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I grew up in and around New Orleans. My mother and father were both New Orleanians, as were their parents and their parents before them.
I knew the city well. I spent many a day traversing its streets looking for my first job and then working my first jobs as a teenager out of high school before leaving for college.
I never returned to live there, only to visit. I still have pleasant memories of Canal Street when the streetcars were still there, before the Superdome and the International Trade Mart. I remember well the French Quarter, the first part of New Orleans to be built when the first ships came up the Mississippi. I do not have fond memories of Bourbon Street and all it came to be known for.
It is the neighborhoods that I miss more than anything else. Everyone knew each other, so kids playing in the streets were looked after by all the grownups. It was a safe place, a happy place.
It's hard to imagine a city so alive, so teeming, now so lifeless, so devastated, all in a matter of a few hours.
A city below sea level
New Orleans for the most part is below sea level, reclaimed from swampland. This is the most amazing thing about the place. Levees built around Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, the system of canals through the city, and its pumping stations kept the water out.
My father would tell me that the pumping system in New Orleans was the eighth engineering wonder of the world (undoubtedly, the Dutch would contest that claim). I remember passing the huge Broad Street pumps, built at the turn of the last century, still on the job, still operating, until Katrina. They weren't designed for Katrina.
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