Largely Alone, Pioneers Reclaim New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS, July 1 - The sound of hammers and saws. New green grass. A few freshly painted facades. Birdsong piping from a young tree.

Skip to next paragraph Patchwork City Block by Block

This is the first in a series of articles on the fragmentary recovery of New Orleans and its people, nearly two years after the flooding unleashed by Hurricane Katrina.

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A Block Is Home to Only a Few The 1800 block of Brutus Street, in the Gentilly section of New Orleans, is, like many blocks, a microcosm of the fragmentary efforts to repopulate the city’s working-class neighborhoods. 4740 Annette Street, at the corner of Brutus Street. Before Hurricane Katrina the home was occupied by an elderly brother and sister; the brother has died, the sister left and sold the house. The new owner put on a roof and gutted the interior, and is thought to be waiting for federal money. The house is empty.

This is the Gentilly neighborhood today, once a backbone of New Orleans and all but given up for dead less than a year ago after flooding from Hurricane Katrina turned it brown and gray and silent in 2005.

Gentilly, home to about 47,000 people before the storm and a thin fraction of that now, is not dead. Haltingly, in disconnected pockets, this eight-square-mile quadrant north of the historic districts that line the Mississippi River is limping back to life, thanks to the struggles of its most determined former residents.

But they have had to do so largely on their own, because help from government at any level has been minimal, in their accounts. In recent weeks, some residents have reported getting checks from the state's Road Home rebuilding program, but four-fifths of applicants have not.

Each block still contains only a handful of occupied houses. But a beachhead has been established here, a residential area critical to this city's survival and one that before the storm was dominated by black homeowners, professionals and multigenerational citizens of New Orleans.

A similar story is unfolding in two other once-flooded family-centered neighborhoods, neither of them flashy but both equally important to this city's future: Broadmoor, in central New Orleans, and Lakeview, in the northwestern corner, show signs of life here and there along the wounded streets. Neighbors, encouraged by the earliest post-Katrina pioneers, are moving back in.

All over the city, a giant slow-motion reconstruction project is taking place. It is unplanned, fragmentary and for the isolated individuals carrying it out, often overwhelming. Those with the fortitude to persevere - and only the hardiest even try - must battle the hopelessness brought on by a continuing sense of abandonment.

The selection process has been Darwinian, with a combination of drive, tenacity, luck and savings seeing the neo-colonizers through. New Sheetrock glimpsed through a window, often as not, was bought with scraped-together savings.

"I'm just keeping my head down," said Albert Felton, 76, a retired mechanic who has exhausted his resources on his frame house on Brutus Street in Gentilly, near one of the levee breaks. He has done most of the Sheetrocking, painting and sanding alone, and the task remains unfinished. "You don't see contractors out here," Mr. Felton said. "We can't afford them."

Reluctantly, he admitted that discouragement sometimes got the better of him: "Some mornings, I just sit on the steps for two hours, and I go right back to Baton Rouge." He is living in that city with his ailing wife and commuting over an hour each way to do the work on his house in Gentilly.

Essential residential New Orleans neighborhoods like Gentilly and Broadmoor, with their bungalows, Arts-and-Crafts and ranch-style houses, grew with the city over the course of the 20th century; their loss seemed to presage an abrupt reversion to the narrow port town along the river of the 1800s. Now, taken together, the rebuilding activity in the once-flooded neighborhoods points to a more hopeful future than might have been thought possible a year ago.

Statistics - fragmentary and loosely bandied about by civic boosters here - nonetheless support the idea of tentative rebirth. In Gentilly, a door-to-door survey by a Dartmouth College professor this spring found 31 percent of homes either renovated or occupied, and an additional 57 percent gutted or under construction. That meant that only 12 percent of the houses in the neighborhood had been abandoned; a year ago, block after block appeared forsaken and silent.

A few thousand hammers and nails, of course, go only so far in a city that remains stricken nearly two years after the Katrina floodwaters. With so many houses still empty, the effect of the rebuilding effort in much of New Orleans resembles a giant piece of Swiss cheese, with big gaps in settlement connected by thin strands of inhabitants. Though neighborhoods are shells of what they were, they have not disappeared.

At the same time, whole blocks in the Central Business District remain lifeless. The poorest districts, with tens of thousands of their inhabitants still stuck outside New Orleans, seem abandoned. The downtown complex of hospitals is moribund, as officials squabble over how to bring it back and as upstate legislators have plotted its relocation to another city.

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