NEW ORLEANS – Piles of household debris – furniture on the bottom, clothing and small items in the middle and Sheetrock on top – line the streets. Refrigerators, some with spray-painted political slogans, add pungency to the air, even more than seven weeks after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city.
The Big Easy has become a commuter city. Many residents are just returning, boosting the city’s population during daytime cleanup efforts and clogging roads to Baton Rouge at night.
Yet residents of New Orleans’ uptown neighborhood who have stayed in the city or returned to the area are remarkably positive about the city’s prospects for the future.
Anne Hasuly, a Tulane University sophomore, sits on her porch swing, smoking a cigarette and occasionally talking with the chatty electrician working next door. She said although she’s only lived in New Orleans for one year, it’s impossible to imagine herself at another school or city.
“It’s New Orleans,” Hasuly said. “I just couldn’t be anywhere but here.”
She said she was in Meridian, Miss., with three friends when the storm passed through.
“There was no power, no TV, no news, just sketchy cell phones.”
After relocating to Austin, Texas, she and three friends found what she describes as a “commune kind of collect of people,” with whom she took 5,000 garbage bags of supplies to Algiers, a New Orleans suburb. She biked around, delivering supplies.
“There were people there from all over the United States and Canada,” she said. “It was amazing to see all these people who had just dropped their lives and everything to come and help.”
Using fake press credentials to return to the city a few weeks after Katrina passed, Hasuly began helping others with food and supplies.
“We all wanted to come back and help,” she said. “We feel like we can’t exist anywhere else.”
Farther down the street, Mary Poatt is raking up the remainder of the oak tree that fell in front of her house.
“All these oak trees were here,” Poatt said, pointing to her front yard. “You couldn’t get in my house.”
She arrived in New Orleans Saturday. She lost half of her roof and, consequently, her second story to Katrina, but she said she will definitely stay in the much-loved city.
“There’s no other place like New Orleans,” she said. “People go bad-mouthing it, but they’ve never lived here. They don’t know the community … everybody knows each other.”
Poatt has only been back a few days, but she’s already seeing progress.
“Last week, this (street) was horrible, but it’s all been cleaned up,” she said, gesturing toward a block strewn with scant traces of debris.
A U.S. Army Humvee rolls by, followed by a telephone utility truck. Poatt smiles.
“I’m pretty impressed with what the city’s doing – well, trying to do. Let’s put it that way,” she said.
It’s nearly impossible to walk down the sidewalks; huge piles of furniture and personal belongings sit every few feet. A headstone inexplicably sits in a front yard on Broadway Avenue.
In the house next door, Irma Stiegler is preparing her lunch, a Meal Ready to Eat, from the military. Stiegler has lived in her house since she was 2 and lost her basement to the flood.
“My basement was loaded with all my memorabilia, because I had so many things from other people that I was trying to store and distribute to all the right places,” she said.
She gestured to a dilapidated piano sitting on the median. Her most painful loss, it was her grandmother’s piano from 1867. She saved the ornate top and brass handles before the piano was dragged out.
Kelly Terrase is tending bar at The Boot, a popular college bar, despite the fact that there’s only one customer. The Boot re-opened three weeks ago, and Terrase said that the crowd has been smaller but generous with tips.
The Boot had about two feet of water outside – a widely circulated photo showed a man canoeing by – but is slightly raised off the street, leaving about eight inches of water inside.
Beyond The Boot, huge yellow tubes snaking into the windows of Tulane University’s buildings are clearly visible. Giant blue dehumidifiers are helping dry out the buildings, some of which had two feet of standing water.
No Tulane University officials will comment on the school’s status, but it’s been widely reported that Tulane will open for the spring semester.
Rodney Owsley, a splice worker for BellSouth from Missouri working on a switchboard at the edge of Tulane’s campus, said that the job facing utility crews is enormous.
“I’ve worked ice storms, but never nothing as widespead as this … they’re going to have to re-engineer their whole infrastructure,” he said.
The relatively unscathed campus of Loyola University New Orleans has become a makeshift Army base. Humvees fill the parking lots, and an armed guard checks credentials.
A student union ballroom is filled with hundreds of cots, and signs proclaiming that breakfast will be served only from 7 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. litter the campus. In front of the Smoothie King, a triage unit and aid supplies have replaced cafe tables. The library has become the base of operations.
At the Bulldog, a popular pub on Magazine Street, business is booming. Because the street is so close to the river, and therefore on higher ground, there was no standing water and relatively little damage.
Patrons fill the interior and spill out onto the streets. They don’t seem to be bothered by the limited selection of food and alcohol.
Not everyone is so cheerful. Maria Esperanza Fingerman has just returned home to find her downstairs covered in mold.
“It’s so hard to see everything so destroyed,” she said. She points to art on the walls and a grandfather clock, all warped and stained in brown, gray and green circular blooms of mold.
She and her husband fled to Pensacola, Fla., where they stayed in their car in a parking lot under condos. On the second day, a man from New Orleans invited them into his condo.
“He was our angel,” Fingerman said.
This is her first day back in New Orleans and she is overwhelmed, but she keeps her faith.
“God is going to help us, one or the other way, and I always believe that,” she says. “He’s going to give us a lot of courage.”

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