Misery on Every Corner

NEW ORLEANS —  They might have been mourners in a hearse, so somber were the passengers in the small bus on Mirabeau Avenue.

Theresa Sandifer shook her head sadly as the bus crawled along. House after ruined house was spray-painted with an “X” and numbers denoting how many people had been found there, dead or alive, after Hurricane Katrina. Sue Stein stifled a gasp at floodwater marks that grazed the roofs of a block of one-story homes. William Thompson glued his gaze to a trim beige house impaled by an oak tree.

No one spoke until the bus rounded a corner onto St. Bernard Avenue, in the Gentilly area. The roof of a wood-frame house from the 1960s sat askew, as if it had been picked up and tossed down at all the wrong angles. The chimney was missing; the doors and windows were blown out. A plywood sign carried a message from a family who had left for good.

“Goodbye, N’awlins, We’ll Miss You,” read Brad Dupuy, the guide on this city’s newest bus excursion.

The “devastation tour,” as the three-hour outing is popularly known, brings visitors to some of this city’s most heavily damaged areas, though it skips the almost obliterated Lower 9th Ward. Even in a city that loves to test the limits on tastefulness -- a city, after all, that made an industry out of cemetery tours -- the idea caused consternation when it was proposed in late December.

A city councilwoman accused the Gray Line franchise of trying to profit from the miseries wrought by Katrina. Some worried that gawkers snapping photos of shattered homes would turn New Orleans into a theme park of destruction. Others chafed at the tour’s brash, formal title: “Hurricane Katrina: America’s Worst Catastrophe!”

But many New Orleanians welcomed the prospect of the public’s seeing first-hand what happened when the city was battered by a Category 4 hurricane, then flooded when man-made levees gave way last August. Survivors of the storm argued that newspaper pictures and television footage could not capture the magnitude of a disaster spread through 141 of the city’s 181 square miles. The city’s newspaper, the Times-Picayune, editorialized about the value of expeditions designed to be educational, not morbid or sensational.

“It will keep this storm-ravaged region on the national radar,” the paper wrote.

The tour attracts about 300 people per week and has turned out to be a draw for local residents as well. One recent Saturday morning, more than half the 25 passengers on the bus leaving the French Quarter came from the Gulf Coast and the New Orleans region.

Stein, 55, said she was busy for weeks cleaning up storm damage in her home in nearby Kenner. But now she wanted a look at the city where she grew up, so she could keep tabs on sections of New Orleans that have received little attention. Two friends from Kenner joined her on the tour.

“When I first heard about it, I thought it was exploitive,” she said. “Then I got to thinking, so much TV coverage had been focused on just one area, the 9th Ward. People need to know that this touched all of us, everywhere. They need to know how bad it is, all over this city, not just in any one part.”

As the tour got underway, Dupuy, 31, offered a dedication to the “1,000 men, women and children who lost their lives on account of Katrina.” He asked everyone to turn off their cellphones, and said: “We are not here simply to point and gawk at people who lost their property.” And, he said: “We will not be seeing dead bodies on this tour.”

On Canal Street, Dupuy gave a quick lesson in how to spot a floodwater line -- “yellowish brown horizontal bands” on the buildings. He noted the many boarded-up buildings and businesses closed five months after the storm.

“Is this where they had all the looting?” asked Thompson, 59, of Mobile, Ala. In a sad voice, Dupuy said yes.

Three days before Katrina hit, he said, “not too many people were concerned” about the hurricane. Many in his native city had been through so many storms that they were casual about it, the way Californians yawn about earthquakes, Dupuy said. He and his roommate rode out Katrina in their apartment on Esplanade, not far from downtown, where the flooding was less severe than in many other parts of the city.

His narrative balanced the glories of New Orleans’ past against the misery of its present. Consulting a spiral notebook filled with handwritten notes, Dupuy told passengers that the city has three times as many canals as Venice, Italy, and its leading industry before Katrina was not tourism, but shipping.

The pristine white roof on the Superdome is a patch job, Dupuy said as the bus circled the arena where more than 25,000 people took shelter in chaos for nearly a week. St. Joseph’s, the largest Catholic church in the South, lost many stained-glass windows. The chic River Walk shopping center, he said, fell prey to looters.

“Oh my,” said Sandifer, a dental assistant in Baton Rouge. One of the dentists she works with, who also had an office on Canal Street, had been telling her about the looting, and about how bad things looked. Seeing it with her own eyes was worse than she had expected.

The dentist lost many patients to Katrina, Sandifer said: “He ended up using his dental records to identify 35 bodies.”

Past the Orleans Parish prison, where about 6,500 inmates were evacuated during the flooding, the bus crossed through the Mid-City and cemetery districts. Dupuy issued a warning as the bus entered the once-prosperous Lakeview area: “Brace yourselves, folks, as we are about to enter one of the hardest-hit areas.”

Large, luxurious homes had become brick-and-stucco skeletons. The formerly vibrant neighborhood was a ghost town: no cars, no children, no pets -- no sign of life, anywhere.

“That is what is so hard to bear,” said Mary E. Carter, 71, who lives near Hartford, Conn. “You look out, and you don’t see anyone in these neighborhoods. And it’s like that for miles.”

The neighborhood of million-dollar houses overlooking Lake Pontchartrain had been home to Greg Hoffman, vice president of Gray Line New Orleans. Hoffman lost everything. He was also in danger of losing his business. The staff had shrunk from 65 in late August to six in late December. Travelers were avoiding New Orleans.

When his employees first broached the disaster tour, Hoffman hesitated. Gray Line sales director Jim Fewell said the idea came to him after he rode his motorcycle around the city a month after the storm. The experience so upset him that he did not sleep for a week. Then he realized that what he had seen could help others understand what had happened in New Orleans.

Fewell convinced Hoffman that a tour could be done with dignity. Buses would not stop, and passengers would not be allowed to explore the ruins. He argued that exploitation was about cheap tourist merchandise -- T-shirts that laud the looters by boasting, “I Survived Katrina, and All I Got Was This T-shirt ... and a Plasma TV” -- not about bringing people to see the ruined city.

He said visitors would want to see the damage, just as travelers want to see the sites of the bombed-out Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or the World Trade Center in New York.

“Yes, certainly, part of it was we wanted to get back to work,” Fewell said. “But we also needed to tell the story. This is a defining moment in the history of New Orleans.”

Even before City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis introduced a ban on tours of the Lower 9th Ward -- arguing that the area should not be turned into a tourist attraction -- Gray Line had decided to skip that area. Joe Gendusa, another guide who helped design the tour, said the company wanted to show how extensive the damage was throughout New Orleans.

“Lakeview, Gentilly, Mid-City -- they got ruined too,” Gendusa said. “The 9th Ward, believe me, it is awful, but it is only part of the city.”

In Lakeview, Dupuy gestured to 15-foot flood marks. After the 17th Street Levee breached, houses in the district stayed inundated for at least four days. Many remain standing, but the interiors were destroyed and the homes will have to be razed.

Along with 50-foot mounds of dead trees and assorted debris, a powerboat sat in a median strip on West End Boulevard. On a side street off London Avenue, floodwaters had picked up a house and left it in the middle of the road. A man hurling wallboard and old carpet out a window of his one-story wood home paused to wave as the bus went by. The passengers waved back. At 1505 London St., Dupuy drew gasps as he pointed to a marker showing that two of the home’s five residents had been found dead after the London Avenue levee had breached.

Coconut Beach alongside Lake Pontchartrain was bereft of trees, buildings or people.

“I want you to imagine people playing sandlot baseball here,” Dupuy said, summoning up a childhood memory. “I remember it very well.”

The venerable Southern Yacht Club was in splinters. A tumbled-down lighthouse lay nearby. Katrina’s fierce wind and waters had smashed a row of two-story boathouses from front to back. Before the storm, wealthy New Orleanians liked to entertain at these coveted properties. Now they were piles of metal and glass, with only the side walls standing, and furniture scattered around. One boathouse owner with a sense of irony had posted a sign: “For Sale, Needs Some Work.”

A row of wooden pilings was all that remained of a cluster of popular restaurants. Joe’s Crab Shack, once a bustling three-story establishment, was tilted sideways.

“That bare area back there, that was where Bruning’s Seafood was, one of the places we liked best,” Stein said. “I don’t know if those places will ever come back.”

Sandifer, who celebrated her 40th birthday on Aug. 29, the day the storm hit, said her husband and teenagers refused to accompany her because they did not want to hear such sad stories or see all the misery.

But she came because “this is history. This is something I really need to know.”

As is the practice on every tour, Dupuy explained that $3 of the $35 ticket goes to one of several Katrina-related charities. He passed out a list so passengers could choose from projects benefiting programs for children, healthcare, animals, housing -- or, if they chose, specify another charity.

Dupuy also asked passengers to sign a petition to be sent to President Bush and other federal officials, urging that New Orleans be rebuilt. Everyone signed.

“We have to rebuild,” said Trevor Colestock, 30, a teacher who came from Hollywood, Fla. “We rebuilt Western Europe after World War II, and we can’t rebuild New Orleans, one of the great cities in America? What kind of a country is this?”

Getting off the bus, Susan Breaux of Baton Rouge said she was sorry her 17-year-old son had stayed behind.

The teen had said he thought it would be too depressing, seeing his mother’s hometown in such bad shape.

“But this is what is here, right now,” Breaux said. “It is important to see this. You can’t forget it. You can’t forget what you have seen today if you grew up here and you knew how beautiful and alive this city was.”

Others seemed to share that view. Back at the starting point, a line of people waited for cancellations for the next devastation tour, one hour away.