Toward a New New Orleans

Not far away, in the worst-hit area of the Lower Ninth Ward, a man mows the lawn around a concrete slab—all that's left of his house. Here, where the devastation has given way to cleaned-up vacant lots of weeds and surprising bursts of pink wildflowers, Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation plans to construct 150 affordable green houses and offers returning residents a menu of designs. Each is by one of 14 leading contemporary architects, including Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne, who's experimenting with a plan for a house that, supposedly, can float in an emergency. And in the Central City neighborhood, architecture students from Tulane University are finishing their fourth affordable house, which they designed, then built with their own sweat. The two-story house, which will sell for about $140,000, is on the scale of the older ones on the street, but it has contemporary lines and siding of bright red Hardie board and corrugated metal. "We definitely want to preserve what we have in New Orleans," says Emilie Taylor, 28, a graduate of the program who decided to stay in the city as project manager for Tulane's Urbanbuild program. "But our stance is to build with the technology of our time. We're hoping these little ideas will open up people to what New Orleans could be."

New Orleans culture has never stood still, but the calamity of Katrina gave it new momentum. Everything people had taken for granted—a good meal, music in the neighborhood—was suddenly at risk. In the months following the storm, New Orleans musicians achieved a level of recognition they'd never had before, appearing at benefit concerts around the country and on albums dedicated to raising money for relief efforts. But would these musicians, along with New Orleans's writers, visual artists and chefs, be able to re-create their culture once they got back home? Based on what's come out of the city in the two and a half years since the storm, the answer would seem to be yes—though this is still a story in progress. Nancy Lemann is working on a novel about the storm. Tom Piazza, who already published an impassioned nonfiction book about the catastrophe, "Why New Orleans Matters," has a new novel, "City of Refuge," coming out in August. Visual artists are moving here to help create the most vibrant art scene New Orleans has ever enjoyed, with such new galleries as Good Children, Antenna and Kaechele's KKProjects, giving derelict parts of the city a much-needed shot of energy. High-profile curators have moved in from Houston and New York. And last fall, when conceptual artist Paul Chan brought the Classical Theater of Harlem's production of "Waiting for Godot" to the devastated neighborhoods of the Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly, the only complaints came from those who had to be turned away.

The story for musicians is more complicated—fittingly enough, since music is the cardinal art in this still-desperate city. Many old clubs failed to reopen after the storm, but new venues seem to pop up every month, while such established nightspots as Snug Harbor are thriving. A fair number of marquee names—Henry Butler, some of the Neville Brothers—have yet to return, but those who have made it home are working furiously, and turning out some of their best work. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard produced a Grammy-winning album-length requiem, "A Tale of God's Will." Dr. John composed a suite inspired by the coastal damage wreaked by both Katrina and Rita. And Allen Toussaint collaborated with Elvis Costello on "The River in Reverse," the first album, Toussaint proudly points out, recorded in the city after the storm. One of the country's great songwriters ("Working in a Coal Mine," "Yes We Can," "It's Raining," "Lipstick Traces"), Toussaint was a titan on the local scene but little known nationally before the storm. Now he tours regularly. "Katrina," he says, "has been quite a booking agent for musicians."

Toussaint is one of the more upbeat analysts of Katrina's effects. "There's lots to be done," he admits, "but many of the musicians—who are what makes New Orleans New Orleans—are back or on the way back. There are musicians down in Jackson Square, doing what they've always done. And there can be a brass-band parade on any day at any time. It won't damage the music community at all, not even a little." Not everyone is so sanguine. "We lost everything that we had—our instruments, our households, so many memories," says trumpeter James Andrews, who grew up tap-dancing for tips on Bourbon Street and who, along with his brother, Troy, a.k.a. Trombone Shorty, belongs to one of the city's several musical dynasties—their grandfather was soul singer Jessie Hill. "But the most important thing was losing so many people, who have tried to come back and can't make it because they can't afford it, or can't find the gigs that would sustain them." The artists who have returned all insist they're home to stay, but each of them admits to being haunted by the experience. For Blanchard, it is the memory of standing in front of his mother's destroyed home, days after the storm, "and not hearing a sound, not hearing a single thing that resembled life." Sally Heller, an artist who creates installations that look like forests and jungles woven out of cast-off materials, says her work has seemed, post-Katrina, to take on a new heaviness verging on despair. Before the storm, "we all lived with the sense that there's a safety net beneath us," says Heller. "I can't live like that anymore."

No one captures the sweet-and-sour fate of the arts in post-Katrina New Orleans better than hip-hop star Lil Wayne. "A lot of guys I knew that had big-time skills lost everything and moved to Atlanta or Texas," he says. "The city hasn't done anything to get people like that back. They don't care that young black men left and didn't come back." Yet in the same breath he insists that, "if anything, the arts are even stronger since Katrina. You know the best part of our music—rap or the blues—is based on suffering. I grew up in the Ninth Ward with murders and drugs. That's where my subjects come from—that hardship. And that's what people relate to. The world saw what happened in Katrina—so people couldn't dismiss us and our complaints so quickly."

New Orleans is a dangerous city. Since Katrina, the murder rate, already one of the highest in the nation, has only gone up. Last year more than 200 people were killed (that's roughly 71 per 100,000, more than twice the rate of, say, Washington, D.C.). It is also culturally volatile. The things that make the place interesting—different ethnicities and classes, different foods, different styles of music and clothing and dance—are the very things that people tend to fight about. Last fall the police were called to break up a funeral parade in the Tremé neighborhood. Some argue that there is nothing new here—that the police have a history of rousting musicians from the city's parks and streets. But others insist that a new front in the culture wars has now opened up; because Tremé was not heavily damaged by the flooding, it has started to attract more-affluent residents uncomfortable with the old neighborhood's mores. What really irked the old-timers was that the police bothered to act on the complaint at all. One of the angriest observers was Dr. John, a.k.a. Mac Rebennack, who wrote a song about the incident for his forthcoming "City That Care Forgot," a furious album about what's happened in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast.

In "My People Need a Second Line," Rebennack constructs a song that cleverly mirrors what he's singing about: a second line, in New Orleans parlance, is a group of people who follow one of the street parades or funeral marches that course through the city every week. His lyric in the song's first half is doleful, like mourners on their way to the graveyard. Then the music turns around and doubles the tempo, like a brass band on the way back, while the singer excoriates anyone who interferes with one of the city's most sacred institutions. In a recent interview, Rebennack could barely contain his rage: "The tradition of the second-line brass bands is right there in Tremé, in that neighborhood. And now politicians want to charge people [for parade permits] to have a second line. They have to have a police escort—all that crap. This is a spiritual thing. You don't put spiritual things in politicians' hands."

Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, whose office oversees the state's arts economy, acknowledges that street culture and crowd control don't always ride on the same float. During the last few Mardi Gras Indian parades, "some people not involved in the parades shot guns and people got injured. So now the police are saying, are these things dangerous or not?" It's a question, he believes, of balancing public safety against cultural vitality. Landrieu, who's pushing a Cultural Economy Initiative package that would assist artists as a vital part of the state's economy, puts his thumb on the side of the scale representing the artists: "Don't make it hard," he says, "for a culture to stand itself back up."