21
Mar
2006
An ad in the March issue of New Orleans magazine boasts, "Lots Start at 100' Above Sea Level." That's life in the Big Easy, post-Katrina: It doesn't matter how much it costs as long as it's on high ground.
The ad speaks to something important about New Orleans. It's remarkable for its lightheartedness, and the casual way it puts a happy spin on a horrible situation.
What's genuinely amazing is that this phenomenon is widespread. Less than seven months since Hurricane Katrina hit - overwhelming ill-designed and poorly maintained levees, flooding three-quarters of the city, leaving more than 1,000 people dead - New Orleans' sense of humor is abundant. It's a testament to the spirit of its people that Crescent City remains so vibrant so soon after the hurricane.
And spirit is about all New Orleans has. The people are still bitter about the response of the federal government, particularly the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They're angry at insurance companies that won't pay the full value of insurance policies, leaving even residents who had flood insurance without enough money to re-build. They're skeptical that next month's election - with 24 candidates for mayor - will produce the leadership necessary to create the new New Orleans.
Yet on St. Patrick's Day weekend, it was easy to feel like New Orleans is going to be just fine. Beads hung from power lines, left over from the Mardi Gras celebration, and revelers were pelted with more strings of them. Two mostly naked women rubbed their bare asses against the storefront glass at Déjà Vu on Bourbon Street. Early on Saturday afternoon, you could hear live music coming out of taverns. At the legendary bar Pat O'Brien's, the Irish holiday brought shoulder-to-shoulder crowds drinking the famous and potent Hurricane in an environment that brought back unpleasant memories of dungeon-like college drinking spots.
Elsewhere in the French Quarter - which was spared from flooding - are dozens of art galleries, restaurants, and shops that represent the area's less-debauched culture. Around Jackson Square and between it and the Mississippi River were artists, musicians, palm readers, and the like, all practicing their trades. One musician played a guitar with his hands and a bass guitar with his feet.
Many residents said New Orleans has been a "ghost town" since Katrina, and residency estimates bear that out. But last weekend, this first-timer was impressed at the spiritual and cultural restoration that has already taken place, even if the financial and structural recoveries lag far behind.
And therein lies a lesson for the rest of the world, even those who have no interest in the future of that storied river city and stopped paying attention to Katrina news in September. New Orleans in early 2006 shows that a vital city, no matter how dire its straits, will be saved by its people and its culture, not by government money or redevelopment plans. Major capital projects can certainly help the process along, but they are not substitutes for human beings who are passionately tied to the place where they live.
That's another way of saying that we in the Quad Cities put too much stock in top-down urban-revitalization plans. New Orleans is an example of how a community succeeds and rebuilds despite a leadership void.
Remnants of Katrina, Signs of Recovery
Certainly, as a person who only spent three full days in the city and didn't see it before the hurricane, I'm not qualified to provide informed analysis of the city's current situation and its prospects; these are mere impressions. Yet I saw enough (and talked to enough people) to know that even though New Orleans can never reclaim what it was, its residents and resilience guarantee that it will still be New Orleans in fundamental ways.
My wife and I weren't sure what to expect when we arrived at 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday night for a friend's wedding. The first thing we noticed was seen from the air: an exodus of cars from the city. These, we figured out later, were workers with no place to live in New Orleans, or residents who toil cleaning or repairing their houses during the day but leave at night. The city's Rapid Population Estimate Project from late January says that the city's population drops by between 70,000 and 100,000 people at night - and that doesn't include commuters who don't work in residential structures.
That bolsters the "ghost town" claim. And there's no getting around the fact that New Orleans proper - with a population of 484,000 in the 2000 census - is now home to between one-third and two-fifths that many people at night.
Our first human contact in the city was a cab driver who took us from the airport to our hotel. One of the first things he told us was that we had to buy a "Meet the Fuckers" T-shirt in the French Quarter - one that featured politicians and bureaucrats both local and from beyond, from Mayor Ray Nagin to George W. Bush.
He pointed to the Lakeview neighborhood, where the street lights were on but the houses were dark.
Our first stops were downtown. Darkness obscured most of the damage, but broken or boarded-up windows were still plentiful and obvious. The Louisiana Superdome - home to 26,000 New Orleans residents and countless horror stories during the disaster - wore a banner that proudly proclaimed "Reopening 9-24-2006" and "Go Saints."
Our hotel was in the Uptown neighborhood, on high ground. The area suffered wind and storm damage but was spared from flooding. Two blocks away was a shuttered Rite Aid store. The building is closed, and the business is operating out of a trailer in the parking lot. A residential trailer is, we were told, available to anybody with land on which to put it. So if you owned a house in New Orleans, you could keep your address in a much more modest abode.
Some people offer tours of hurricane damage, but the most seriously damaged areas are open only to residents.
In areas that tourists are likely to be - Uptown, the Garden District, the French Quarter, the highway - you'll see scars of the hurricane but not much damage. In much of the city, you can still see a brown line showing the peak water level. Shutters are askew.
More common are human markers of accounting and recovery. There are those spray-painted Xs whose quadrants show when a building was searched for bodies and what was found. Blue tarps covering roofs, indicating storm damage but also trying to keep the rain out until repairs can be done.
There are piles of garbage everywhere - some of it everyday household trash, some of it the obvious product of the gutting of a house - and it's not clear whether this is longstanding refuse-collection procedure in New Orleans or just the way things are right now.
The doors of businesses have certificates showing when they were approved to re-open post-Katrina.
People are expressing their displeasure at those support systems that have done wrong by them. One deli has a handmade sign on its window that reads, "CNA Insurance sucks." The lively menu at Slim Goodies has hurricane-related items, from the only meal it served in the immediate aftermath of the storm to the Waffle Ray - with chocolate chips, to commemorate the now-infamous remarks of the city's oft-mocked mayor. He's running for re-election, and some people think he'll win. With two dozen candidates on the ballot, anything can happen.
The Louisiana artist George Rodrigue has turned his normally lost Blue Dog character into a political activist. In one work, an atypically focused Blue Dog - in a Mardi Gras mask - demands: "Throw Me Something F.E.M.A." Another work features the text "To stay alive we need Levee 5." The character also encompasses grief and hope. In one piece, Blue Dog's head emerges from the water with its haunting yellow eyes, a red cross on its chest and an American flag behind it. The title: We Will Rise Again.
Then there are the people themselves. One wedding guest stayed in a hotel that still housed displaced New Orleans residents. The bride and groom were the first overnight guests at the Columns hotel Uptown. At the reception, someone from the hotel publicly and sincerely expressed gratitude for their patronage and confidence. Everywhere we went in the city, business owners thanked us for visiting, and we felt like the mere act of spending money - for an Abita beer or a few inexpensive pieces of New Orleans artwork - amounted to far more than commerce. Slowly, the city is in the process of lifting itself back up, and being lifted up by visitors.
Yet it's hard to ignore the labor shortage, and the possibility that it could seriously retard recovery. Some guests at a next-door hotel reported that their rooms weren't getting made up. A taxi service hung up on us four times before we gave up and tried another. A significant portion - if not a majority - of businesses have help-wanted signs in their windows and keep abbreviated hours that seem to have more to do with a dearth of workers than a lack of customers.
Even so, this problem - at worst, an inconvenience - is a testament to how far the city has come. If there are too few drivers to taxi tourists, and not enough workers to provide them basic services, a lot of things are going right.
Lessons for Us
I was one of the people who questioned whether New Orleans was worth rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I was operating on the assumption that the city would be a money pit, that the reconstruction effort would re-create the same problems with the same potential for catastrophe.
Those things might very well happen. What I didn't understand was that this is not really an issue. In a story on an ill-fated couple, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose wrote: "He was from Atlanta and had moved here to be with her because she is a New Orleans girl and New Orleans girls never live anywhere else and even if they do, they always come back.
"That's just the way it is."
The issue related to New Orleans' future is not whether to rebuild but who will do it. New Orleanians have already partially re-populated their city and will continue to do so. What remains to be seen is whether they do it by themselves, in conjunction with local, state, and federal governments, or in active opposition to those local, state, and federal governments.
I hope it's the middle option. What New Orleans has today is a tremendous opportunity - perhaps unprecedented for a major American city in modern times. Because of the scope of Katrina's devastation, the city has something approaching a clean slate. It is still rich with cultural history and cultural capital - no mere Category 5 hurricane can wash away the Cajun and Creole cuisine, the music, the language, the folklore - yet the storm offers the chance to re-imagine the city in physical, sociological, and economic senses.
The city knows what it has, and it knows what its problems were, and it has a sense of what it needs. Now it needs some help getting there. Is there a way to rebuild the city so that 30 percent of its residents don't live below the poverty line? How can it create mixed-income, mixed-race neighborhoods, and an affordable housing stock that allows service-industry workers to live there? How can it accommodate its poorer citizens without forcing them into below-sea-level ghettos?
My fear is that the thoughtful, creative planning those questions require will take a backseat to political expediency. There is presently no plan to rebuild New Orleans. The April 22 city election should provide a boost of leadership and direction, but there's an excellent chance it won't. Lawrence H. Pugh, the manager of the Rodrigue Studio, said he thinks the election will be tied up in court for years with issues related to absentee voting. He added that the state's politics - Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco are both Democrats - have meant that New Orleans has seen less and slower federal aid from the Bush administration than states such as Mississippi and Florida. (The former has as its governor a former Republican National Committee chair with strong Bush ties, while the latter has the president's brother.)
And even if the money does make it to New Orleans, the city has a long history of political corruption.
Yet because recovery is still in its infancy, this can be a time for idealism, to talk about potential rather than pitfalls. We can talk about New Orleans as it relates to our own communities and our own (admittedly tiny) disasters.
The re-population of New Orleans is limited now only by the amount of livable, affordable housing stock. People want to come back, in spite of Katrina. If something that catastrophic happened here, how many people would return?
Not many, I'd guess. Certainly not a third to half the population within six months.
So what about New Orleans keeps drawing people back, forever?
It is not the amenities, the bricks and mortar that, we are frequently told, will attract visitors and keep our young people here. We've built the amenities, and we continue to build the amenities. And yes, downtown Davenport is a much cooler place than it was three years ago.
We need to build a community that has the passion and commitment of New Orleans, one whose magnetism means that even in the face of great adversity - a Mississippi flood, an economic recession - people are drawn to it. Let's be even more forceful: We need a place, a culture that doesn't just attract people but grabs them and doesn't loose its grip.
Top-down amenities are great ancillary benefits. In New Orleans, on the riverfront, the old Jax brewery has been turned into a shopping center that houses mostly chain stores. Some developer decided it was a great redevelopment project. But who wants to go to New Orleans to shop at the Virgin mega-store?
I'm not equating the River Music Experience, the Figge Art Museum, Bucktown, the new John O'Donnell Stadium, or the proposed "market district" in Davenport to that shopping center, but they're not bottom-up developments; they were designed by organizations to fulfill their wishes or meet perceived needs, or to provide something that experts and studies told them we should want.
Too many people in the Quad Cities have been charmed by that hokey movie line: "If you build it, they will come." No. What will actually draw people here, and keep them here, is a populace that's passionate about the Quad Cities, and what it has to offer.
This is different than civic pride, or series of meetings at which public input is gathered. The people of New Orleans are pissed about a lot of things, and they know their community's shortcomings. But they love it just the same, and would never leave; the dysfunction is part of the community's identity.
Somehow, the Quad Cities need to generate a ground swell that captures, articulates, and then executes what the community genuinely wants. This is a self-reinforcing process, for as the community realizes that it's driving the bus, it becomes more invested in its direction and destination. Eventually, people will tell you that they'd never leave.
But how the hell do you accomplish that? By definition, such a grassroots movement cannot be dictated from above, marketed, or even organized. It has to happen naturally, and genuinely, because people have fallen in love - again, or for the first time - with the Quad Cities. It starts with entrepreneurs, restauranteurs, club owners, artists, bands, and performers, and continues with people patronizing them loyally and enthusiastically. It's the establishment of venues where those cultural and economic transactions can occur easily. It's word of mouth. It's ideas that are expressed, heard, and seized upon. It's community ownership - and the opportunity for community ownership - of the cultural capital we already have. Sometimes it's simple questions: What do you want to see, to hear, to eat, to do, to buy? And then: How do we get there? It's an energy that's hard to define or create but impossible to ignore when it's there.
The good news is that we have something plentiful that New Orleans lacks right now: governmental and civic structures that can shepherd and fund projects from concept through completion - that can transform widely and strongly held visions into reality.
But right now we're missing something essential, and something that New Orleans has in abundance: a community that sucks people in and never lets them go.
The ad speaks to something important about New Orleans. It's remarkable for its lightheartedness, and the casual way it puts a happy spin on a horrible situation.
What's genuinely amazing is that this phenomenon is widespread. Less than seven months since Hurricane Katrina hit - overwhelming ill-designed and poorly maintained levees, flooding three-quarters of the city, leaving more than 1,000 people dead - New Orleans' sense of humor is abundant. It's a testament to the spirit of its people that Crescent City remains so vibrant so soon after the hurricane.
And spirit is about all New Orleans has. The people are still bitter about the response of the federal government, particularly the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They're angry at insurance companies that won't pay the full value of insurance policies, leaving even residents who had flood insurance without enough money to re-build. They're skeptical that next month's election - with 24 candidates for mayor - will produce the leadership necessary to create the new New Orleans.
Yet on St. Patrick's Day weekend, it was easy to feel like New Orleans is going to be just fine. Beads hung from power lines, left over from the Mardi Gras celebration, and revelers were pelted with more strings of them. Two mostly naked women rubbed their bare asses against the storefront glass at Déjà Vu on Bourbon Street. Early on Saturday afternoon, you could hear live music coming out of taverns. At the legendary bar Pat O'Brien's, the Irish holiday brought shoulder-to-shoulder crowds drinking the famous and potent Hurricane in an environment that brought back unpleasant memories of dungeon-like college drinking spots.
Elsewhere in the French Quarter - which was spared from flooding - are dozens of art galleries, restaurants, and shops that represent the area's less-debauched culture. Around Jackson Square and between it and the Mississippi River were artists, musicians, palm readers, and the like, all practicing their trades. One musician played a guitar with his hands and a bass guitar with his feet.
Many residents said New Orleans has been a "ghost town" since Katrina, and residency estimates bear that out. But last weekend, this first-timer was impressed at the spiritual and cultural restoration that has already taken place, even if the financial and structural recoveries lag far behind.
And therein lies a lesson for the rest of the world, even those who have no interest in the future of that storied river city and stopped paying attention to Katrina news in September. New Orleans in early 2006 shows that a vital city, no matter how dire its straits, will be saved by its people and its culture, not by government money or redevelopment plans. Major capital projects can certainly help the process along, but they are not substitutes for human beings who are passionately tied to the place where they live.
That's another way of saying that we in the Quad Cities put too much stock in top-down urban-revitalization plans. New Orleans is an example of how a community succeeds and rebuilds despite a leadership void.
Remnants of Katrina, Signs of Recovery
Certainly, as a person who only spent three full days in the city and didn't see it before the hurricane, I'm not qualified to provide informed analysis of the city's current situation and its prospects; these are mere impressions. Yet I saw enough (and talked to enough people) to know that even though New Orleans can never reclaim what it was, its residents and resilience guarantee that it will still be New Orleans in fundamental ways.
My wife and I weren't sure what to expect when we arrived at 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday night for a friend's wedding. The first thing we noticed was seen from the air: an exodus of cars from the city. These, we figured out later, were workers with no place to live in New Orleans, or residents who toil cleaning or repairing their houses during the day but leave at night. The city's Rapid Population Estimate Project from late January says that the city's population drops by between 70,000 and 100,000 people at night - and that doesn't include commuters who don't work in residential structures.
That bolsters the "ghost town" claim. And there's no getting around the fact that New Orleans proper - with a population of 484,000 in the 2000 census - is now home to between one-third and two-fifths that many people at night.
Our first human contact in the city was a cab driver who took us from the airport to our hotel. One of the first things he told us was that we had to buy a "Meet the Fuckers" T-shirt in the French Quarter - one that featured politicians and bureaucrats both local and from beyond, from Mayor Ray Nagin to George W. Bush.
He pointed to the Lakeview neighborhood, where the street lights were on but the houses were dark.
Our first stops were downtown. Darkness obscured most of the damage, but broken or boarded-up windows were still plentiful and obvious. The Louisiana Superdome - home to 26,000 New Orleans residents and countless horror stories during the disaster - wore a banner that proudly proclaimed "Reopening 9-24-2006" and "Go Saints."
Our hotel was in the Uptown neighborhood, on high ground. The area suffered wind and storm damage but was spared from flooding. Two blocks away was a shuttered Rite Aid store. The building is closed, and the business is operating out of a trailer in the parking lot. A residential trailer is, we were told, available to anybody with land on which to put it. So if you owned a house in New Orleans, you could keep your address in a much more modest abode.
Some people offer tours of hurricane damage, but the most seriously damaged areas are open only to residents.
In areas that tourists are likely to be - Uptown, the Garden District, the French Quarter, the highway - you'll see scars of the hurricane but not much damage. In much of the city, you can still see a brown line showing the peak water level. Shutters are askew.
More common are human markers of accounting and recovery. There are those spray-painted Xs whose quadrants show when a building was searched for bodies and what was found. Blue tarps covering roofs, indicating storm damage but also trying to keep the rain out until repairs can be done.
There are piles of garbage everywhere - some of it everyday household trash, some of it the obvious product of the gutting of a house - and it's not clear whether this is longstanding refuse-collection procedure in New Orleans or just the way things are right now.
The doors of businesses have certificates showing when they were approved to re-open post-Katrina.
People are expressing their displeasure at those support systems that have done wrong by them. One deli has a handmade sign on its window that reads, "CNA Insurance sucks." The lively menu at Slim Goodies has hurricane-related items, from the only meal it served in the immediate aftermath of the storm to the Waffle Ray - with chocolate chips, to commemorate the now-infamous remarks of the city's oft-mocked mayor. He's running for re-election, and some people think he'll win. With two dozen candidates on the ballot, anything can happen.
The Louisiana artist George Rodrigue has turned his normally lost Blue Dog character into a political activist. In one work, an atypically focused Blue Dog - in a Mardi Gras mask - demands: "Throw Me Something F.E.M.A." Another work features the text "To stay alive we need Levee 5." The character also encompasses grief and hope. In one piece, Blue Dog's head emerges from the water with its haunting yellow eyes, a red cross on its chest and an American flag behind it. The title: We Will Rise Again.
Then there are the people themselves. One wedding guest stayed in a hotel that still housed displaced New Orleans residents. The bride and groom were the first overnight guests at the Columns hotel Uptown. At the reception, someone from the hotel publicly and sincerely expressed gratitude for their patronage and confidence. Everywhere we went in the city, business owners thanked us for visiting, and we felt like the mere act of spending money - for an Abita beer or a few inexpensive pieces of New Orleans artwork - amounted to far more than commerce. Slowly, the city is in the process of lifting itself back up, and being lifted up by visitors.
Yet it's hard to ignore the labor shortage, and the possibility that it could seriously retard recovery. Some guests at a next-door hotel reported that their rooms weren't getting made up. A taxi service hung up on us four times before we gave up and tried another. A significant portion - if not a majority - of businesses have help-wanted signs in their windows and keep abbreviated hours that seem to have more to do with a dearth of workers than a lack of customers.
Even so, this problem - at worst, an inconvenience - is a testament to how far the city has come. If there are too few drivers to taxi tourists, and not enough workers to provide them basic services, a lot of things are going right.
Lessons for Us
I was one of the people who questioned whether New Orleans was worth rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I was operating on the assumption that the city would be a money pit, that the reconstruction effort would re-create the same problems with the same potential for catastrophe.
Those things might very well happen. What I didn't understand was that this is not really an issue. In a story on an ill-fated couple, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose wrote: "He was from Atlanta and had moved here to be with her because she is a New Orleans girl and New Orleans girls never live anywhere else and even if they do, they always come back.
"That's just the way it is."
The issue related to New Orleans' future is not whether to rebuild but who will do it. New Orleanians have already partially re-populated their city and will continue to do so. What remains to be seen is whether they do it by themselves, in conjunction with local, state, and federal governments, or in active opposition to those local, state, and federal governments.
I hope it's the middle option. What New Orleans has today is a tremendous opportunity - perhaps unprecedented for a major American city in modern times. Because of the scope of Katrina's devastation, the city has something approaching a clean slate. It is still rich with cultural history and cultural capital - no mere Category 5 hurricane can wash away the Cajun and Creole cuisine, the music, the language, the folklore - yet the storm offers the chance to re-imagine the city in physical, sociological, and economic senses.
The city knows what it has, and it knows what its problems were, and it has a sense of what it needs. Now it needs some help getting there. Is there a way to rebuild the city so that 30 percent of its residents don't live below the poverty line? How can it create mixed-income, mixed-race neighborhoods, and an affordable housing stock that allows service-industry workers to live there? How can it accommodate its poorer citizens without forcing them into below-sea-level ghettos?
My fear is that the thoughtful, creative planning those questions require will take a backseat to political expediency. There is presently no plan to rebuild New Orleans. The April 22 city election should provide a boost of leadership and direction, but there's an excellent chance it won't. Lawrence H. Pugh, the manager of the Rodrigue Studio, said he thinks the election will be tied up in court for years with issues related to absentee voting. He added that the state's politics - Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco are both Democrats - have meant that New Orleans has seen less and slower federal aid from the Bush administration than states such as Mississippi and Florida. (The former has as its governor a former Republican National Committee chair with strong Bush ties, while the latter has the president's brother.)
And even if the money does make it to New Orleans, the city has a long history of political corruption.
Yet because recovery is still in its infancy, this can be a time for idealism, to talk about potential rather than pitfalls. We can talk about New Orleans as it relates to our own communities and our own (admittedly tiny) disasters.
The re-population of New Orleans is limited now only by the amount of livable, affordable housing stock. People want to come back, in spite of Katrina. If something that catastrophic happened here, how many people would return?
Not many, I'd guess. Certainly not a third to half the population within six months.
So what about New Orleans keeps drawing people back, forever?
It is not the amenities, the bricks and mortar that, we are frequently told, will attract visitors and keep our young people here. We've built the amenities, and we continue to build the amenities. And yes, downtown Davenport is a much cooler place than it was three years ago.
We need to build a community that has the passion and commitment of New Orleans, one whose magnetism means that even in the face of great adversity - a Mississippi flood, an economic recession - people are drawn to it. Let's be even more forceful: We need a place, a culture that doesn't just attract people but grabs them and doesn't loose its grip.
Top-down amenities are great ancillary benefits. In New Orleans, on the riverfront, the old Jax brewery has been turned into a shopping center that houses mostly chain stores. Some developer decided it was a great redevelopment project. But who wants to go to New Orleans to shop at the Virgin mega-store?
I'm not equating the River Music Experience, the Figge Art Museum, Bucktown, the new John O'Donnell Stadium, or the proposed "market district" in Davenport to that shopping center, but they're not bottom-up developments; they were designed by organizations to fulfill their wishes or meet perceived needs, or to provide something that experts and studies told them we should want.
Too many people in the Quad Cities have been charmed by that hokey movie line: "If you build it, they will come." No. What will actually draw people here, and keep them here, is a populace that's passionate about the Quad Cities, and what it has to offer.
This is different than civic pride, or series of meetings at which public input is gathered. The people of New Orleans are pissed about a lot of things, and they know their community's shortcomings. But they love it just the same, and would never leave; the dysfunction is part of the community's identity.
Somehow, the Quad Cities need to generate a ground swell that captures, articulates, and then executes what the community genuinely wants. This is a self-reinforcing process, for as the community realizes that it's driving the bus, it becomes more invested in its direction and destination. Eventually, people will tell you that they'd never leave.
But how the hell do you accomplish that? By definition, such a grassroots movement cannot be dictated from above, marketed, or even organized. It has to happen naturally, and genuinely, because people have fallen in love - again, or for the first time - with the Quad Cities. It starts with entrepreneurs, restauranteurs, club owners, artists, bands, and performers, and continues with people patronizing them loyally and enthusiastically. It's the establishment of venues where those cultural and economic transactions can occur easily. It's word of mouth. It's ideas that are expressed, heard, and seized upon. It's community ownership - and the opportunity for community ownership - of the cultural capital we already have. Sometimes it's simple questions: What do you want to see, to hear, to eat, to do, to buy? And then: How do we get there? It's an energy that's hard to define or create but impossible to ignore when it's there.
The good news is that we have something plentiful that New Orleans lacks right now: governmental and civic structures that can shepherd and fund projects from concept through completion - that can transform widely and strongly held visions into reality.
But right now we're missing something essential, and something that New Orleans has in abundance: a community that sucks people in and never lets them go.
