Toward a New New Orleans

Drive through St. Roch, a tough New Orleans neighborhood northeast of the French Quarter, and you'll travel down street after street of shockingly dilapidated houses. Many are abandoned, some still marked by the spray-painted orange crosses of the rescue workers who searched for survivors—and bodies—in the days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In St. Roch, where 51 percent of the households had annual incomes of less than $20,000 before the storm, these tiny historic houses had long been in a state of decay. So maybe it's not surprising to come upon a shambles of a shotgun house that's filled with dirt.

But this isn't a vestige of disaster—it's an art installation. Kirsha Kaechele, 31, a kind of cultural impresario who moved into an abandoned bakery in St. Roch in 2002, has now bought half a dozen crumbling houses on or near North Villere Street—between two cross streets named, irresistibly, Music and Arts—and has been unleashing artists to create works in these derelict places. Inside the dirt house, artist Margaret Evangeline spread a foot and a half of soil, broke the kitchen pipes to spew water all over, then planted native seeds, which are beginning to sprout.

Kaechele isn't sure how long this project, called "(America)," will endure—the floors are rotting even more badly than before—but it may morph into a different artist's installation later this year, using the mud. Nearby, another uninhabitable house was completely painted white—including the roof, shrubbery, random rubble and an adjacent telephone pole. It's a riff on the pristine white spaces of conventional galleries—and part of what Kaechele calls "a sort of a purification or healing ritual." These artworks, employing the detritus of the city's splendid and varied architectural history, are clearly inspired by Katrina. "New Orleans has always been a disaster—white flight, poverty, racial tension—and there's always been this incredibly creative and rich culture," says Kaechele. "But I think the hurricane forced life assessment and change, like any personal disaster would—except that it happened to an entire community."

New Orleans is a long way from recovery: its current population hovers south of 300,000, far below the pre-storm figure of 450,000, and as you drive around the city you see surprisingly little visible progress in rebuilding, and you hear profound frustration and anger with government at every level. Yet the culture of New Orleans isn't only surviving after the storm and a nation's neglect—in places, it seems to be thriving. It's sustained by the perseverance and spirit of people with deep roots here, such as visual artist Sally Heller or musician Allen Toussaint. And by an influx of such non-natives as Kaechele, who maybe came to visit, but have stayed to work, to help, to make art or to study. Applications to New Orleans's colleges and universities have soared since Katrina. The club scene is booming. Taco trucks may soon outnumber FEMA trailers, as Mexican workers who've flocked here for construction jobs have brought new flavors to the rich Cajun/Creole food scene. Architects are experimenting with affordable housing. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival—going on right now, and the city's biggest party except Mardi Gras—is expected to draw record crowds this year. As the novelist Nancy Lemann puts it, "A spark so divine is not easily extinguished."

This subtropical port, which looks to the Mediterranean, Africa and the Caribbean for inspiration, has always marched to the beat of a multitude of different and very funky drummers. Which city has more beguiling street names—Abundance, Beaujolais, Cupid, Desire? Other places have the Rotary and the Elks. New Orleans has Social and Pleasure clubs and the Mardi Gras Indians—African-Americans masquerading as Native Americans in a tradition dating from when Indians and slaves were natural allies. A Mardi Gras Indian designs and sews a new costume every year; one chief put the cost, in time and materials, at $100,000 each. There are secret rituals, songs and chants; even parade routes are classified. Masking is crucial—disguise, misdirection, all in the service of nutty, impractical, unclassifiable mystery—and it's one key to understanding the city and its culture. New Orleans elevates the chores of daily life to a high level of culture. Porch railings are wrought into sculpture. In the kitchen, the humblest food becomes piquant. Even the funeral procession is an art form.

In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans is doing what it does best: making something extraordinary out of next to nothing. There's no Marshall Plan here—just small miracles in individual neighborhoods. "The culture of New Orleans emanates from the bottom up, not from the top down," says Ellis Marsalis, pianist, composer and patriarch of the musical clan. The resurrection of the neighborhoods is doubly important because thousands of residents are still trying to come back, and because the city's culture—particularly its music—is anchored in the neighborhoods. Unless they are revived, "the music won't have a home anymore," says saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., who is also the Big Chief of the Congo Nation, a Mardi Gras Indian tribe. "New Orleans needs the neighborhoods, because it's the only city in America that retains its traditional styles."

Yet the allure of New Orleans's culture is impossible to imagine without the backdrop of its gorgeous old architecture—much of it now in a precarious state. "I think you wouldn't have your music scene, the food scene, the art scene, if you didn't have the buildings," says Patricia Gay, director of the Preservation Resource Council, a local nonprofit that's been restoring houses for 30 years. Since the storm, the work has been especially urgent: one classic shotgun house the PRC is reconstructing with the National Trust belongs to 92-year-old Emelda Skidmore, who was evacuated to Houston and wants to return to her lifelong home—which was home as well to her stepdaddy, the late jazzman Kid Sheik. It's not just each house that matters. "People don't realize the importance of creating a street scene," Gay says—a whole row of fixedup, inhabited houses. It's hard to remake a neighborhood's street life when the few rebuilt houses sit scattered in a landscape of abandoned wrecks. The charming old houses aren't the only endangered species; so are fine examples of 20th-century modernism. The bulldozers' victims include parts of the Lafitte housing project, a model New Deal achievement with its handsome low-rise buildings, gracefully arrayed around tree-shaded courtyards.

Affordable housing is essential to luring back many poorer residents who formed the backbone of the city's work force. Thanks to church groups and such volunteer organizations as Habitat for Humanity, a handful of inexpensive houses have been constructed or repaired. While most new housing is being built in traditional styles, philanthropy is also sparking a change in the city's design culture. In the Holy Cross neighborhood, the Global Green organization has just opened a model house that's the centerpiece of a small residential development, with high-tech sustainable features and architecture that's a 21st-century take on New Orleans traditions, with porches and deep roof overhangs.