If Katrina had an upside, Cowen says, it was this: after decades, if not centuries, of civic lassitude—a sense that nothing in the beleaguered and often mismanaged tropical city could change, or even should change—Katrina forced the locals to hit the reset button. "It forced us to realize that we've got to change to survive," Cowen says.

Convention and tourism traffic, the heart of the local economy, has come back somewhat, though planners of mega-meetings remain leery of another storm, and the conventioneers who do come are not always as upscale as in the past. Now, just as the city claws back, it is feeling the effects of another hurricane—the global credit crunch and recession. A sure sign: there is widespread talk of fewer krewes at Mardi Gras this year.

And yet, like the live oaks that survived the flood, people here are a hearty breed. If the city comes all the way back, it will be because of people such as the writer Julia Reed (a NEWSWEEK contributing editor), and her husband, lawyer John Pearce. Their renovated book-lined home in the Garden District (she wrote a hilarious book about the re-do) is a testament to the New Orleans ideal of graciousness and artistic achievement; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, which she helps to run, is becoming a major stop of the national gallery circuit.

And if the Ninth Ward makes it back, it will be because of the will and heart of people who managed to avoid being flooded out, or who have now returned, or who are becoming urban pioneers. I am thinking in particular of one survivor I met named Harold. Standing in the side yard of his brick bungalow on an otherwise empty block of Tupelo Street, he is 69 years old, with blue eyes and skin the color of weathered copper. He wore a bright red bandana shaped in the form of a bishop's miter, and the look of a man who had seen everything in life. He had been a longshoreman, and a union man, and had reared a family in the home that he had built the home himself in 1962, at what he assumed was the dawn of a new era, not only in Louisiana, but also in America. The Kennedys were in power; the ideas of Harold's hero—Franklin Delano Roosevelt—were still fresh and largely unchallenged. "The idea was that government could do things for working people," he says. The neighborhood was proud and alive and a generation of men and women reared children with a sense of hope.

His home had survived, he explains, because the brick structure had been "pinned to the slab" when it was built. The lives of working families need similar anchoring, Harold says, of the kind that only government can provide. "The big corporations aren't going to do it," he says. "The foreign countries are taking our jobs away. They're not to going to pay into our Social Security!

"What we need here in this neighborhood is more government help. The bankers up in New York take care of themselves—and they are doing it at my expense! If they get loans, why can't we?"

Good question, and the "stimulus package" doesn't answer it.

© 2009