Friday marked the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in New Orleans. One of the country’s deadliest and costly disasters, Katrina submerged 80% of the city underwater and killed hundreds of people in the city and along the Gulf Coast.
There is no other American city quite like New Orleans. The food, culture, cemeteries are a boon for your senses and imagination.
I first visited as a child in the 1970s. My parents did mostly family-friendly touristy things, although I am mystified as to how our parents thought wandering the French Quarter was family friendly. The number of scantily clad women standing in doorways inviting tourists into the strip clubs suggested otherwise, but it was the ’70s and, as a young teenaged boy, who was I to argue?
We marveled at the colorful, architecturally intriguing homes in the Garden District, where my brother and I tasted our first artichoke and fell in love with the baked banana with hard-shell ice cream sprinkled with nuts dessert we had at a once-renowned, now-closed culinary landmark in a city known for its gastronomic innovations.
Especially memorable were the guided tours through the city’s stunning above-ground cemeteries that could double as a movie set. Memorable because my brother and I were uninterested in anything that captivated our parents culturally except when it came to hearing well-told stories about ghosts and pirates and maybe a zombie or two while wandering cemeteries heavily influenced by Gothic architecture.
Twenty years later, my wife and I visited for a food-themed visit, preferring restaurant hopping to bar crawling. We were not disappointed.
So, when Katrina hit New Orleans in late August 2005, I was glued to TV watching the slow-moving catastrophe unfold as an incompetent Federal Emergency Management Agency failed tens of thousands of residents in one of my favorite cities on earth as well as across the Gulf Coast.
It was a travesty.
But New Orleans, like New York City after the 9/11 attacks, has risen like a phoenix in the two decades since, aided by a massive infusion of federal money.
In 2016, I witnessed the transformation, visiting the city post Katrina for a journalism conference.
It was memorable.
A former colleague who grew up in New Orleans introduced me to a couple of eateries favored by locals not on the tourist circuit where the food tasted as if it were made with tender-loving care by a culinarily gifted grandma twice removed.
I traipsed through the Garden District, retracing my steps from my first visit as a kid, seeing the houses of the many celebrities who have lived there over the years; the most interesting was the writer Anne Rice’s former home, which still boasted a wrought-iron fence with little skulls interspersed into its design.
And as if that weren’t enough, I stayed in a boutique hotel with the most arresting decor of any hotel I’ve stayed in at a journalism conference. In the lobby hung massive photos of Miles Davis and Jim Morrison and other musicians while jazz played. My room was similarly adorned.
Because of all the memories I’ve created over the years, I think it is fair to say I feel connected to New Orleans.
So as the country marks the 20th anniversary of Katrina, I wish to express my thanks to the nation for the billions of dollars in aid the federal government funneled into rebuilding one of our greatest cities after its initial well-documented failure.
I can only hope the United States will be ready to render the same aid for other American cities and communities as super hurricanes and massive wildfires occur with greater frequency in the 21st century.
After all, as our founders understood in July 1776 when adopting the motto E Pluribus Unum that accompanied the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we are one out of many.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth.