Looking down a long, hard road

Gina Barton, a staff writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, arrived in New Orleans March 1. Gina's no stranger to the aftermath of devastation, having traveled to Rwanda several years ago ...

I gave the cab driver the address of the Dart house.

Gina Barton

“That’s going to be hard to get to,” he said. “The roads there are bad.”

He was right. The journey from the airport consisted of more potholes than I could count. And filling them in is obviously not a priority.

The cabbie also pointed out dark, quiet, empty streets that used to be teeming with activity, even in the evenings. At 10 p.m. on a Thursday, they were desolate. I didn’t see a single porch light.

I asked the driver what he had done during the hurricane. He’d been evacuated to Texas. Coincidentally, he ended up in the town where his brother lives. After some weeks, he’d returned to New Orleans and gotten a new apartment. The rent was higher, though, he said. And the taxi business was no longer what it had been. As we talked, he told me he was considering returning to Texas for good.

Melissa Manware, a Dart Fellow from Charlotte, N.C., was waiting for me. On her way from the airport, she had seen more than one house with a single light on upstairs, an indication that the residents were staying up there while they worked to fix the flood-damaged lower floor.

On a tour of the devastation with Times-Picayune photographer Ted Jackson, I noticed numerous “for sale” signs on crumbling houses. I wonder if anyone will ever buy them. If so, I wonder at what price. It struck me that some billionaire developer should just start buying up entire subdivisions, bulldozing the ruined homes and building new ones. Undoubtedly, such a strategy would pay off down the road, wouldn’t it?

Later though, I realized the faultiness of my logic. I didn’t visit a single neighborhood in which everyone had given up. Every block has a few abandoned homes, a few empty lots, and one or two newly rebuilt structures. And many blocks have a house or two with a permit in the window, signifying the owner’s intent to rebuild.

Gutting a house

The second house I worked on had a spray-painted slogan across the siding: “Do not bulldose (sic), Mr. President.” A friend of the owner was mowing the grass when we arrived. Another friend joined in our efforts to gut the place. When we entered, I felt the place was a lost cause. There were holes in the roof. No drywall remained between the studs. The floorboards were so damp and rotting they resembled wet cardboard more than wood. After a few hours of work, though, my feelings changed. In one of the rooms, two other Muckrakers and I cleared debris from the floor, and then pulled up the rotting layers of wood, tile and linoleum. When we finished, I could picture new drywall, fresh carpet, comfy furniture. Maybe I was just dreaming, I don’t know.

After two days, I felt that our group had placed a tiny raindrop in a bucket three stories high. I couldn’t even imagine living like so many New Orleanians do -- in a trailer in the front yard, staring out at the frustrating snail’s pace of progress every day. Ted Jackson told a story that illuminated that frustration better than any of the others I heard. Three months after the hurricane, the Times-Picayune sent teams of reporters and photographers to five other cities that had suffered natural disasters. Jackson went to Kobe, Japan. He told one of the residents that there were still abandoned cars clogging the streets of New Orleans. The Japanese man counseled him to be patient. It took 10 years for Kobe to recover from the earthquake, the man said, and in New Orleans things might take longer.

Our inspiration and guide throughout the trip was Dart Fellow Natalie Pompilio, who is spending four months doing what Melissa and I did for two days. Late Sunday afternoon, after we had finished working and gotten cleaned up, Natalie gave Melissa and me a lift to the French Quarter. The streets there were alive with tourists. Hundreds of people had stopped to watch some guys break-dancing and doing acrobatics across the street from Jackson Square. At Café du Monde, it was hard to find a table at 5 p.m. on a Sunday, and servers were hustling to bring café au lait and baguettes to everyone who wanted them.

There, everything was just as it had been before. And that gave me hope.

--Gina Barton