"They'd Throw a Party for a Dog's Birthday"

This isn’t about economics.  It is about the city of New Orleans, its magic, its darker side, and the unique intangible part of the city that may be lost forever:

My New Orleans, by Thomas A. Sancton, WSJ Commentary:  Watching the apocalyptic images of New Orleans on television is like witnessing the fall of Pompeii -- the collapse of a mythic civilization in the face of an all-powerful and unforgiving nature. In my case, I am also watching the destruction of the urban roots and sinews that shaped my early life. ... the French Quarter, the teeming riverfront, the mansions of the Garden District, the luxuriant oak-lined elegance of St. Charles Avenue, the splintery back-of-town neighborhoods where jazz was born and where the jazz people created a unique cultural gumbo of spicy food, hot music and joie de vivre that was the best antidote to adversity.

I have had trouble sleeping. ... I worry about all the friends and relatives whose fates I do not yet know. And I worry for the tens of thousands of my homeless compatriots, black and white, whose helpless agony and anger have been on 24-hour display via the world-wide media. But what troubles me at least as much as the human drama is the agony of the city itself. Every city is special to its inhabitants, but New Orleans is special to the whole world. As Mayor Ray Nagin said during one of the softer moments of his now-famous tirade on WWL radio, "When you mention New Orleans anywhere around the world everybody's eyes light up." It evokes images of graceful Old World architecture, Mardi Gras parades, incomparable restaurants, steamy jazz clubs, paddle-wheel riverboats -- and a hedonistic lifestyle dedicated to good times, good eating and genteel decadence. The late Danny Barker, a local jazz banjoist and guitarist, once summed it up to me in these words: "New Orleans people are unique, man. Somebody goin' to jail? Give him a party. Somebody died? Give him a party. They'd throw a party for a dog's birthday..."

There is a darker side to New Orleans, too ... the yawning gap between the haves -- those with cars and SUVs to flee in -- and the have nots -- the overwhelmingly black masses huddled in the Superdome and outside the Convention Center, with nowhere else to go and no way to get there. These are the images that have made my European friends shake their heads and tell me that the world's most powerful democracy looks today like a helpless Third World nation that inspires more pity than compassion. Apart from the baffling slowness of relief efforts, these images translate a disturbing reality about the city: Black people comprise more than two-thirds of the local population, and one-third of them live below the poverty line. Even more troubling is the rampant criminality that has long reigned there ... New Orleans has the nation's highest per capita murder rate -- 10 times the national average -- and one of its highest levels of narcotics use... I think of that, too, when I lie awake at night. What happened to the dreams of civil rights, equality and integration that so many of us embraced in the 1960s...

I was lucky enough in my youth to have an extraordinary New Orleans experience. As a white middle-class boy and aspiring clarinetist, I went through a decade-long apprenticeship alongside some of the city's legendary old black jazz musicians. They taught me about their music, of course, but more than that they taught me about their world, their neighborhoods, their laughter and anger, their fears and disappointments, their courage in the face of poverty and prejudice, sickness and death. Most of all, they taught me their humanity. They called themselves "the mens."

The images that haunt me most today are memories of those wonderful people ... and of the times and places I discovered at their side. There was Preservation Hall ... now known the world over, but at that time a one-room hole-in-the wall frequented by a cult-like handful of traditional jazz fans. The place smelled of dust and cigar smoke and sweat, and the steamy heat of New Orleans floated in the air like a warm, wet blanket. My father took me there one summer night in 1962. I immediately fell in love with the music, the people and the atmosphere. It was then that I decided to become a jazz musician...

My New Orleans apprenticeship also took me into the neighborhoods where white people rarely ventured in those Jim Crow days when racial segregation was still the law in Louisiana. That's where the city's legendary brass bands -- the Eureka, the Olympia, the Tuxedo -- would wind their way through the narrow streets trailing a "second line" of dancers wielding painted umbrellas and cans of Dixie beer. The parades would go past rows of sagging shotgun houses -- single-story wooden structures with all their rooms in a straight line -- where the old folks would sit on their front steps and clap their hands to the pulsing beat. ... Today, most of those low-lying black neighborhoods are under water. Many of the houses have collapsed or floated off their foundations. In the massive rebuilding ... I can't imagine anyone pouring major investments into recreating low-rent property for the poor, so where will those huddled masses go? Will renewal and gentrification push them out of the city whose culture they did so much to shape?...

New Orleans was probably never as idyllic ... as many ... imagined it to be. But it was a special city, a magical city, a city of dreams. It will be rebuilt, of course; many of the best-known landmarks will be lovingly restored, the port will welcome ships from around the world, and a busting metropolis named New Orleans will once again stand along the banks of the Mississippi. After all, the city came back from two devastating fires in the 18th century and a yellow fever epidemic in the 19th. But as I watch the aerial shots of those submerged neighborhoods, with their checkerboard of ruined rooftops, and the debris of a thousand, thousand lives floating in the putrid water, I know that the city, as I knew it, will never be the same.