Requiem for the Crescent City

[MountainLaurel]

Assemble the brass band and let the funeral march begin, because the old New Orleans is dead.

The passing of our most distinctive city, so prominent in American imagination and lore, became official Wednesday when a blue-ribbon commission presented its plan to rebuild on the mud-caked ruins. One way or another -- through a proposed moratorium on rebuilding in the areas flooded when the levees failed, or through protracted argument over whether to have a moratorium -- the plan all but guarantees additional months of delay and rot. Every day, meanwhile, more evacuees will decide to make new lives for themselves elsewhere.

Play a mournful dirge for the lost city they have left behind.

The old New Orleans was unique in so many ways. The cityscape was like no other, with its thousands of little Creole cottages and shotgun houses. Before the flood, the city boasted 38,000 recognized historic structures; about 25,000 were badly damaged. All told, according to the report from the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, 108,731 households -- half the city's total -- were inundated with more than four feet of water.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/12/AR2006011201552.html

[sui generis]

1. The focus is wrong

Until the infrastructure problems are fixed, the airport will flood again, the FedEx and other distribution and warehousing and manufacturing areas will flood again, and without any guarantee that they won't flood again because of incomplete planning, the economic structure of New Orleans as anything but a fading tourist destination will never change.

Nagin is again playing the fool. You have to secure the city, not accept that half of it is designated as "wetland parks". Until you do that, you will have stupid plans with monikers like "wetland parks" in the middle of former residential areas and no incentive to return and no business other than tourism to support a local population which can be bussed in just like it is in every other tourist destination.

It is truly a shame that the incompetence that allowed this to happen in the first place is being allowed to plan its recovery.