Joie mixes with blues on eve of Mardi Gras

Six months after Katrina, New Orleans is a work in progress. But it's opening its doors and hearts to tourists.

By Chris Erskine, Times Staff Writer
12:00 AM PST, February 26, 2006

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YOU can rattle around the French Quarter in a horse-drawn buggy or make a fool of yourself on Bourbon Street. You can treat yourself to the crabmeat maison at Galatoire's, the city's tabernacle of opulent dining, or people-watch at Café du Monde.

You can get your fortune read, your pocket picked, your cocktail to go and pretty much all the other pleasures, delicacies and moral failings this city had to offer before the levees began to bleed.

Just in time for Tuesday's Mardi Gras, New Orleans is back in the tourist business, at a level beyond what you might expect six months after such an epic disaster.

When I visited here a week ago for a nuts-and-bolts update on tourism, I also found something richer and more poignant simmering beneath the surface. Sentimental, creative, lurid, sublime, resilient and never shy, New Orleans is ready to talk about all it's been through since Hurricane Katrina. Nearly everybody has a story to share in a place where conversation has always been the smoothest of rums.

It's part therapy, part living history and, like the city itself, ceaselessly entertaining. Deeply personal, these vignettes of heartbreak, loss and resolve add layers of meaning and discovery to any visit.

At the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, public information officer Mary Beth Haskins talks about losing her home, all the while leading a guest through an exhibit of David Rae Morris storm images. "I'm seeing more and more people coming out here," she says with measured hope. "I think the locals are saying we have to enjoy this city now because we really don't know what the future will bring."

Katrina's impact on the city and its creative community has been profound, and pieces are showing up at the Ogden and other museums around town, providing another way for visitors to try to understand all that the storm has wrought.

"Katrina has turned my work dark and bird-like — a style I have not used in some time," says Jeffrey Cook, whose art is on display at the Contemporary Arts Center.

But the mood here is not all dark and bird-like. The upcoming mayor's race has residents buzzing, and crime is down, from dozens of armed robberies a week before the storm to two a week now, for example.

Meanwhile, the bourbon is flowing, the clubs are jumping, and the streetcars bump and grind along their ancient tracks.

All told, the city offers an incomparable blend of hope, despair, rebirth and sheer joie de vivre . Here, using Mardi Gras as a milestone, is how New Orleans' primary tourist draws are faring and what to expect as you wander its courtyards or toast its fortitude.

Dining out

ABOUT a third of the city's restaurants have reopened, and most report doing well, despite the disappearance of the tourist base. Owners and managers credit increasing numbers of local patrons, who have helped make up some of the losses from tourism and business travel.

Galatoire's, a New Orleans standout since 1905, served 12,000 meals in January, just as many as it did that month the year before, says general manager Melvin Rodrigue.

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