In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina two decades ago, many wondered whether the city’s unique culture – particularly its food and music – would survive.
NEW ORLEANS – Flying into Louis Armstrong International Airport recently, I was quickly reminded just how radically this city has changed in the two decades since Hurricane Katrina.
Stepping off the plane, a gleaming $1.3 billion terminal beckoned with creole offerings from Leah’s Kitchen and Café Du Monde. There’s a stunning two-story cypress swamp mural. The space shimmers with the curves and technology of a world-class facility – a far cry from the fusty older terminal.
Then I went to retrieve my rental car.
After I waited 15 minutes in a pelting rain, the shuttle bus arrived. It took 25 minutes circumnavigating the airport grounds before delivering me and other passengers to the car rental facility.
Charm amid dysfunction. Though some things in New Orleans may be different, others remain stubbornly the same.
Musicians and unity heal New Orleans twenty years after Katrina
New Orleans musician reflects on 20 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, civil rights, and rebuilding through music and community.
I lived in New Orleans from 2007 to 2013, reporting at the time on the region’s rebuilding from the destruction wrought by Katrina and the failures of the federal levees. It remains one of the most special places my wife and I have ever lived – and one of the most significant stories I’ve ever covered.
Katrina roared ashore on the morning of Aug 29, 2005, as a Category 3 hurricane. It killed more than 1,300 people, many of them in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, and caused about $200 billion in damage, adjusted for inflation. At the time, it was the costliest hurricane ever to hit the USA and remains the third-highest death toll from a hurricane in recorded U.S. history, according to federal estimates.
One of the pressing questions early in the recovery was whether the city would retain its traditions and charm while rebuilding. Would New Orleans plaster over its unique culture – the very thing visitors travel from around the world to experience – in its rush to spend billions of dollars in federal recovery money?
As I returned to the city to report on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, that was one of the key questions I hoped to answer, specifically related to the city’s vaunted cuisine and music.
‘Always room for another great restaurant’
To get a sense of how the city’s food scene had evolved, I met with Dickie Brennan, a third-generation restaurateur whose stable of eateries include some of New Orleans’ most iconic restaurants, including Bourbon House, The Commissary and Pascale’s Manale.
On a sultry late afternoon, we sat on rocking chairs on the porch of his Riverbend home watching cargo ships slowly ply down the Mississippi River. Brennan recounted his time during Katrina: how he fled to Baton Rouge after the storm but returned to the city five weeks later to reopen Bourbon House in the French Quarter.
It was one of the first eateries to open in the city after Katrina. While New Orleans sat in muddied ruins, Brennan and his crew served redfish on the half shell and wild catfish to journalists and first responders.
“We were in it,” Brennan said. “Our instinct was, ‘Let’s just get in there and do it.’”
The two decades since have presented a plethora of challenges for the city’s restaurant scene, from sagging visitor numbers to lack of infrastructure such as schools and hospitals to the coronavirus pandemic that further decimated restaurants’ bottom lines. Through it all, though, the city’s restaurant scene has somehow thrived: The number of restaurants in New Orleans jumped from 800 before Katrina to more than 1,200 by 2018, according to some estimates.
One of the challenges to the city’s culinary character has been the gentrification of neighborhoods. Entrepreneurs from all over the United States have descended on New Orleans after Katrina, eager to help revitalize the city. But the influx threatened to distill its unique creole cuisine, which leans more toward pecan-sauced gulf fish than broiled salmon.
Brennan said he’s unfazed by the newcomers.
He pointed to Magazine Street, a Garden District retail corridor that has welcomed quality restaurants after Katrina – Dakar NOLA, Shaya – while rebuffing national chains. Independent restaurants bringing new ideas and flavors is good, Brennan said, for a city built on constantly evolving cultures and palates.
“If I see Red Lobster on Magazine Street, I’ll get pissed off,” he said. “We’re not competing with each other. We’re competing with the rest of the world. This is a great restaurant town. There’s always room for another great restaurant.”
In many ways, this is New Orleans’ superpower: absorbing newcomers and their cultures and churning out unique sounds or flavors.
The thump of bamboulas by enslaved people in the city’s Congo Square in the 19th century leaked into surrounding neighborhoods and may have influenced early jazz. Spanish soldiers occupying colonial New Orleans used local ingredients for their beloved paella and birthed jambalaya (though some culinary scholars place the dish’s origin in West Africa). And refugees from the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) infused the city with distinctly Caribbean flair and traditions, including voodoo.
But Katrina put the city’s traditions to the ultimate test, scattering its culture-bearers – chefs, artists, Mardi Gras Indians and musicians – all over the country.
Without musicians, New Orleans won’t survive
Ben Jaffe watched with growing alarm in Katrina’s aftermath as musicians he knew fled the flooded city without the resources to rebuild or even return.
Born and raised in New Orleans, Jaffe manages Preservation Hall, the famed French Quarter venue dedicated to preserving original New Orleans jazz and co-founded by his parents, Allan and Sandra Jaffe.
Raised in a 19th-century carriage house next door, Jaffee, 54, grew up around musicians and knew it would be difficult for many of them to return after Katrina.
I met with Jaffe one day over the summer in a back room of the legendary venue. Behind him, atop a grand piano, stood a framed photo of drummer Shannon Powell, and Jaffe wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a photo of 93-year-old saxophonist Charlie Gabriel.
Jaffe rode out Katrina in his apartment just outside the French Quarter, then got in his car and drove to Baton Rouge and then Lafayette, staying on friends’ couches and checking in on displaced musicians. He eventually made his way to New York City, where he began thinking of how to get musicians back to New Orleans.
Jaffe realized that without its musicians – artists like Kermit Ruffins, Irma Thomas, Dr. John, Allen Toussaint – New Orleans wouldn’t survive.
“All these people become symbols of the rebuilding process,” he said. “I recognized very early on: Get the musicians back, and then everybody will come back with them.”
Exclusive book: How Katrina changed all of us
Jaffe created the New Orleans Musicians Hurricane Relief Fund, which, through benefit concerts, raised money to help local artists return and rebuild. Slowly, musicians began trickling back to the city.
Preservation Hall reopened and, before long, tourists were streaming back. Live music again filled music halls from the River Bend to the Bywater.
But not a day goes by without Jaffe thinking of the floods that swallowed his city.
“A lot of people didn’t make it through the storm,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “A lot of people didn’t make it back to the city, you know. It’s those people that get me out of bed every day. It’s the memory of those people that I do what I do every day.
“There’s like this scar, this thing that never quite heals. It’s like a reminder of all of that pain.”
‘It’s a New Orleans thing’
Jaffe walked me next door to a three-story, 19th-century home, where construction crews carefully pried apart drywall and hammered beams. Through the success of Preservation Hall and its namesake band (where Jaffe plays sousaphone, the tuba-like instrument worn over the torso), Jaffe is developing the 10,000-square-foot structure into a massive education and community center where young musicians can learn and perform the traditional New Orleans sound.
He credits Katrina for the idea.
“I would have never thought of this if not for Katrina,” Jaffe said. “I wouldn’t have thought this expansively.”
Later that night, I returned to Preservation Hall to watch the band belt out standards like “St. Louis Blues,” “Li’l Liza Jane” and “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” which included a stirring piano solo from 73-year-old Rickie Monie. A crowd of tourists watched in awe.
After the show, I took a drive around the darkened city, through the Bywater and Marigny neighborhoods, past hipster brunch spots and art galleries that sprouted after Katrina, across Esplanade Avenue, with its columns of fern-draped live oaks, and back into the French Quarter.
As I did, “It’s a New Orleans Thing” by Allen Toussaint came over WWOZ, the community-supported radio station that helps keep the city’s music culture alive.
“Anywhere I am there’s a bit of Tipitina …
Anyone from New Orleans knows exactly what I mean.”
I drove slowly along Royal Street, with its ornate wrought-iron Spanish-style balconies, and a man, maybe in his 20s and wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and black tie, pedaled past me on his bike, a gleaming trombone balanced on the handlebars.
“It’s a New Orleans thing …
It doesn’t leave you just because you leave town …”
Everything’s different. And everything’s still the same.
Jervis is a national correspondent for USA TODAY based in Austin, Texas. He lived in New Orleans from 2007 to 2013, where he covered the region’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina. He’s the author of “The Devil Behind the Badge: The Horrifying Twelve Days of the Border Patrol Serial Killer.”