As the old year was reaching its final moments, New Orleans seemed ready for the new year.
The city had gone through tough times, but things were looking up. Gun violence, which increased to alarming levels during the pandemic, has declined dramatically. The Super Bowl, returning to New Orleans in February after a dozen years, promised an influx of visitors and excitement. And the city’s best season, the spirited week leading up to Mardi Gras, was on its way.
But less than four hours into the New Year, a heavily armed man drove a truck into a celebrating crowd, injuring or killing dozens of people on the city’s deadliest street.
At news conferences afterward, the mayor of New Orleans and other Louisiana leaders praised the city’s residents for their resilience amid the disaster. It’s a message they’ve heard before.
“The word ‘resilient’ has become synonymous with the city of New Orleans,” City Councilwoman Leslie Harris said in an interview, acknowledging that the quality was a source of both pride and frustration. “We are flexible because we have to be flexible.”
Many in New Orleans have expressed a certain comfort and satisfaction at the strength of community bonds and the collective ability to cope with disaster and hardship. Yet they will have no objection to getting by without a stockpile of patience and good humor.
“You have to understand it and figure it out,” said Rachel Zachary Dutcher, who works at an oyster bar on Bourbon Street, where she witnessed the scale of the carnage the morning after the attack. “But at what point,” he said expletives, “do we stop sucking what we shouldn’t?”
The attack in New Orleans could have happened anywhere where crowds gathered on New Year’s Eve. But it happened in a city that has suffered more than its share of heartache and chaos.
Twenty years ago this summer, four-fifths of New Orleans was underwater when the levee system designed to protect it collapsed as Hurricane Katrina struck. There was talk of abandoning some parts of the city completely. But people returned and rebuilt homes, started businesses and nonprofits, and worked not only to keep the city alive but to make it better than ever.
There was a sense of hope at the time, punctuated by the Saints, the beloved but long-cursed football franchise that won its first Super Bowl in 2010. Surveys conducted by the University of New Orleans in that decade showed a city that, despite its many challenges for all, was optimistic about the future.
But that optimism faded.
To some extent, this was luck: The disproportionate share of New Orleans’ disaster is partly a function of the location where it was built, a location that, in the age of climate change, has become particularly precarious. Since 2020, the average US county has experienced one to two federally declared disasters. Over the same time period, every part of the state of Louisiana have experienced at least a dozen,
In recent years, the streets of New Orleans have flooded when the city’s aging drainage system could not keep up with increasingly torrential rains. Hurricane Ida devastated the Louisiana coast in 2021, leaving the city without power for weeks and dumping thousands of tons of trash.
Covid ravaged New Orleans early in the pandemic, infect and kill The rate of evictions in those first few months was higher than in most American cities and affected the livelihoods of thousands of residents who depended mostly on the low-wage tourism economy. The number of murders and carjackings increased, leading to New Orleans once again, in 2022. a so-called murder capital,
Living in New Orleans was always going to require some sort of cost-benefit analysis, but it was reaching a point where the affection for New Orleans and its way of life was being overshadowed by the complications that came with it. Was. Home and auto insurance premiums soared to unaffordable levels. Residents said they were less surprised to find their car windows broken.
When the University of New Orleans conducted its biennial quality of life survey in 2022, the results were disappointing. “We saw figures we haven’t seen since the 1990s, when we had a homicide epidemic in our city,” said Edward Chervenak, director of the university’s Survey Research Center.
Residents who had the resources to leave were increasingly choosing to do so. Those who did not have the resources to move often felt trapped in a precarious situation. Residents said that for them, affordable housing was scarce, as were well-paying jobs, much less the possibility of long-term financial security.
Ms. Zachary Dutcher’s husband, Timothy, said he makes $17 an hour at his restaurant job — and he considers himself lucky. Some restaurant workers were making half of that. (The minimum wage in Louisiana is $7.25.) The only recourse: taking more hours. “You can’t stop moving forward,” Mr. Dutcher, 36, said.
And yet, Mr. Dutcher has recently arrived, visiting from Colorado in the summer. New Orleans is a culinary destination, he said, which also offers an atmosphere and possibility for building community that he couldn’t find elsewhere.
When the citywide survey was conducted again late last year, it showed a strange change. “People were dissatisfied about the past five years of the city, but seemed optimistic about the future,” Professor Chervenak said.
The violence that plagued New Orleans in the early years of the pandemic has declined substantially, with large drops in the number of murders, carjackings and armed robberies. Ms. Harris also noted that this is a local election year, which fosters an exchange of ideas about the direction of the city and represents a moment to start a new chapter for New Orleans.
“I think there was a fear that we might move,” said Ms. Harris, who represents a district adjacent to the French Quarter. “And here comes this attack.”
The attack not only shocked the city, but also left people worried about the lives lost, worried about what else might happen, and once again skeptical about whether authorities would do enough to stop it. Might be able to do something for. It also disrupted the hopeful moment the city had been waiting for for years, leaving it back in the familiar position of relying on its old patience.
“I’m sick and tired of being flexible,” said retired Orleans Parish Judge Calvin Johnson, 78. But, he said, “you look at our glorious history” – he said, 300 years of disease, hurricanes, violence and inequality – “and this is a place that can endure all of that and still become something.”
On Thursday, Eric Moore, 29, sat on a folding chair in a parking lot on Canal Street, waiting to give blood with dozens of other volunteers. He works at a café on Bourbon Street, although he was not there at the time of the attack and has no desire to return any time soon. “I don’t want to see Bourbon Street at all right now,” he said.
Mr. Moore said he understood that bad things happened on Bourbon Street – there has been firing there also often in recent years – but he stressed that the attack on Wednesday morning was a very different kind of bad.
Still, he said, the city will pull together and work together. again.
“We came back from Katrina,” Mr. Moore said. “We have some work to do, some healing to do. But we will all be fine.”
isabel taft Contributed reporting from New Orleans.