New Orleans this day lies in ruin, a city dangerous, diseased and impassable. In time, though, the waters that torment it will leave. This nation has suffered many urban disasters, from the leveling of San Francisco to the flooding of Galveston. Each catastrophe, as deadly and as irredeemable as the survivors proclaimed it, presaged a city’s robust comeback. Proof that in the long arc of history, the profits of doom are more enduring than, well, the prophets of doom. Trust the former to trump the latter and you’ll rarely lose a bet.
No comeback was more dramatic, more unexpected, than Chicago’s after the Great Fire of 1871. Even as this city still smoldered, as the body count rose, as refugees huddled cold and homeless in Lincoln Park, many Americans wrote Chicago off for dead. “Its glory will be of the past, not of the present,” predicted an editorial writer in, yes, New Orleans. ” … [I]ts hopes, once so bright and cloudless, will be to the end marred and blackened by the smoke of its fiery fate.”
That smug jeremiad was as wrong in 1871 as are the gloomiest predictions for New Orleans today. Streets and homes in the Crescent City will dry. Families will grieve and, to their astonishment, persevere. Hordes of helpers, builders–and, of course, hucksters–will descend, their eyes more on the future than the past.
But before this nation tries, at phenomenal expense, to rebuild a city in a bowl afloat, a patsy for the next massive hurricane, it is fair and urgent to ask what, and perhaps even where, this Newer Orleans should be.
More than a century and almost 1,000 miles of America separate Chicago’s terrible conflagration from the cataclysm wiping New Orleans as we’ve known it off the map. Flood and fire are elemental opposites. And it would be churlish to invoke a tale from Chicago’s past as the sure antidote for a struggle now playing out so desperately in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
But an essential fate unites these two events. Each brought vast destruction–and with it a chance not to simply rebuild, but to re-imagine.
Resurrecting a city
In 30 hours the Great Chicago Fire killed some 300 people and destroyed more than 17,000 buildings. Yale historian William Cronon captured the evident demise of a city of 330,000 as the blaze leaped northward from the barn behind Patrick O’Leary’s cottage: “Terrified inhabitants fled amid scenes of gothic horror: parents searching for lost children, looters picking through abandoned buildings, mobs crowding collapsing bridges, whole city blocks engulfed in flames.”
That was not the end of Chicago’s saga, any more than today’s similar images will be the end of New Orleans’ saga. Chicago was less rebuilt than remade–the very opportunity that confronts New Orleans. On Oct. 11, 1871, the day after rain slaked Chicago’s fire, a Tribune editorial (reprinted on this page) predicted the resurrection to come. An Oct. 12 editorial amplified on the critical human assets still on hand: “All is not lost. Though four hundred million dollars’ worth of property has been destroyed, Chicago still exists. She was not a mere collection of stone, and bricks, and lumber. These were but the evidence of the power which produced these things; they were but the external proof of the high courage, unconquerable energy, strong faith, and restless perseverance which have built up here a commercial metropolis.”
It was not long, Cronon wrote, before Chicagoans were claiming that the destruction of the downtown had done more good than harm. The young architect Louis Sullivan arrived to see on the clean slate that was Chicago “An intoxicating rawness: A sense of big things to be done.”
A city of bigger shoulders, a smarter city, arose. Rubble carted from the fire zone fed a landfill east of Michigan Avenue that became Chicago’s lakefront. New building standards forbade the reconstruction of the wooden downtown. That improvement, plus rapidly rising land values, provoked the construction of fire-resistant skyscrapers–a relative term–within a generation. The more Chicago became a vertical city, the more jobs concentrated at the city center. That employment density made it impractical for many people to live within walking distance of their jobs. So metropolitan Chicago employed railroads as the liberating force that allowed outlying suburbs to bloom.
From disaster, then, came new ways of thinking, new ways for people to live and work, new ways to frame the urban areas of this country.
We cannot know what urban innovations the resurrection of New Orleans will provoke. Our hope is that, when they arrive, they are sufficiently dramatic to inspire other cities to mimic them. Chicago, once a teacher, can be a student.
The giant theme park
The challenge for New Orleans is to re-create itself as something more than a tourist mecca and oil hub. The question for its people, as for Chicagoans of 1871: How can this be a better city?
The rebirth of New Orleans is months if not years away. But already, in the confusion and chaos and suffering, it has begun. Even as people with little but the ragged, filthy clothes on their backs and the moldering shoes on their feet wander the streets, the scattered tribes of New Orleans are doing what people in such crises do.
In words they share with journalists, those people mourn their losses. They commiserate with friends and relatives. They try, many of them, to help others in need. And they start planning for the future they cannot envision: When can I return to work? When will my children go to school? How do we regain the ground lost, and build new memories of our personal triumphs?
It is far too early to know what shape their Newer Orleans will take. But this much is clear: Every American subject to federal taxation will help pay to reconstruct the city. This is not just a matter for local planners and officials. We all have a stake in New Orleans now.
As such, we are entitled–when the sense of emergency passes–to ask something of New Orleans: that it think through what it aspires to be.
In the 1920s, urban historian Joel Kotkin points out, New Orleans was a powerhouse metropolis. Its population was nearly triple that of Houston and nine times that of Miami. Now, both of those cities, despite their own storm vulnerabilities, have long since surpassed New Orleans. Kotkin credits an influx of entrepreneurial newcomers for transforming Houston and Miami into hubs of trade and investment, centers of finance and medical care that serve the entire Caribbean Basin.
By contrast, New Orleans is–or was–a tourist town. Its dominant industry, as Kotkin wrote in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, “lies not in creating its future but selling its past, much of which now sits underwater.” That overreliance on peddling yesteryear left the city with not enough high-wage jobs and a bifurcated social structure: “This can be seen in New Orleans’ perennially high rates of underemployment, crime and poverty. The murder rate is 10 times the national average.” In lieu of the perpetual reinvention for which many cities strive, Kotkin sees “some basic hostility in New Orleans to the very idea of economic renaissance and growth.”
There’s nothing wrong with tourism. Anyone who has marveled at Mardi Gras or simply strolled the vivid French Quarter knows that New Orleans richly deserved its motto: “Laissez les bons temps rouler.” Let the good times roll.
If Americans want to pay to rebuild the giant theme park that was New Orleans, in the same vulnerable locale, fine. But if public officials in both New Orleans and Washington reflexively embrace that option, without truly engaging opportunity born of tragedy, they will cheat the people of New Orleans out of options perhaps better suited to the region’s climate and needs.
Reclaimed by nature?
A clone of the old New Orleans may yet rise again at the mouth of the Mississippi River. That’s certainly the first instinct, and it’s the American one. This nation has never abandoned a major city. There’s an elemental urge to rebuild the world as we knew it. When wars or calamities have leveled other cities here and abroad, the impulse was to rebuild on the site destroyed.
That was, of course, a far easier decision for most of those cities than it will be for New Orleans. Those cities weren’t sinking like bricks in a swamp. And those cities didn’t face the prospect of repeated destruction by something as inevitable as the next killer hurricane.
This is a restless nation, never satisfied with the status quo. Preservationists often battle the tide of public sentiment that almost always finds excitement in the big new plan. Americans like to ask, if we were starting over today, what would we do? How would we build it better? In New Orleans’ case, the first question is: Where would we build it better? Which leads to other questions:
Could much of New Orleans thrive as a different kind of destination, a place where people work and play but don’t live? That sort of thinking rubs against the grain of modern urban planning, the push to reinvigorate the American city by drawing people to live downtown. But this exercise is about re-imagining, not repeating.
Could the city’s already busy port be expanded and modernized to handle more or different shipping traffic? What should be the future, and in what proximity to water, of the valuable but vulnerable oil and chemical industries? And if the local labor force can be subdivided into outlying communities, is there a place for new light industrial parks with new kinds of job opportunities? Should some of what has been New Orleans now be reclaimed by nature?
The worst kinds of decisions are those that are never truly made, but simply allowed to happen. Rebuilding New Orleans as it was looks to be folly. The hope here is that the city’s residents, and the Americans who will help them recover, craft a master plan that preserves the city’s brash spirit while protecting it from another disaster on this scale.
Then New Orleans can reinvent itself–as a devastated Chicago did after 1871.
