New New Orleans

I spent the weekend down in New Orleans, couple reason I suppose. Went to a Saints game, the D-Day museum, and saw the overall, oh, shall we say, historical moment of the city. My father and I planned the trip, we basically like to center vacations around museums and sporting events. It kept in tradition with the Rutgers/UNC game / Confederate History museum, and Astros/JFK assassination / Alamo trip. We like to fly Jet Blue because they have TV, it really takes alot of dread out of flying. I mean, if we were home what would be doing, watching TV; the TVs not as big on the plane, but everyone has headphones on so you don't have to talk to anyone. However, there's a few awkward moments before cruise where we'll all sitting around, waiting to watch the first of many sportscenters, so I did talk a bit with the guy next to me. It seems that the guy's cousin was the special teams coach for the tampa bay Buccaneers, and he was going down for the saints game as well. He was a nice new york man, great accent, gave me a dirty look when I said I was from boston, laughed at him for being a yankees fan, real great moment of bonding. The guy was also having lunch with Deuce McAllister later that day; I told him to say hi for me, Deuce carried me through a couple fantasy games. I mean, I know the guy kept getting injured, but man, he's still a human being, you can't trade him and drop him like a piece of meat. It's how I run my fantasy teams, it's not about winning, it's about building a life support group. Once the TV got going, I watched my two episodes of the A-Team. The first one, the A-Team got themselves into prison a'la Prison Break, to expose an underground boxing league run by the guards. But for some reason they then had to break out of prison. That non-descript guy pretended to be crazy so he could get his hands on a lot of garbage bags, somehow they got a hold of helium, they never really described that part, and made a balloon, sailing over the prison walls and onto freedom. Which makes me wonder, we are they always on the run for this crime they didn't commit if they could just break out of prison? And what's their ultimate goal, I mean, shouldn't they be trying to clear their names instead of running wacky capers? Anyway, in the second episode, the A-team formed an American all-star football team with BA Barracus and Joe Namath, to play against an evil German team with fascist tendencies. I'm not sure what the purpose was, other than to stick it to people who talk with an accent. My main point is this, if I unequivitably believe everything I see on TV (and I do), then during the 80's the nation was gripped in the chaos of underground boxing leagues and the jets tireless pursuit at defeating the nazis.

Now onto New Orleans. Large swaths of the downtown are back up to what they once were (I wasn't there before Katrina, so I'm just guessing here, but everything's pretty much open and running). They have really good subs there, called po-boys. It's got this great bread, and they put chopped up pickles and mayonnaise on everything. And they love these little fried doughnuts, it's basically fried dough. Oh, and oysters, oysters all over the place. And Bourbon Street may be just be one of the grossest places around, but the French Quarter has a persona and charm that can't be found anywhere else in America, it's rare to find another place like it. In fact, if you showed me a picture from say, a historic street in Boston, and I didn't know the exact place, I could tell you it's in Boston, or maybe Washington or Philadelphia. But New Orleans, it's itself. Of course, that's the neighborhood most in your face. There's the incredibly wealthy southern money section, complete the sweeping porches and gated communities, and the gentrified areas, with coffee and sushi shops that have free treats for dogs, and 30 something white people having sunday brunch.

Then there's other neighborhoods which are, well, simply gone. The most dramatic is the lower 9th ward. It used to be blocks and blocks of tightly compacted house, now it's just a field with an occasional house ripped right off its foundations and sent some hundreds of feet away. Other neighborhoods look more or less abandoned. You can still see the watermarks on the houses where the flood waters sat stagnated for weeks, and the spraypainted markings of animal search and rescue teams. I'd say about a third of the homes have a FEMA trailer parked out in front, and you can see they're doing some work in there. In one area I saw a housing development that looked like the crews worked on it up to the hurricane, and now the houses stand abandoned halfway to being completed. The truth of the matter is, no one is moving into the area, it's just empty. And as a results, whole shopping areas are abandoned. Mini-malls, like the countless one's you see elsewhere, with a burger king and a dentist office and a drug store, are just sitting there. No one's doing work on them, no one's tearing them down. Someone has got to own the land, but for now, well, it's just there. Except the Home Depot, everyone in town was there. I suppose it's more financial feasible right now than say, a toy-r-us. The most striking was the six flags amusement park. I mean, it's an amusement park, with multi-million dollar rides and attractions, I imagine all kinds of technical machinery and gears and chains and steel, is closed, without one ounce of effort being put into it. Call it what you will, slow rebuilding efforts, insurance details, whatever, people aren't physically there. To be a number on it, the population of New Orleans was around 600,000 before the hurricane, it currently stands at 180,000. As a point of comparison, that's the city of Boston becoming Worcester about overnight. There signs all over the city saying "Rebirth," and maybe that the best way of saying it. It's not going to be the same city, but it has this moment to define what kind of place it will be, and it's basically looking for people to take leadership and commitment to make this city something new, and hopefully better. We met one such woman on the rental car shuttle van. Before the hurricane, she lived with her six kids in the lower 9th ward. The breaking levee completely wiped out her four-bedroom house. At the moment she can't rebuild, no bank is willing to give a loan to build a home with no insurance, and no insurance is willing to take her. The sad thing she did have insurance on the home, but the company says it's technically a man-made disaster and not a natural one, after all, the broken levee destroyed her home, not the storm. There's a class action law suit going on, and hopefully she'll get what she needs. The other problem is there's little to no action of bring any power or water to the area. In the mean time she's still paying taxes on her land, heck, she even got a fine for not having her house gutted on time. Unfortunately there wasn't a house left on the foundation to gut. She commutes into the city 50 miles each way, and hopes to one day bring her family back. She wants to see the city again.

There's a goofy hope in all this, the Saints game, that was an unreal experience. I don't think I'll ever see a crowd like that at another sporting event. If you go to like a Giants or Pats game, the crowd is all gonna be 40 investment bankers and their clients. Just, really expensive tickets with the season ticket holder being a law firm of some such. But Saints tickets are cheap, dirt cheap, it's pretty easy to find tickets in the $15 range. That brings a different kind of crowd. The other thing that was cool that it was packed, usually when tickets are that cheap the crowd is a little sparse, but everyone, everyone was coming to this game. Sitting behind us was a bunch of middle school kids who got free tickets by keeping their grades up, to our left was a high school couple, to our right was this group of girls who seemed amazed by the game of football itself, and in front of us were a few roady 50-something women all in Reggie Bush jerseys. When Reggie Bush ran back the punt return, man, the place was gonna come down. And I don't want anyone to be cynical and say a football game is not going to solve the city's problems; cause in reality cities don't need to be saved. We can sit around and discuss of urban planning and economic theories and some such, but in the end, it's all people. And what this team is doing for these people is creating a community out of shared experience, where anyone and their mother can come and take part. Heck, the day after the game we talked to the girl working behind the mrs. fields cookie place at the mall, she was still beaming about that reggie bush touchdown, and she's going again next week. It's just the simple thing, that life is more than cities and amusement parks and urban development. For instance, the woman I was talking about earlier, she makes it a point to offer candy to anyone coming on that shuttle bus and asking us where we're from, and tells us all good morning, which, "is alot more than some people can say, because they don't even have that. If you can get up each day and say 'good morning,' then, hello."