I have to give credit where credit is due: Slate has finally published an assessment of New Orleans which comes close to my own view. The writers of the article, Tyler Cowen and Daniel Rothschild, point out that the universities in the city have largely gotten back on their feet, even if the rest of the city has not. They argue that the reason the universities are up and running is that they are headed by decisive presidents and chancellors who made the necessary hard decisions to get things going again. For the rest of New Orleans, they posit, it has been business as usual.
Well, not quite. The Slate writers are both university professors, and I think their view is a little biased towards universities. While I agree with them that the city and state government have not done enough to get recovery underway, I disagree with their assessment that the recovery is limited only to universities.
There are many private enterprises that have done an admirable job of coming back, despite the lack of public leadership. Most notably is the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, which just won two well-deserved Pulitzer prizes for covering Katrina. The Picayune’s facility on Howard Avenue was flooded out, and the paper published online for one week before restarting its print edition first in Houma and then with an affiliate paper in Mobile, Alabama. Now they are back home and as good as ever.
Or how about Mardi Gras? The dozens of private carnival clubs were told over and over that Mardi Gras would be a disaster; there would be crime; the police couldn’t handle the crowd; there were not enough people to parade, ad nauseum. Mardi Gras was safer this year than it had ever been, hosted crowds in the tens of thousands, and there were no disasters, unless one considers one night of parades cancelled because of rain a disaster.
How about Entergy corporation? Entergy is the primary electricity provider in New Orleans. Seven months after the storm, Entergy has at least 95% of its old customers back on line. Although there have been a lot of people criticizing Entergy for its pace of repairs, in my humble opinion, considering the way the infrastructure in New Orleans was mangled, Entergy’s success has been remarkable. And just this week, Entergy has announced that it is bringing its corporate operations back to New Orleans after an eight month exile.
Then there are the restaurants of New Orleans. There were over 1,000 independent restaurants in New Orleans before Katrina, many of them famous the world over. Of those, 615 are now back in operation. I have been to a few of them, and believe me, the old quality is back. I had the best oysters of my life at Acme Oyster House 3 weeks ago. R & O’s in Bucktown is sublime as ever. On St. Patrick’s day I drank down two Pimm’s Cups and had a half a muffelatta at Napoleon House in the Quarter with my wife. And we have been to Café Du Monde more times than I can count.
Let’s not forget that the Port of New Orleans opened for business within 2 weeks of Katrina.
On September 30 (32 days after Katrina) I was cruising the internet (looking for a job!) at P.J.’s Coffee and Tea on Veteran’s Highway in Metairie.
And a special honor goes to Drago’s Restaurant, which never closed, and offered by some accounts as many as 10,000 free meals to hurricane victims in the days after the storm.
Most of the New Orleans legal community is back and in operation. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court is up and running.
This weekend is the French Quarter Festival, and next is the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, one of the largest outdoor music festivals in America. The Jazz Fest will be staged in Mid City, one of New Orleans’s hardest, hit areas. Both festivals are expected to be as good as ever.
Last weekend, the Mississippi River Bridge was closed briefly for the filming of the movie Déjà Vu. I guess that means the film industry is back.
The oil refineries between New Orleans and Baton Rouge are all up and running. And the offshore drilling is getting back up to pre-Katrina capacity.
What is fairest to say is that everything except the government is improving daily. The problem is not that the universities are better than the government. Everything I can name is better than the government.
New Orleans is being rescued by its citizens despite the government, rather than because of it. It is like a dying patient giving himself his medicine while the doctor naps at the bedside.
It’s all enough to turn me into a Reagan Republican. The problem is, you can’t find those people anymore. Small government, pro-small business, non-intrusive leadership? Forget about it.