The No Longer Big Easy

Almost two years ago I was sent on assignment to New Orleans, one month after hurricane Katrina. It was my first trip there and I could not help but thinking what a grand place it must have been and would be again. I thought again would be sooner than two years and honestly it may still be sometime in the future. The French Quarter was shockingly unscathed. It was the first few days that people were allowed back to their homes and a few bars and strip clubs were already open. Two years later the same is true. If you go straight from the airport to your hotel in the French Quarter, you would think that the recovery is complete. Disappointingly, the true pace of the recovery can only be seen when you leave the tourist centers. It is subtle at first, a pile of debris in front of a house, then a FEMA trailer on the lawn, followed by a whole parking lot of trailers and then once you hit the Lower Ninth Ward it’s just empty lots with a sporadic house; total destruction. Unfortunately, that is where I was sent to photograph Gwen Adams, her house had survived the flooding, was salvageable and she had just applied for a building permit, when the second phase of the disaster hit. Without notifying the Adams the city deemed the house uninhabitable and with all but a few exceptions raised the whole neighborhood without notifying anyone. Gwen found out that her house was gone from a neighbor who had come by to cut the grass to keep from being fined by the city. So now Gwen is paying a mortgage, taxes and cutting the grass at a home that is gone.