red Cross food truck was still parked at a corner of Clairborne Avenue, handing out 200 meals a day. A freckled boy went up to the window and said to the woman in the truck, "I got four people."

Still, it was New Year's Eve weekend.

At the Mardi Gras Lounge on Elysian Fields Avenue, owner Earline Guillory was placing pints of liquor on pedestals behind the bar. They were diminutive compared with the regular liquor bottles, all stolen by looters, but there they glistened underneath a spotlight. Guillory plugged in the jukebox, filled with old-school selections. "Oh, I had a real nice clientele," Gillory said, sweeping the floor of her empty bar. Every so often, she would go to the front door and look outside, as if waiting.

"No freaking fireworks," the disc jockey on the blues show on WWOZ, 90.7 FM, told listeners, passing along the city's ban on personal fireworks, which were especially risky this year because the roofs of houses across the city are covered with flammable blue tarp.

But roped off from the outside world was the French Quarter, an epicurean island of plenty.

Crab bisque and French wine have replaced the MREs and energy bars that were the only sustenance here after the storm. About 80 percent of the restaurants in the Quarter are now open, though with limited menus. About 30 of the 40 hotels in the Quarter are open.

"Can you hear the music?" a woman on a cell phone asked incredulously as she walked on a crowded sidewalk near Jackson Square.

In the French Quarter, the clip-clop of horse hooves and the snap of reins echoed in the streets. The chef at Antoine's, Michael Regua, presided in the kitchen over potato souffle for the 300 guests booked for New Year's Eve.

Bill and Theo Fleckles had come from Chicago to see New Orleans and were on their way to hear jazz on New Year's Eve. "We felt it would be good to put some money in the city," said Theo Fleckles. "We feel so bad for the people here."

Cass is a special correspondent.