A Brief Note about New Orleans

I spent a few hours total in New Orleans a week ago, spread over two separate visits. The first was a lunch and a beer in The Quarter after arriving, and the second was a dinner in the 'burbs and then Bourbon Street in The Quarter again for the Halloween festivities.

This post is really about an article I read in the Times-Picayune newspaper I picked up on my way out of town. It was about Ed Blakely, the former NO recovery-czar who "couldn't get out there fast enough."

Ed Blakely cut his teeth in the large-scale recovery industry after the Bay Area earthquake in '89. He was brought in in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005.

He gave a fiery interview to CalTV, the Berkeley university's television channel, in which he claims that New Orleanians always wanted someone else to do the rebuilding, that the city is a hotbed of racial tension that will erupt into full-scale race riots within five years, that city workers were unsophisticated and thirty-percent were taking remedial literacy courses, and that, in his possibly his bleakest condemnation, the city "isn't likely to have a future."

He described the white politicians in the city as seeing the hurricane as an opportunity to reclaim the power in the city. New Orleans, which had been one of the more bustling metropolises with a black majority, had enjoyed almost three-decades of black supervision in the most powerful spots in city government. That has changed since 2005.

Is Ed Blakely right or wrong? I wasn't there long enough to tell. I can say that I didn't really see any damage from Hurricane Katrina, but we didn't really go to the 9th Ward, or some of the more devastated areas.

I thought the article was an interesting viewpoint, one I never could have fashioned on my own after my five hours of research time learning of French Quarter cajun restaurants and bars.

New Orleans did seem like an interesting place to visit. It had its share of history and mystery, and the older parts--The Quarter--had its charm...narrow European-like streets, relatively clean, and lax public consumption laws.