The City Tourists Never Knew

By Sonja Steptoe

Through the recounting of the legions of coventioneers and hearty partyers who have flocked to the city to frolic at Mardi Gras, jazz festivals and Sugar and Super Bowl games over the decades, New Orleans has come to be thought of as the place to forget your cares. It has been years since I've held that view. Growing up in a town some 40 miles upriver, I saw overwhelming evidence that the more accurate image is that of a city that care forgot. Now the rest of the world is getting a shockingly graphic and unsettlingly intense introduction to the forces that created the New Orleans I know.

I keep hearing people say on TV and in print that they don't recognize "this New Orleans." Perhaps they closed their eyes or didn't pay close attention when they were there. While I understand the temptation to wax nostalgic about the architecture of the Ninth Ward homes, the beauty of the Garden District, the charm of the French Quarter and so on, such musings perpetuate a romantic notion of the place that doesn't track with reality. Sure, there are isolated spots dotting the tourist maps that are well stocked with pristine prettiness and antebellum hospitality, but like A Streetcar Named Desire's Blanche DuBois, the real New Orleans hasn't possessed much beauty or charm for nearly 30 years. The deep wealth and class divisions, the decayed infrastructure, the lax civil-engineering management, the depleted city coffers, the lawless depravity, the history of political corruption by a long line of city and state officials, and the incompetent governance that television viewers are discovering are, to use the local vernacular, the roux of a long-simmering pot of gumbo that finally boiled over when Hurricane Katrina turned up the heat last week. Now the city is drowning in it.

Although I have never lived in New Orleans proper, I have worked and spent much time there, experiencing firsthand the city's glory days during the late 1960s and early 1970s and its depressing decline since then. I remember childhood shopping trips with my parents inside the big, bright, block-long department stores that once lined Canal Street. My parents did their monthly grocery shopping at the cavernous Schwegmann's supermarkets in the city and treated my younger sister and me to movies and a few Mardi Gras parades there. Without us, my mother and father enjoyed frequent weekend excursions there, taking in shows and having dinner at Dooky Chase's and other eateries around the city. But by the time I hit my teens in the late '70s, New Orleans was hardening, and so was my father's attitude toward it. Crime was rising, white citizens were fleeing, conditions deteriorated in the public schools and hospitals, garbage littered the streets and the economy and tax base were beginning to falter. Our family trips became far less frequent, limited to the pursuit of necessities that couldn't be obtained in suburban shopping malls, medical appointments at the downtown offices of specialists and our annual trek to the Superdome for the Bayou Classic football game. When asked, my father declined to articulate precisely what made him grow so uneasy about the Big Easy, beyond his stock response: "New Orleans is changing. It's gotten so dirty and dangerous down there." It's true that he was a black Mississippi country boy raised to be suspicious and fearful of the big, bad city and had grown into a conservative, law-and-order school administrator, but clearly Daddy had started to sense that real trouble was festering down in the Crescent City.

The passing years have proved him right. Those cheery tourists need only have peered out of their French Quarter hotel-room windows to see the ugly and abject poverty on full display at the squalid Iberville housing projects (average annual income of its 833 households: $7,279), sitting just next door to the Vieux Carre off Canal Street. If the visitors had taken a few steps beyond Tulane University and the nearby Garden District mansions, they would have found themselves smack-dab in the middle of a ghetto choked with rudimentary shotgun houses, dilapidated housing projects and living conditions that seem only slightly better than those in Port-au-Prince, Bangladesh or Baghdad.

I reached my father on his cell phone the Monday night after the storm spared our house and left him and my mother unharmed but without power and conventional phone service. When I told him about the rising floodwaters throughout New Orleans, the rain coming in through the torn Superdome roof, and the lack of air conditioning and lighting for the evacuated multitudes inside, his reaction was predictable. "What a shame. I'm sorry to hear about all that suffering," he said, before adding, "But I am so glad to be living out here in the country, far from that mess of a city."