“The Big Easy”: as with so much about New Orleans, there are conflicting stories about who gave the city its seductive descriptor but the nod usually goes to Betty Guillaud, the gossip columnist for the Times-Picayune in its print heyday. No easy thing, running the gossip page in a city as driven by society and glad-timing as New Orleans was in the 1970s and 1980s and when Guillaud died in 2013, the Times-Picayune had this to say about her modus operandi: “She fired up one of her pencil-thin More cigarettes, slipped off an earring, picked up the telephone, and waited for someone to answer, which was her cue to announce, ‘Hello, dahling, this is Betty Guillaud,’ in basso-profundo tones reminiscent of Lauren Bacall, and start asking questions in a style that masked bluntness with southern charm.”
If the depiction seems slightly over the top, then it’s in keeping with the exuberance of the city itself. New Orleans is a small, intoxicating city with a colossal reputation and its constant flow of tourists can easily be overwhelmed by the too-muchness of it all: too much southern and creole fare, too much jazz, too much river, too much booze, too many baroque cemeteries, too many ghosts, so much fun and history and, it sometimes seems, too many crises for any one city to withstand. Yet it does.
It’s used to outsiders arriving and instantly falling in love with it. “In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions,” Bob Dylan wrote in Chronicles, Volume 1. “There’s only one day at a time here, then it’s tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you’re in a wax museum below crimson clouds.”
It seems unlikely that the endless hordes roaming Bourbon Street year round, all day and all night, have that sensation – or maybe that’s precisely how they feel. But regardless, the good times determinedly roll in what has been a touchstone year for New Orleans.
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2025 revolved around the sombre August commemorations of the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The year began with the senseless, shocking truck-drive attack on a crowd in the French Quarter on New Year’s Day.
Now, it ends with confirmation of news that New Orleanians had been anticipating for months: Ice agents will move into the city in a concerted sweep of immigration enforcement. And there are other obstacles. Just this week, the city’s new mayor, Helena Moreno, announced plans for brutal cuts to the city budget next year in a bid to eat into the $87 million debt she inherited.
The tension between the New Orleans and the state of Louisiana is an old story. Jeff Landry, the current governor of Louisiana, in September pushed state legislators to reject the city’s request for a $125 million bond bailout to ensure payroll commitments through the end of the year. The request was passed, but Landry’s obstinacy was emblematic of an old state-city divide.
“Okay. Most people probably won’t say this. But the other surrounding areas – parishes and that kind of stuff – they frown on New Orleans,” Tyrone, a city taxi driver, told me one Saturday a few weeks ago as we drove across to the Lower Ninth Ward.
“Because we get all the attention. It’s like a jealousy. People from Louisiana don’t understand the greatness of the city. We got a governor, and if it’s up to him he’d shut New Orleans down. We tell them: if it wasn’t for us nobody would even know ya all. Cos New Orleans ‘was’ before the state ‘was’. If ya know anything about it, when America and France did the Louisiana Purchase ... well, I don’t know why they named it that. It should be the New Orleans Purchase. Because they got 13 states out of that one deal and Louisiana didn’t come until after it.
“But I love this place. I think the city has grown a lot and is getting better. The main thing about this city to me is the people. If you were born and raised here, you don’t meet a stranger. We are very resilient. People don’t never say: I always wanted to come to Louisiana. They want to come to New Orleans.”
Tyrone is one of countless residents who was forced to temporarily leave when Katrina struck. The eye of the storm made landfall 80km away from the city but the storm surges that pushed ahead caused cataclysmic breeches of the Mississippi levee system.
Katrina, on August 29th, 2005, was a disaster of such magnitude that in many ways, the recovery made by the city in the two decades since is something of a marvel. But it is ongoing. The city’s population peaked in 1960 at 627,000. By 2004, it was holding steady at about 460,000 but a year after the flooding, it had plummeted to 200,000. Many were exiled and homeless and later returned. But some did not or could not. Now, the population is about 384,000.
Of New Orleans’ 17 wards, the Lower Ninth, in the historically black community on the other side of the Industrial Canal, was eviscerated. Laura Paul was among the volunteers who arrived in the city in the months after the disaster and has never left. She runs a non-for-profit (lowernine.org) that is dedicated to helping “legacy” residents – those who had lived in the Lower Ninth before Katrina – to rebuild and improve their homes.
On the day we meet, she is taking a group of college students who had driven, by minibus, from Nebraska to volunteer for a week. They’d earned their trip, spending much of the week weeding gardens and digging, and learning now about the various bureaucratic and administrative foibles visited on the neighbourhood.
All of the Lower Ninth was rendered uninhabitable by the flooding: there was a debate, in the aftermath, as to whether the neighbourhood was even “worth” rebuilding although it was built on higher ground than many wealthier neighbourhoods, about which the same question was never raised.
On a warm afternoon, Paul gives us a funny, sardonic and highly informative tour, chatting brightly as the minibus crawls through the narrow residential streets of the Lower Ninth and adjoining Holy Cross.
The houses are small and beautifully kept but there is no commercial thoroughfare – no run of shops or cafes. Just houses. It took about a month for the waters to recede, after which every house had to be gutted to the studs and then rebuilt according to the strict specifications of the Historic Districts Landmarks Commission.
It was slow and painstaking and often grim: human remains were found in devastated Lower Ninth houses some two years after the flooding. She shows us a typical “shotgun house”, so called because of the narrow front and long back, a Caribbean architectural style with two purposes. The narrow front meant lower property tax.
“The doors are linear. You get a cross breeze and sit in the front porch in the evening. You could fire a gun and the bullet would travel through the front door and out the back.”
Laura Paul’s knowledge of individual homes is extraordinary. If she speaks of them as living things, it’s understandable. They have been resurrected from what was, just 15 years ago, a deeply compromised neighbourhood. Now parts of Holy Cross have become swept up in the gentrification scourge.
“Maybe it’s a lot nicer if you like bespoke cupcakes,” Paul tells us.
“But it happened so quickly that it is almost not right to call it gentrification. What I need you guys to take away from this block is this: there is one pre-Katrina resident living on this street. Miss Mary, here in the white house on the corner, just moved out and rented out her house. Her pre-storm property value was $56,000. That peach house on the corner sold a few years ago for $350,000. So, your property value goes up.
“But now you are paying a lot more tax. But also, after Katrina there was a federally-funded and state-administered programme designed to help to get people back in. The Lower Ninth had one of the highest levels of black ownership in the nation, before Katrina. But they based it on pre-storm property value. And it was found to be discriminatory – but not until 2011.”
By which time many of the pre-Katrina residents had been forced out.
We drive past a street where houses had been rebuilt, to national applause, by the actor Brad Pitt’s Make It Right foundation. The intention was wonderful: eco-houses, solar panels and an international design competition and a design contribution by luminary Frank Gehry.
The reality was a disaster: ill-suited materials; flat roofs in a city prone to deluges of rainfall; glass-infused lumber that had not been tried and tested. The project raised and spent $100 million. Several homes had to be demolished: others are visibly falling apart and there is an ongoing lawsuit against the foundation. The lowernine organisation, meantime, has persevered through stealth and local knowledge. Paul stops the bus to show us one of the homes that has been reclaimed after the storm.
“Everything on that house is new except for windows, doors and corbels and the shingles under the roof line. But historically appropriate. The gutters are copper half-pipe gutters and are about $70 a linear foot – incredibly expensive compared to modern gutters. It’s a good-looking house but it was a real labour of love. It’s a legacy home owner.”
Although the Ninth seems apart from and separate to New Orleans, it falls under the city boundaries. Tourists taking the ornate steamboats that roll up and down the river – jazz bands and brunches and cocktails and history through loudspeaker – pass by the point at the levee where we stand to view the famous houses built by Paul Doullut, a river boat captain, to resemble steamboats in the early 1900s.
Both survived the flood. But the Lower Ninth feels at a remove; one of the complications of city planning is a charter school system that requires schoolchildren in the Ninth to take 6am bus trips for long trips across the city to their designated schools.
Like many New Orleanian residents, Paul considers the French Quarter to be for the tourists. Over the next few days, I ask locals about how visitors even find the “real” New Orleans.
“New Orleans is a city of neighbourhoods and in order to experience it that’s exactly how you do it,” says Jason Berry, another long-term resident who believes you have to go with the rhythm and pace of the place if you want to settle.
“People move in here and quickly learn this city doesn’t like change. So, they come in with big plans and they are usually gone within a couple of years.”
Berry echoes Tyrone in that he believes the roots of the historical resentment of the state legislators towards the city are extraordinarily deep. He talks me through the prevailing class system – the old money families, the burgeoning attorney community and “the rest of us are tourism serfs”.
“The state hates us. The majority of the people running the state, including those holding the purse strings, absolutely hate us. This city generates a tremendous amount of revenue for Louisiana and they suck it out. That has gotten worse since Katrina, I think. But I’m encouraged now because Helena Morena understands how to deal with state.”
I ask him what the source of the resentment is.
“Racism. Yeah. You can parse it a million different ways but at the end of the day, it comes down to that. This is the most complex racial city you could possibly imagine. For instance, I’m friends with one of the wealthiest trial attorneys in the city. He bought the Whitney Plantation and created a slavery museum. He didn’t buy it to glorify it: he did the opposite. He wanted to show what it was like. And that infuriated the good ole’ boy network.”
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A number of antebellum plantations on the outskirts of New Orleans have been repurposed as tourist or historic sites. Some have become popular wedding venues. Others, like the Whitney and Destrehan mansions, are dedicated to the authentic retelling of the dismal history of plantation life. Destrehan was used in the filming of Interview with the Vampire and 12 Years a Slave. Visitors there will frequently encounter Raymond Poret, a historian who grew up in the “black Catholic Creole environment of the city”.
“And I didn’t realise the dimensions of it until I travelled outside of New Orleans. People of colour beyond New Orleans are not Catholic. Here, we all are,” he explains.
“It’s that mix of all these Caribbean and Mediterranean people. But you have to understand the Irish element of New Orleans too. The civil rights movement in the United States had dynamic young black protestant ministers.
“We had a few here of those here but we also had a few in-your-face Irish Catholic priests. I was an altar boy and I’d a seventh grade teacher, a nun. And the priests were fascinated by her, because her family was in the Easter Rebellion. I don’t know if they were in the post office. But the Catholic priests here were very involved in the civil rights and they were all either Irish or Polish. And my theory is that it’s because they were people from vocations who came from families whose ancestry involved being compromised by bigger countries or governments.
“So, yeah, I grew up here around musicians. I’ll bet you I’m the only person around here who, when he was in his third grade, went down stairs in the big house where his uncle Percy lived and there’s Little Richard walking around in a moo-moo.”
That’s how many conversations with strangers in New Orleans go: meandering, time-bending, colour-saturated.
Later that Saturday, the New Orleans staging of the national “No Kings” protest took place at Lafitte Greenway. Brian Alexander is another resident drawn to the city to volunteer after Katrina.
“When I saw the more communal way of living, I didn’t miss Miami,” he says of his decision to stay. A teacher by profession, Alexander was recently laid off when enrolment was down – another peril of the charter system. For now, he works in the tourism industry.
“This is a service industry city. Most people I know survive on tips – which is the generosity of strangers. And so, when I talk to my friends, we are all bracing ourselves for the arrival of the National Guard. They’re saying November.”
As it turns out, more than 250 federal agents will begin “Operation Swamp Sweep” in the coming days of December. It aims to remove some 5,000 undocumented people from the city and the southeastern surrounds of Louisiana.
Mayor Moreno has launched a “Know Your Rights” guidance programme for residents amid general fear. Sue Weishar, a research fellow at the Jesuit Social Institute, this week predicted that the operation will be used to “terrorise the same community members who were the workforce that saved New Orleans after Katrina”.
Keith Conley, a police department chief in the suburb of Kenner, has described the arrival of the agents as “a godsend” for the area. The operation comes just as New Orleans has had a 50-year low of homicides (124) in 2024, and a 20 per cent decrease in overall violent crime in the first half of this year.
“I’ve never felt unsafe in this neighbourhood,” Laura Paul says of the Lower Ninth Ward. “French Quarter might be a different story. The other side of the Industrial Canal might be a different story. It’s an American city. There’s a lot of guns, there is poverty – there will be crime. Property crime is low here. But the life expectancy in this zip code is 25.5 years less than uptown.
“More than a quarter century lower here than across town, just five miles away. And that’s got to do with crime but also with healthcare, with systemic racial and environmental reasons, sexual discrimination. It’s tied up in everything.”
The idea of 5,000 people suddenly lifted out of the ecosystem is terrifying to many in the old and new immigrant community in New Orleans. But it’s just the latest obstacle placed in the path of a city that will get through without compromising its gothic squiffy strangeness and the magical sense of moving through a living dream.
“I think the culture of the city is absolutely preserved, and still here,” says Jason Berry. “I don’t ever see that disappearing. Just go to Vaughans on a Tuesday night and you see it,” referencing the music haunt on Dauphine Street that has held live sessions weekly since the 1950s.
“Even after Katrina, the culture of New Orleans was so strong that it rebounded. And that’s because the appeal of this city is eternal.”
