New Orleans Remembers Katrina With Style

CNN's Anderson Cooper does some taping in the doorway of a house in the Lower Ninth Ward that was damaged by Hurricane Katrina nearly one year ago in New Orleans on Monday, Aug. 28, 2006. The national and international media have come to the region for the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, however Cooper has returned to the region repeatedly.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon) (Alex Brandon - AP)

NEW ORLEANS -- The first anniversary of the biggest calamity to befall this city was marked Tuesday with a moment of silence, wreath-layings, the tolling of bells and, in true New Orleans fashion, a wailing jazz funeral through the potholed streets for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Jazz musicians marched ahead of a horse-drawn hearse, a symbol of the city's watery death. They played a dirge for the more than 1,800 people killed when Katrina came ashore. But the ensemble soon exploded into a joyful rhythm, the marchers opening colorful parasols and hoisting them toward the hot sun as they danced the city back to life.

Sandra Brown has made a point of wearing a black skirt or top since the hurricane, but she was shimmying behind the musicians on the roughly one-mile procession from the city's convention center to the Superdome _ both scenes of the storm's misery.

"I mourn for the lives lost. I still cry when I see the footage of last year," she said. "But you have to be hopeful."

Residents held vigils in pockmarked neighborhoods choked with weeds, in church pews and in gutted community centers. They rang bells to mark the collapse of the city's biggest levee and laid wreaths at the site of each successive break in the cement structure protecting the city.

They bowed their heads and closed their eyes in prayer, both for those no longer here and for the city's rebirth.

At a midday interfaith prayer service, Mayor Ray Nagin told the city it was time to take responsibility for rebuilding.

"If government can't get you your check on time, it says you need to do something," Nagin said. "It says your neighbors need to come together and all you need to do is cook a pot of red beans and they'll bring over the hammers and the nails."

Nagin met with President Bush, who bowed his head for the dead in St. Louis Cathedral, the city's mother church, and made an impassioned plea for the living.

"I know you love New Orleans, and New Orleans needs you," the president said. "She needs people coming home. She needs people _ she needs those saints to come marching back, is what she needs!"

On his way out of the city, Bush's motorcade drove to the shattered Lower Ninth Ward, where water from the buckled levees tore homes from their foundations and spit them into the street. He stopped at the destroyed home of New Orleans rock 'n' roller Fats Domino.

Not far away, people danced, sang and wept at the new concrete levee that replaced one that had split open on the Industrial Canal in the Lower Ninth.