When Hurricane Katrina blew drummer Quin Kirchner from New Orleans to Chicago, he thought for sure he’d move back. He hasn’t, and now he won’t.
Holistic therapist Sharon Mathieu saw the hand of fate and settled in Uptown. Page and Carter Wilson built a new life in Downers Grove — not New Orleans, but at least it’s not Buffalo, they say. Linda Grady remains in Des Plaines because she can’t face New Orleans now that her family isn’t there.
“I would love to go home,” she said sadly. “It’s nowhere to go.”
Four years after the winds of fortune blew thousands of Gulf Coast residents to the Chicago area, many still haven’t found their way back. They have built lives here, their tales articulating a modern American diaspora with still-unknown dimensions.
Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, killing more than 1,600 and scattering 1.7 million people to every state. The Federal Emergency Management Agency tracked more than 6,000 to Illinois. How many remain isn’t clear — people stopped calling FEMA when they became ineligible for assistance. But they have left a mark on the Midwest that is as impossible to ignore as the Cajun aromas in their kitchens, the bayou businesses reopened on the prairie and the gleaming Mardi Gras decorations that enliven Chicago streets.
Loyalty to Saints still strong amid crowd of Bears fans
Page Wilson made jambalaya for dinner Sunday. Her family eats red beans and rice on Mondays, just like they did in New Orleans.
They may live in Downers Grove now, but they still cheer for the Saints when their hometown team plays the Bears, and Wilson swears she will never — ever — give up New Orleans’ 504 area code on her cell phone.
“But Chicago is such a wonderful place,” added Wilson, 37.
In 2005, Page and her husband, Carter Wilson, lived with their daughters Maggie and Frances in New Orleans’ Uptown neighborhood, where they planned to wait out the storm until it began gathering fearsome strength as they watched TV.
They fled to Shreveport, then to her brother’s house in Downers Grove. Her sister-in-law taught preschool in Oak Park and got their kids into classes.
In Louisiana, their home was a moldy wreck but salvageable. Yet when Carter Wilson’s company told him the business needed him to move to Buffalo, the Wilsons took stock and made a counter-offer: “Why not start a Chicago office?”
Maggie, 8, just started the 3rd grade. Frances, 6, just started 1st grade. “New Orleans is still home, but we’ve made a life for ourselves here,” said Page Wilson.
She and her husband, also 37, bought their own house in Downers Grove. By 2007, they had new jobs and a new baby boy, Carter Jr., but the change was permanent by the end of 2006.
“We had a party that December to say ‘We’re not the Katrina People anymore,'” Page Wilson said. “We’re the Wilsons.”
Bayou country musicians find solid groove in Chicago
A musician needs to know a city’s other musicians to find a job. That’s what drummer Quin Kirchner and bassist Matthew Golombisky loved about their lives in New Orleans — and why both say Chicago will be their home for the foreseeable future.
“Now, living in Chicago since the hurricane, I have a lot of roots,” said Golombisky, who was 25 when he fled Katrina. Also a composer, he ended up teaching music theory at a neighborhood shop, blues and rock at a Naperville summer camp and piano lessons in Andersonville and Albany Park.
By chance, a friend who came to Chicago is Kirchner, 27, who moved to New Orleans from Oak Park at 18 and held off evacuating until the last minute due to a gig.
“I learned everything about playing in New Orleans. Those were my formative years as a musician,” said Kirchner.
Being uprooted was so traumatic, Kirchner said: “Short of there actually being a hurricane in Chicago? I don’t think I’ll ever relocate to another city.”
Businesswoman at peace with family-focused move
Sharon Mathieu wasn’t bothered by the fact there were 300-foot pine trees in her front yard near Louisiana’s Lake Ponchartrain. The problem was the trees had fallen out of a neighbor’s yard and — no getting around this — the tops had broken through the walls of her home.
It was a sign to move.
She laughs about this now. She said she has to.
In the days before Katrina lashed and drowned the Gulf Coast, Mathieu, 61, already had sent her elderly mother to hospice care in Chicago, where her daughter Gretchen Halpin, 41, was about to open a branch of the family’s spa business. Soon after the storm, they decided to make it the only branch.
Mathieu closed her shop in Mandeville, La., and moved north to be with her daughter, grandkids and ailing mother.
“I knew that I had to make a decision,” Mathieu said. “Either I was going to stay and rebuild, or be here with her at the end. I chose to be with her. My support network was here.”
Her mother died six weeks later, but Mathieu said the move was no tragedy — nor even as disruptive as it was to so many others. True, she is the only woman on her block to festoon her house in yellow and purple for Mardi Gras, but friends in Chicago embraced her family, she said, and its relocated business has been open for four years.
“I truly feel like God has given me a blank canvas,” Mathieu said of life on the North Side of Chicago. “That’s where we ended up, so I think that’s where we’re supposed to be.”
Fractured family grateful for chance to pick up pieces
Linda Grady left behind a good job with a tour company in New Orleans and a home off Elysian Fields Avenue. In exchange, she has a lease in Des Plaines set up by a local church, a job (briefly) at a Park Ridge hospital and an abiding sense of loss.
The seemingly random hands of fate scattered her family, said Grady, 50, who settled in the Chicago area with her husband, Lawrence, 60. Her sisters are in California. Her daughter and grandchildren are in Texas. Aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews are in Michigan, Mississippi and Georgia.
“It’s still rough, you know,” Grady said. “I haven’t been able to see any of them since. All these years. Everybody’s trying to pick up and put their lives back together.”
The Gradys remember their panicked flight from New Orleans — the bank they reached too late, the image of their home with water up to the roof, the long string of shelters, trailers and homes where people let them stay awhile. But just as clearly they recall the kindness of strangers in Chicago, who hired them and helped them find a home — one that increasingly looks permanent.
Grady was born in Louisiana. So was her mother. She spent her entire life in New Orleans and had “a huge family” that was as much a part of the place as the gingerbread architecture and warm evening breeze. “How do you replace that?” she wondered.
“Chicago’s been good to me,” Grady said. “But there’s no place like home.”
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Four years after Katrina
Saturday marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall near New Orleans. In the years since, the Big Easy has struggled to rebuild itself. Yet while some neighborhoods remain largely desolate, others have added population. Rebuilding efforts have helped the local economy fare relatively well amid the recession, with an unemployment rate below the national average.
Recovery by neighborhood
Percent of addresses receiving mail In June 2009, as compared with June 2005
Central Business District
147%
One of the few areas to add people, it now has about 50 percent more households than it had before Katrina.
Lower Ninth Ward
19%
The city’s hardest-hit neighborhood in 2005 today is about one-fifth occupied.
76.4% of New Orleans addresses received mail in June.
65,888 New Orleans homes were unoccupied in March, down from 69,727 last September.
UNEMPLOYMENT RATE
New Orleans metro area* July 2009: 7.3%
U.S July 2009: 9.4%
* Not seasonally adjusted. U.S. figure is seasonally adjusted.
OPEN NEW ORLEANS SCHOOLS
By school year, 2004-05-’08-09
SOURCES: The Brookings Institution’s “The New Orleans Index,” Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Louisiana Department of Education, Tribune archives
ADAM ZOLL AND PHIL GEIB/TRIBUNE NEWSPAPERS
-See microfilm for complete graphic
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jjanega@tribune.com
