New Orleans
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in late August 2005, the city and its people suffered wounds that are still healing. While the rebuilding efforts continue apace, everyone seems to agree that the city that eventually emerges from the wreckage will be very different to the “old” New Orleans. But it was not just the physical city that was devastated by Katrina. Equally damaged was its carefully cultivated image as the city that care forgot. Shocked by the indelible images of destruction wrought by the hurricane and its aftermath, the world was presented with an unsettling and unfamiliar vision of a city that it thought it knew well.
For many years, New Orleans had traded on a painstakingly constructed sense of itself as a tourist town. Before Katrina, the city was famous the world over as one of America’s most beloved playgrounds, known for its food, its music, for Mardi Gras and the hedonism of Bourbon Street and for letting the good times roll. It was also a city that capitalised on its history – or, at least, selected highlights from its past.
Whatever else it did, Hurricane Katrina tore away the city’s elaborate carnival mask and demonstrated that life in the Big Easy has not always been so. In stark contrast to its laissez-faire reputation, this 21st-century disaster evoked parts of the city’s hidden history, exposing a landscape that had long been scarred by repeated traumas. Indeed, though Katrina may have seemed a uniquely terrible event to modern eyes, it was a relatively characteristic moment in the history of a city used to extraordinary reversals of fortune. It was a reminder that catastrophe, adversity and rebirth had been part of the fabric of life in New Orleans since its foundation in 1718. Flood, fire, famine and war – New Orleans has seen it all.
Beginning life as a small colonial backwater on the banks of the Mississippi River, traded between France and Spain and valued largely for its strategic location, New Orleans was acquired by the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase. It soon became one of the richest and most powerful cities in the US, made prosperous by the cotton trade and its status as the home of the largest slave market in the South. By the mid-19th century, New Orleans was internationally famous as the imperious, opulent, cosmopolitan Queen of the South.
That success, however, came at significant cost, since the city’s rise took place against a backdrop of repeated disasters and an almost constant sense of flux. Partly this was a result of its location. Or, as New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial put it in 2001: ‘This was a lousy place to put a city.’ Unsurprisingly, therefore, the city’s particular relationship with catastrophe has long been proverbial.
As bad as hurricanes and conflagrations and potential slave rebellions could be, perhaps no single threat was more pressing and more characteristic of 19th-century New Orleans than disease. In the years before the Civil War, New Orleans had the highest mortality rate in the United States. Cholera carried away nearly 5,000 people in 1832 alone. More terrifying still were the periodic visitations of yellow fever. The city suffered multiple outbreaks of the disease from the late 18th to the early 20th century, but it was in the middle of the 19th century that the worst incidents took place.
In countless ways, the previous traumas in the life of New Orleans prefigured the ways in which the evils of Katrina and its aftermath unfolded. Indeed, what the events of 2005 also revealed was the degree to which, even before Katrina, this was a city marked by disaster. While 21st-century New Orleans may not have been bothered by repeated yellow fever epidemics, it was certainly plagued by the highest per-capita murder rate in America – an accolade, unfortunately, that the city currently looks set on reclaiming.
Yet, if this modern moment of devastation evokes past disasters, it also brings to mind previous moments of rebirth for the city. The continued existence of New Orleans is a story of survival against the odds and repeated renewals. Of course, this new beginning is tinged with tragedy. That there have already been profound problems with the rebuilding effort is clear for all to see. That those problems have been unfairly spread is equally evident; a recent study showed that the city’s neighbourhoods are now more segregated than they were before Katrina.
The seemingly inevitable cycles of death and rebirth might be woven into the fabric of New Orleans’ history and, as an incident like the BP oil spill highlighted, there is little doubt that a city in such a ‘lousy place’ is likely to face hard times again. But as the process of rebuilding continues, this might at least be the moment to lay some ghosts to rest.
Thomas Ruys Smith, History Today