by Gary Rivlin
“RAY NAGIN WAS A man who didn’t have allies,” offered Oliver Thomas, president of the City Council. Thomas was a good-natured political natural who, pundits and pollsters said, could be the next mayor. A burly, six-foot-six-inch, light-skinned black man with a lumbering gait, Thomas is a soft-spoken giant as likely to throw an arm around a shoulder as shake a hand. “We went to school together, man,” Thomas said of Nagin. “We were friends before he became mayor. But he pushed me away, just like he pushed everyone away.” Thomas’s apparent sin was his association with one of the black political organizations in town. Nagin wanted to show himself above the old ways of narrow partisanship and cliques. “After he became mayor, our families never got together anymore,” Thomas said.
Sally Forman was always pushing Nagin to act more like a politician. “Give him a call,” she’d say about one elected official or another. “He only wants to hear from you.” So, too, were others around the mayor, including at least one of the chief of staffs whom he had fired. You need friends in the City Council, they’d counsel; you need friends in Baton Rouge to get anything done. Nagin had built up considerable political capital yet didn’t know how to use it or simply refused to do so. “Let them come to me,” he’d tell people. “I’m the mayor.” People nudged him to do a better job of promoting his ideas, even when it meant sitting down with people he didn’t like or respect. He acted as if they were asking him to grovel or act in a way that cheapened the office. Instead he’d float a proposal in the media and hope the pundits and others saw its inherent wisdom.
Nagin felt frustrated by the racial balancing act in being a big-city mayor in the modern era. “If I do something the white community likes, the blacks get upset,” he complained during his weekly Friday lunch with top staffers. “And when I do something to help the black community, the whites get upset.” This “constant tug-of-war between the races,” as Nagin described it, had come up as recently as the Friday before Katrina. The primary topic at that lunch was not the impending hurricane but the upcoming mayor’s race in February. With the election less than six months away, no big-name opponent had yet to step forward, but Nagin was asking his staff to help him deliver a mandate, not just a victory. Around the table people floated ideas that would help the mayor win more support among black voters, but others invariably pointed out how that could alienate the mayor’s white supporters. “Race, politics, and economic development had become a part of every major executive-staff decision,” Sally Forman said of that last Friday gathering before the storm, “and this day was no different.”
One exasperating case that had Nagin grumbling was the death of Levon Jones, a black college student killed on Bourbon Street nine months earlier. On New Year’s Eve 2004, Jones tried to enter a popular Bourbon Street club. In an argument over the way Jones was dressed, four bouncers surrounded him, and he was strangled to death. After protests by the local NAACP and other civil rights groups, Nagin responded by announcing a “secret shopper” study: the city would send white and black males of roughly the same body type and dress to the Bourbon Street clubs and see if they were treated differently. Despite signaling his intentions, 40 percent of the street’s twenty-eight clubs charged black patrons more for the same drink than white customers. Some also charged blacks a higher cover charge, and a few applied different dress codes depending on the race of a customer. The bar owners should have been ashamed. Instead, they criticized the mayor for putting an unflattering spotlight on Bourbon Street.
By the final year of his four-year term, Nagin’s “Relax, I’ve got this in hand” act was starting to grate. On the campaign trail, he’d spoken about building a new City Hall and merging departments to save money, but that turned out to be just talk, just like his idea for selling the sucker to contend with a crumbling infrastructure. “Let me percolate on that,” Nagin would say—and then weeks, if not months, would pass before the mayor might be ready to make a decision. He was a CEO, Forman said, “who did not like the burden of timelines or deadlines.” He had vowed to end minority set-asides but hadn’t, just as he had yet to streamline the permit process or follow through on any number of campaign promises.
Nagin could point to accomplishments prior to Katrina. The city’s website was good enough to win the notice of other municipalities, and the city was moving forward with a Nagin proposal to install crime cameras around the city. Yet even a straightforward promise to give the city a digital upgrade was proving far more difficult than it had looked from the outside. “The bureaucracy couldn’t be reasoned with,” complained Greg Meffert, the city’s technology chief and eventually one of the mayor’s closest aides. “It didn’t care about the merits of an idea. It was this leaderless half human, half machine that kept coming. It was their way or nothing happened.”
NAGIN’S RTA CHIEF, JIMMY REISS, was already fed up with Nagin. Reiss had helped to create Nagin, opening doors for him among his Uptown friends. But the crime rate was worse than it was at the start of the Nagin administration, and the schools were in such a poor condition that the state was moving to take them over. “I didn’t care if it was someone black in that office or someone white,” Reiss said. “We needed results.” Katrina only added urgency to the need for action.
The Business Council members met with Nagin that Saturday in Dallas at a suite Reiss had reserved for them at the Anatole. By Reiss’s count, fifty-seven members had shown up. Almost everyone in the room was white, but to Reiss that was irrelevant. “I was just looking for concerned citizens willing to give their time and their soul to help the city,” he said. While waiting for the mayor, Reiss, a slight man with wavy gray hair, offered a sly grin when anyone brought up the Wall Street Journal article, which had been published just two days earlier. “Don’t regret it one bit,” he’d offer, or “It had to be said.” The mayor, dressed casually in a pale yellow, short-sleeved pullover and dark pants, showed up with Entergy’s Dan Packer and several others.
Later, Nagin would cast Dallas as the scene of his political liberation. In his telling, he let these people “intent on engineering a very different New Orleans” talk for a few minutes and then, after drawing a deep breath, let them know he wouldn’t be doing their bidding. “Look, I’m aware of what some of you have been saying to the national media,” he quoted himself as saying in the memoir he wrote after leaving office. “But if you’re thinking about rebuilding the New Orleans of the 1850s, I’m definitely not interested.” Being there, he would write, was “like I had been invited to a private, secretive meeting of the Rex and Comus organizations.”
Others there tell a different story. Bill Hines, the attorney, had served on Nagin’s eight-person transition team and was still part of Nagin’s unofficial kitchen cabinet. He sat with the mayor and remembered him saying little. Certainly he didn’t offer anything like the speech he included in his memoir. There was no talk of making New Orleans a whiter or less poor city, Hines said, only a lot of dry talk of the best way to dewater the city, fix the infrastructure, and rebuild the city’s battered business community. Dan Packer also didn’t recall any speeches. “I remember the mayor sitting and listening a lot,” Packer says.
Jimmy Reiss also remembered the mayor saying little—and being quite perturbed by it. An investment banker friend of his asked, “Mr. Mayor, what recovery plan do you have for us?” Reiss and others in Dallas that day quote Nagin as responding, “I don’t have a plan.” The investment banker asked more gently, “Then what resources do you have to call upon to help us draw up a plan?” An expressionless Nagin offered a single-word response: “Nil.”
They were still meeting when the mayor excused himself to take a call. Joe Canizaro, a wealthy white real estate developer and financial supporter of Nagin’s, was on the line. Canizaro lived in Old Metairie, a leafy suburb just over the city line. Canizaro was a personal friend of the president’s and had been in regular contact with Karl Rove since shortly after the storm. “Now take this down, Mr. Mayor,” Canizaro said in his gravelly voice.
Cradling the receiver in one ear, Nagin pulled pen and paper from his pocket. Canizaro repeated the words Rove had shared with him: “Tell your mayor not to give us a list of everything he’s ever wanted. Let’s focus on getting government back and operating.” Rove had also stressed the need for a blue-ribbon panel of businesspeople and other community leaders—a group who could vouch for a rebuilding plan before the federal government committed to spending the tens of billions of dollars New Orleans would no doubt be requesting.
Jimmy Reiss lobbied for a similar commission when he and the mayor spoke after the meeting. It didn’t need to be just businesspeople, Reiss counseled. Add people like Scott Cowen, the president of Tulane, and maybe a couple of religious leaders. The mayor seemed receptive, but then Reiss was frustrated that one week passed, and then a second, without any announcement from the mayor’s office.
THE CITY HAD A visitor while Nagin was still in Dallas. Ten days after Katrina, Vice President Dick Cheney arrived for his first look at New Orleans. With the mayor out of town, it fell to Greg Meffert, the city’s chief technology officer, to greet the vice president. “A portly techie with blazing blue eyes hidden behind blowing bangs,” Sally Forman said when summing up Meffert, a “left-brain genius” with a “garbled delivery” that made her and the mayor nervous. But with the mayor away and his chief of staff and other top aides in Baton Rouge, Meffert was also the highest-ranking city employee in New Orleans.
Meffert greeted Cheney at Harrah’s, where NOPD had set up temporary quarters. “Mr. Vice President, I’m Greg Meffert, the senior on the ground, welcoming you to New Orleans.”
The vice president was dressed casually in a blue dress shirt and tan slacks. Meffert, by contrast, was wearing whatever he’d found on the floor. He was still at the Hyatt and had not showered or shaved since the storm.
“Where the hell did you come from?” were the first words out of the vice president’s mouth, Meffert said. “And then the next thing he says is something about the way I smelled.” Meffert can’t remember the vice president’s exact words, but he’s certain of what he said next: “Fuck. You.”
He left the vice president to find his own way while he was in town.
7
CASSANDRA
The people of New Orleans had plenty to complain about. They made that much clear to the eminent geographer Peirce F. Lewis when he arrived in New Orleans in the early 1970s. A major port city at the “entrance to the richest valley on earth” may have been inevitable, Lewis wrote in his seminal book, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, published in 1976, but it also required its residents to live in a subtropical city surrounded by swampland. The summers were brutal, the mosquitoes were omnipresent, and the streets flooded after even a moderate rain. Hurricane season lasted six months each year. Yet the people Lewis met couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Their native town was the Big Easy, a beguiling city home to costumed parades, brass bands marching through the streets, and jambalaya. New Orleans, Lewis found, was a city that didn’t work at selling itself because it didn’t seem to dawn on locals that someone might prefer to live somewhere else.
Lewis taught geography at Penn State, more than a thousand miles away. But he had shown up in New Orleans because he felt he had no choice. There was little geographical scholarship about New Orleans, yet could there be a more fascinating city in the United States? Or one more preposterous from a geographer’s point of view? “The Mississippi River demands a city at its mouth,” Lewis offered, “but fails to provide any place for one.” New Orleans is a “transplanted Mediterranean city,” he wrote in his book, but he also described it as the globe’s northernmost Latin American one. Sugarcane grows in the area along with banana plants and bougainvillea, and at least until the advent of air-conditioning, people sensibly took midday siestas. The United States had annexed New Orleans nearly two centuries earlier as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but in many ways it was still a foreign land. In New Orleans, a county is called a parish, the median bisecting a boulevard is the neutral ground, and (like the rest of Louisiana) the legal system is based on the Napoleonic Code. Its libertine spirit set it apart, as did its celebration of both the sacred and the profane in a stretch of the United States sometimes called the Bible Belt.
Like others before and after him, Lewis labeled New Orleans the country’s most “eccentric city.” But unlike his counterparts, he did not fixate on the city’s voodoo priestesses or drag queens or the Mardi Gras Indians—the legions of black men in New Orleans who devote an inordinate amount of their spare time stitching together feathers into intricate costumes they’ll wear only a few times. Instead, Lewis found the city’s eccentricities in the Garden District’s “flamboyant mansions,” the cast iron and pastels of the French Quarter, even people’s accents, which he heard as more Brooklyn than Vicksburg.
Technology is the villain in Lewis’s book. Through most of its first two hundred years, the citizenry of New Orleans harbored a healthy fear of floods. Most of the population confined themselves to the high ground and avoided parts of the city that lay below sea level. Then, early in the twentieth century, a local engineer named A. Baldwin Wood invented a pump powerful and reliable enough to drain the swamplands and keep them dry even after a heavy rain. Land once off-limits was now open to settlement. “Just as high speed elevators changed the geography of New York City by making skyscrapers possible,” Lewis wrote, “the Wood pump revolutionized the urban geography of New Orleans.”
The large tracts of marshy land that sat between the central business district and Lake Pontchartrain to the north were the first parts of the city to experience a metamorphosis. Wood’s invention allowed speculators to develop Lakeview in the 1910s, among other communities there. That part of the city was off-limits to black home buyers, but the Wood pump was also used to drain the back-a-town swamps (those downriver from the French Quarter) to expand the Lower Ninth Ward, among other communities. The Wood pump allowed New Orleanians to spread out and also cut themselves off from one another. Technology, Lewis found, accelerated racial segregation rather than slowed it down.
The Wood pump made New Orleans East possible, but first came the interstate, which did nearly as much to reshape the geography of New Orleans. It would have been unthinkable to build an elevated highway above St. Charles Avenue or Magazine Street. Yet that’s what happened on the other side of town in the 1960s, when city fathers mapped the I-10 through the center of Tremé. “A white man’s highway through the black man’s bedroom,” said one critic on the losing end of that fight. The interstate was built directly over Claiborne Avenue, the commercial center of black New Orleans. In its day, Claiborne was a handsome boulevard of large oak trees, lined with businesses, most of them black owned. By the time of Katrina, it was a strip of vacant storefronts under a thick slab of elevated concrete thrumming with traffic. Lewis judged it as nothing short of “murder.”
Lewis was still researching his book when billboards sprang up on the I-10 advertising the newly christened New Orleans East. Speculators were homesteading large stretches of cypress swamp on either side of the interstate just past the new High Rise Bridge that carried people over the Industrial Canal, heading east toward the Gulf Coast. The pitch was simple: a small patch of suburban paradise inside the city limits and only a twenty-minute drive from downtown. Yet the geographer read in horror the promotional materials used to sell this large swath sandwiched between two giant bodies of water—Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain. On twenty square miles of spongy, low-lying, flood-prone land, developers imagined a community of 250,000 people. Advertisements played up the golf courses and nearby marinas “but remain strangely quiet about hurricanes,” Lewis wrote. The East had been inundated with water after Hurricane Betsy in 1965. It had flooded again four years later after Hurricane Camille. Yet both those storms had supposedly delivered only glancing blows to the city.
Coastal erosion added to Lewis’s worries about a city he judged as having “deficient la
nd controls.” The marshy wetlands of the Louisiana coast were a natural buffer against storm surge—the tidal wave of water that accompanies a strong hurricane.I Yet the wetlands were disappearing at a rate of twenty-five to thirty square miles per year. The US Army Corps of Engineers was partly to blame, starting with the choices it had made decades earlier when it first designed the area’s flood-protection system. The same levee system that protects New Orleans from the Mississippi River also prevents the wetlands from replenishing themselves. The sediment the river would otherwise be depositing at the mouth of the Mississippi was now ending up on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The Corps also built the MR. GO shipping channel, which caused more deterioration. Another culprit were the navigation lanes the oil and gas interests carved through coastal Louisiana to construct pipelines and move their heavy machinery to and from the area. These man-made canals caused salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to spill into the freshwater wetlands, killing freshwater plants that held the soil in place, causing more erosion. No longer were a hurricane’s high winds the greatest threat, Lewis concluded, but the “murderous tidal wave” that one of these blasts off the Gulf Coast could provoke.
When Lewis returned to New Orleans in the early 2000s to work on a sequel to New Orleans, he was disheartened. Everywhere he looked, the geographer saw a long list of afflictions: crime, declining schools, a “grinding poverty, especially among black citizens.” He found a city even more segregated and more intolerant than when he’d left it. “As in most other big American cities,” Lewis wrote, “New Orleans’s main malady is racial.”
