New Orleans Worries That Its Unique Culture May Be Lost

[demnan]

A City Fears for Its Soul
New Orleans Worries That Its Unique Culture May Be Lost

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 3, 2006; Page A01

NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans, the theme park?

Frightening as it sounds, the prospect of this sultry, eclectic city rising from the muck of Hurricane Katrina as a sterile imitation of itself is becoming an abiding preoccupation. Even as the city's riverfront high ground -- now dubbed the "Isle of Denial" by one scholar -- gamely revives, miles of culturally vibrant neighborhoods that once smelled of simmering red beans and hosted funky second-line parades lie dark and empty, their futures in doubt.

A quiet but increasingly urgent conversation about that culture's survival consumes this city, both on its street corners and in its institutions. In the Lower Ninth Ward, a woman who stables horses on the Mississippi River levee frets about "a land grab" that could bulldoze her home to make a "playground for the rich." In the Bywater neighborhood, an acclaimed photographer longs for the sound of teenagers blowing horns from porches. At Loyola University, authors and academics convene a panel to ponder whether New Orleans culture can be saved.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/02/AR2006020202746.html

Oddly enough hasn't this happened everywhere else already? I remember when Alexandria, VA was an actual Southern town with people who came from there. Quirky people, like my family. Quirkier people, like my family's in-laws. Now it's a sea of associations and lawyers and people from up North.

People are actually shocked when they hear my accent and I say I was born in Alexandria, VA. The city has changed so much from when I grew up there I don't recognize it. Sure some of the changes have been for the better and a lot of poverty has gone, but where has it gone?

I know how these New Orleans people feel.

[Double T]

1. bushco will make certain NO will never be the same as it was........

and this is ANOTHER national tragedy under his reign.