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New Orleans residents love its charm
Rain falls on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, La.
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TEXT OF INTERVIEW
KAI RYSSDAL: Mardi Gras is still almost two weeks away, but things are really set to get rolling in New Orleans starting tomorrow. That's when a bunch of parades and floats start winding through the city's neighborhoods, and that continues right on through Mardi Gras. But the good times in New Orleans don't stop when the parties end. Even in the face of adversity, and there's a lot of adversity down there between the crime and the corruption, most people just seem to be enjoying themselves. That's what Dan Baum found when he went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. His book "Nine Lives" looks at the people there and why -- even after Katrina -- so many of them wanted to go home.
DAN BAUM: Most people in New Orleans live their entire lives -- before the storm -- lived their entire lives never seeing a face that they didn't know their whole life. It is an extremely neighborhood-based city. You spin those people out of the city for the flood and you send them off to some big soulless suburb of Houston, where they don't know anybody, and it's like being spun off the face of the planet. It's anomie.
RYSSDAL: And that's exactly it though because doesn't that sort of belie an insecurity, right, a lack of trust of authority of people who have let the city become corrupt and let the education system suffer and the rise in crime and all of that...
BAUM: Well it's not like the people in New Orleans like having a bad school system or that they like the crime, but it comes as part and parcel of this culture. New Orleans is the only place in the United States that I have found that is not ruled by the dollar or the clock. Down there, what's important is that right now is pleasant and it makes life... People have time for their friends and people have time for their families and their communities in a way that the rest of us out here in what we call the "real world" don't. It is a very seductive lifestyle, but it is not a place where a high premium is placed on getting stuff done.
RYSSDAL: You tell the story of this city and of the storm and of its history through the lives of nine people. One of whom is a businessman named Billy Grace. Tell us about him and what you learned about New Orleans telling his story.
BAUM: Billy is something of a striver and he pays a social price for that and he lets it known that he's looking for business opportunities. And he does not make it into the Louisiana Club, which is one of the very exclusive lunch clubs in New Orleans. And that stings. And it's never really spoken why he doesn't make it into the Louisiana Club, but he is made to understand that perhaps he's just a little too pushy, he's a little too work-oriented. We don't need that kind of industry and energy ruffling the very still atmosphere inside the Louisiana Club.
RYSSDAL: How has that been reflected in the, what, three and a half years now since Katrina hit this place? How is that affecting the rebuilding and the re-population of the city?
BAUM: You see a lot of activity individually. Neighbors helping each other rebuild their houses. It's one street in the lower 9th Ward where everybody is coming back. What did not happen manifested in New Orleans after the flood was any kind of large, top-down, planned recovery. There was all this talk about making New Orleans bigger and better and all these new urbanism and mixed-income neighborhoods. But I think people heard these plans to make the city bigger and better as a plan to make the city run by the dollar and the clock, the way the rest of the United States is, and people said 'We don't want that.' But to say nothing is happening in New Orleans is a lie.
RYSSDAL: Do you worry at all that maybe you've been too captivated by New Orleans to see the destruction?
BAUM: I'm a partisan. I'll admit it. I love the city. People ask me 'What's going to happen to New Orleans?' And I say, look, you know I think that in 10 or 15 years New Orleans will be the disorganized, impoverished, violent, screwed up, corrupt city it was before the storm and that's really the way they want it.
RYSSDAL: You know, your take on this city, that they're really in it for the moment, that time and money don't really mean anything, it's got a certain charm. But how's it going to play down in New Orleans if we went out and asked people what they think about this book?
BAUM: I think it'll play well. New Orleans is proud of itself and it's proud of itself for all the reasons that I love it.
RYSSDAL: Dan Baum covered Katrina and New Orleans for The New Yorker. His book about the city is called "Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans." Dan, thanks a lot.
BAUM: Thank you very much.
I lived in New Orleans for almost 10 years during the 1970's. I have family members that lived there way before I did & family members that live there & in Baton Rouge now. With a long history in and around that city I personally think Mr. Baum got it exactly correct in his book. He could not have picked his real life characters any better & they show a cross section of life in NOLA as true to reality as possible.
As a former and future citizen of New Orleans, I must say that alot of things are miss understood in the article. In order to really understand the Great City of New Orleans for itself you must live there and take it in in your daily lives. We all love New Orleans and want it to be better than what it was before.I dis agree with it being the way it was 10 years from now, becasuse I as well as thousands of others work hard to make sure it is better. New Orleans is loved by millions and would be home to 10 times as many citizens if it wasn't for some of the problems with city gov and crime that it has. That is why we all fight hard eachg day and pray each night to make the Big Easy a better place and to make it an environment where it won't just be a place for millions to visit but a great place of oppertunity for thousands to live as it was years ago. New Orleans also isn't so small it is a metro of over 1.2 million people with thousands of more moving back after the storm. Also it is within 100 miles of over 2.5 + million people.
I'm another concerned New Orleanian currently not living in the city. I am away at business school and will stay away after because I am ONE OF MANY ambitious young New Orleanians that cannot find opportunity at home. That said, I love my city like few other things in my life.
I just wanted to comment that I think Mr. Baum did not know pre-Katrina New Orleans well enough to really be able to differentiate it from post-Katrina. I grew up understanding apathy as a way of life. When I lived for a while in Portland,Oregon I was blown away by the level of citizen involvement in all levels of government. However, I was ALSO blown away by the citizens of New Orleans following Katrina. In an incredibly short time we consolidated the levee boards, did away with the notoriously corrupt assessors, created the most stringent state ethics code in the country, and made other moves that had been obviously necessary for 50 plus years but never elicited action.
Our government continues to fail us (especially at the city level) with the inability to make the hard decisions necessary to martial and deploy resource effectively. But in line with a previous comment, you can't undo a history of race and class difficulties over night because of a hurricane.
Finally, the federal government under our past president has played some serious politics in terms of directing funds for housing. This has been a major disruption in re-building and has fueled the tensions that are preventing our local government capacity.
So, we love our city. We DESPISE its imperfections and serious problems. We have jumped at the opportunity to improve what we can, but a hurricane is not enough to solve systemic problems that have been around for over two centuries.
My work has been done by comments preceding mine. Mr. Baum was truly seduced by a drink or two in a laid back city with good food. Then, he back to his life in New York City. The studity of random crime and violence and corrupt officials is much more focused in a city of 400,000 than a city of millions. It becomes personal in a small laid back city like New Orleans. The mayor of NO will never get anything done. He does not understand our politics. He is a businessman who is used to paying for a job and getting it done at a fair price. He does not know how to grease palms. Officials will approve spending only if their brother-in-law can have a hand in building that levee, even if the brother-in-law is a shirmp fisherman with no bulldozer, let alone a truck. Good luck Mayor, good luck govenor is change Louisiana and it ways of doing business. Mr. Baum, I am going to read your book and see what you have to say. Open minded, I am. But, for most folk from Louisiana, there is not much there and has not been for a long, long time.
Stephanie
As a native of New Orleans, now living elsewhere after Katrina, I was quite taken by Mr. Baum's comments about my home town. As are many visitors, he was seduced by the city's relaxed "manana" lifestyle and he captured its spirit and charm quite well. I would disagree with him on one point, though. After Katrina, I don't recall anyone talking of making New Orleans "bigger and better." Better, yes, bigger, no. Unfortunately, countervailing forces did not, and do not, necessarily want it to be better, but simply returned to the way it was pre-Katrina, which was an unbridled mess. While many have worked hard to improve the way things are done in the city, the forces of inertia are powerful. And whatever latent racism existed pre-Katrina has reared its head in a very vocal and nasty way. And, to be clear, racism is not the exclusive province of white folks. I appreciate the previous comments posted here and the work that so many have done to make New Orleans a better place to live. Certainly, no one likes the corruption and crime that is so much a part of daily life, but the wall preventing improvement if high and wide. All good intentions aside, the city has no businesses to speak of, is largely impoverished and uneducated, and is not a conducive business environment. Incompetence is wide-spread. As long as those elements are there, change will be hard to come by. It's a vicious circle. I have often said that the very things that we love about New Orleans are the same things that we hate about it. After six decades, I couldn't take it anymore. I wanted to leave before Katrina. But I still love the place. It is special, but it is crazy. I return regularly to see friends and to eat like I can NOwhere else. I still have a home there and will eventually return to live out my days within the company of decades-old friends. But, for the time being, my wife and I are enjoying the banality, and competence, of Anywhere Else, U.S.A.
I am pleased that Mr. Baum enjoyed his time in our city. I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn't intend to make me nearly swerve off the road when he claimed that "the way we want it" is "disorganized, impoverished, violent, screwed up, corrupt." Thousands of people are working very hard, and have even give their lives, to improve things in the city that federal government flooded and forgot. Corruption and violence and the threat of losing our homes and communities to flooding as a result of badly designed levees are all too painful realities to us. And yet we continue to live here despite the risks because we believe we improve things. Not because we relish the persistent threat of random violence, the desperate poverty, and the shameless corruption of our elected officials.
Many of us continue to live here not only because we find the city "charming" but because it is our home, and our home is worth fighting the grinding miseries and daily threats that accompany it. Back in the real world, you say, Mr. Baum? I can think of nothing more real than New Orleans. You embarrass yourself when you diminish the strivings of the people of our city.
What a pity to have a commentator like Dan Baum jump on National radio and speak so ignorantly about New Orleans, the city I and everyone before me has come from. New Orleanians don't like crime, poverty, and lack of attention. To insist that they do is to ignore history and the very real race and class divisions there. It's just like a clueless New Yorker author to parachute down into a place he doesn't understand and start making theories about the place. Take a moment, Dan, speak to folks. Talk to those who did not want to return to New Orleans after the storm, and those for whom crime and poverty are no longer their way of life. See what they have to say.
As a New Orleanian living in New York City, I am sick and tired of non-New Orleanians writing an entire town off without having realized the complexities.
