Should New Orleans be rebuilt where it is and much as it was? That question is not entirely hypothetical.
“Moving the city is clearly going to be an option,” according to John Copenhaver, a former regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Even though it would be difficult and expensive, “it has to be on the table.”
Rep. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, wouldn’t rule that out. “There are some real tough questions to ask about how you go about rebuilding this city.” It’s a decision that Congress has a rightful part in, since there’s federal flood insurance and the levee system maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers.
You want to talk about a Stupid Zone? We’ve got plenty of them in Colorado – flood plains, avalanche paths, wildfire corridors – where people build and then expect the government to bail them out when predictable problems occur.
But New Orleans was in a class by itself. Most of it was below sea level, with the water held back by levees that could breach in a big storm, and the place sat where hurricanes happen. The low parts of the city had to be pumped continuously just so the toilets would flush. When the electricity went out, so did the pumping; the place was an immense exercise in trying to defy the law of gravity, complicated by hurricanes.
New Orleans was founded on a scam. Based on the 1682 claim to the entire Mississippi drainage by Robert Cavalier LaSalle, it was French territory in the early 18th century, but it wasn’t producing much. John Law, a Scottish financier, persuaded the French regent to let him organize the Mississippi Company. He promoted the territory as a land teeming with mountains of gold and silver, and a speculative orgy followed.
Before the bubble broke in 1720, Law’s company started building a town for Mississippi River traffic, and construction continued after the crash. The Encyclopedia Britannica recounts that “The engineers charged with this task met with problems arising from uncooperative convict labor, a shortage of supplies, two severe hurricanes, and the unpleasant physical conditions of swamps and mosquitoes as they set up the first crude buildings.”
In other words, it wasn’t a prime site for a settlement, even when it was founded. But once there were wharves, the place grew. It changed hands from French to Spanish to French. It was so important to the infant United States, where the Kentucky pioneers relied on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to get their produce to market, that President Thomas Jefferson dispatched ambassadors to Paris with instructions to buy the city.
After losing an army in Haiti, Napoleon had little use for the New World, and the result was the famous 1803 Louisiana Purchase – New Orleans and a whole lot more.
The city’s biggest military conflict, the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, didn’t even matter, for it took place after the peace treaty had been signed ending the War of 1812.
Soon afterward, it began losing commercial importance. New York City was closer to America’s major trading partners in Europe, and its port could tap the Midwest, thanks to the 1825 Erie Canal and a growing railroad network.
New Orleans was the largest city and largest port in the Confederacy, but the South fought on for three years after the Union Army occupied the city in 1862 following a brief naval battle. Even by then, 140 years ago, New Orleans did not dominate the trade of the interior despite its location at the mouth of the continent’s biggest river system.
So the argument could be made that New Orleans is a long-fading city in a bad location, and it would be sensible to start over someplace else, rather than try to restore the destroyed city.
But where was “A Streetcar Named Desire”? Near what city did Johnny B. Goode learn to play a guitar “like ringing a bell”? Where was that battle that Johnny Horton sang about in 1959? Where was the “House of the Rising Sun”? What was the name of the melancholy train that Steve Goodman and Arlo Guthrie sang about?
America just wouldn’t be America without New Orleans. Even if it sits in the King of Stupid Zones, we need it. We need Bourbon Street, the French Quarter, Mardis Gras, and perhaps most of all, a city distinguished for something other than freeways, franchises and mini-malls.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
