After the
storm
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the memory of this tragedy still lingers. But the city’s rise from the waters is a cause for celebration and hope
Words Jacqui Agate
New Orleans’ St Louis Cathedral is the oldest continuously active cathedral in the USA (Alamy)
Caesars Superdome rose from downtown New Orleans like a spaceship about to take flight. Its bone-white roof glowed bright in the sun and a sign screamed ‘Super Bowl LIX’ in fat red letters. In February, more than 65,000 American football fans filled the saucer-shaped stadium for the 59th edition of the Super Bowl. And at the tail end of 2024, almost triple that number had arrived over the course of three nights to see megastar Taylor Swift take to the stage, propelling New Orleans into the international spotlight. Now the Superdome was silent as our tour bus rattled around its edges.
The stadium is one of the most famous landmarks in the city: a symbol of New Orleanians’ gregarious hospitality and their penchant for celebration. It also served as a beacon of hope in the city’s darkest hour.
“Hurricane Katrina’s fastest winds were clocked at 175 miles per hour (282km/h),” said driver, tour guide and New Orleanian David. “When the storm came through the city, it ripped the roof right off the Superdome. But the Dome was also used as a shelter during the hurricane.”
I was taking the Louisiana Tour Company’s New Orleans City and Cemetery Tour
(louisianaswamp.com/city-tours), a three-hour trip around the city with a special focus on the impact of Hurricane Katrina. It’s one of a crop of tours born in the wake of the disaster, seeking to tell the story of the hurricane and trace the region’s journey to healing.
Twenty years ago, on 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near the tiny town of Buras, Louisiana. It shrieked through the state’s south-east, devastating parishes including St Bernard and Plaquemines, before passing up through Mississippi. New Orleans was brought to its knees.
The city’s levee system – mostly built in the 1960s after Category 4 Hurricane Betsy hit town – failed in more than 50 places, plunging 80% of New Orleans beneath the water and forcing some 30,000 people to take refuge in the Superdome. It’s estimated that 1,836 people died as a result of the storm, making it one of the deadliest in US history.
Two decades on, New Orleans has taken great pains to move on, but Katrina has irrevocably shaped the city. The population halved after the disaster, falling from 485,000 people to around 230,000 (it’s now more than 350,000). Entire neighbourhoods were decimated and (mostly Black and working class) communities were displaced.
The city has long been synonymous with resilience and grit, surviving at least 27 major floods over the course of three centuries – and that reputation was fortified post-Katrina. New Orleans built back the best way it knew how: through art and music, festivals and first lines (the main part of a parade). Events such as Prospect – an art triennial focused on contemporary creators – rose up in the wake of the storm to celebrate New Orleans’ culture and encourage much-needed visitors back to the city. It’s still going strong.
The hurricane remains part of New Orleans’ psyche. K20, as the anniversary is being tagged, will be marked with a parade beginning in the Lower Ninth Ward (the area most severely impacted by the storm) and culminating in an event with speakers and live music. Meanwhile, exhibitions everywhere – from those of the Historic New Orleans Collection to the Presbytère museum, to the Vue Orleans observation deck – retell the story of Katrina and the city’s response to it.
I’ve been a regular visitor to New Orleans for years, drawn in by its live music, its literary heritage and its dazzling food and cocktail scene. But this trip, exploring the city’s recovery from Katrina, two decades after the tragedy, felt extra poignant.
The French Quarter is known for its ornate wrought-iron balconies (Alamy)
Play it again, Fats!
Today, many locals divide the city’s story into two chapters: before and after Katrina. This was apparent during my trip with the Louisiana Tour Company. The tour revealed centuries of history as it skirted the pulsing French Quarter and through the mansion-stitched Garden District.
Before French explorer Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville established a settlement in 1718, this land was largely a swamp. Many Indigenous tribes, including the Chitimacha, Bayougoula and Houmas, traded here. They called the area ‘Bulbancha’, meaning ‘place of many tongues’.
This part of Louisiana has always been shaped by its location. New Orleans is strapped in by Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi (whose name comes from the Indigenous Ojibwe word for ‘Great River’). That inseparable relationship between the city and the water was central to the tour.
We visited St Louis Cemetery No 1, whose marble tombs were lined up like chalk crayons. They’re built above the ground because of New Orleans’ high water table, the guide explained. Then it was on to City Park, a green space 1.5 times the size of New York’s Central Park. This Spanish moss-trimmed area was redesigned after Katrina struck, to put flood prevention at its heart. A complex lagoon system was created and native plants have been used to stabilise the soil.
Next, we struck out for the Lower Ninth Ward (part of the larger Ninth Ward), where the scars of 2005’s hurricane still show.
“This was the area hit hardest by Katrina,” David said as we inched by still-empty lots and passed abandoned homes cracked open by vegetation. I saw the remains of some blue tarp – back in 2005, sheets of the stuff covered shattered roofs like giant band-aids.
Aside from Katrina-focussed tours, few travellers make it to this part of town. But I was keen to understand the Lower Ninth Ward better, so I made a beeline for the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum, now housed in the Tate, Etienne and Prevost Center. This small museum had been decanted into an old schoolhouse, and I shared the space with just one other visitor.
The museum’s location, I learnt, was significant. In 1960, three six-year-old girls – Leona Tate, Gail Etienne and Tessie Prevost – became the first Black children to attend the previously segregated McDonogh 19 Elementary School, a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement. The school had stood abandoned for nearly two decades after it was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, then it was purchased by the Leona Tate Foundation for Change (pioneered by its namesake) and opened as a cultural centre in 2022. Now a video tells the story of the students’ harrowing experience as they pursued their studies at the formerly all-white school.
In one room, paper information panels tacked to screens labelled the Lower Ninth Ward a ‘forgotten neighbourhood’. The story here begins in the 1720s, when colonists used the area’s land to grow sugar using enslaved labour. Today the neighbourhood remembers this era with street names such as Deslonde – Charles Deslondes was an overseer who led 500 enslaved people in an uprising against the plantation owners in 1811.
A large proportion of the displays spotlighted the impact of Katrina, with oral accounts from local residents and moving photography. But the exhibition also celebrated the Lower Ninth Ward’s rich cultural contributions too. I discovered that jazz trumpeter Kermit Ruffins (who co-wrote New Orleans anthem ‘Do Whatcha Wanna’) was raised here, and that Fats Domino, reputedly the biggest-selling rock-and-roll artist behind Elvis Presley, lived here most of his life – he only moved away in 2005, following the devastation caused by the hurricane.
I walked to what was formerly Fats Domino’s house, just around the corner. Though it’s not open to the public, its butter-yellow exterior is easily visible from the street. You can also see Fats’ Steinway piano at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. It had festered under three metres of water after Katrina, but it has been restored to the tune of £22,000 (with a cash injection from Sir Paul McCartney).
Aside from the museum and a few hole-in-the-wall soul-food spots, the Lower Ninth Ward is mostly residential. That’s not the case in Bywater, however, just 3km to the west. Arguably no New Orleans neighbourhood has seen more change since Hurricane Katrina than this district.
Fats Domino’s house on Caffin Avenue was built with its own recording studio and has been restored after it was flooded in 2005 (Alamy)
A mural of past champions of the Civil Rights Movement in the artsy Bywater district, which was spared much of the flooding caused by Katrina and has transformed from its industrial roots into a creative hub (Alamy)
Layers of history
Flanked by the Mississippi River and the Industrial Canal, the Bywater district (which is part of the Ninth Ward) was once an industrial heartland. Its warehouses and factories processed everything from sugar to coffee to cotton. But as US industry began to decline in the second half of the 20th century, artists filled the vacant spaces left by the workers. This shift was compounded after Katrina. Bywater’s higher elevation (on the river’s natural levee) meant it was spared total devastation, and members of the creative and professional classes have continued to flood in.
Today, some 120 blocks of the neighbourhood are protected as a Historic District. I wandered a tangle of Creole cottages and shuttered ‘shotgun houses’ (single-storey homes with rooms in a straight line), bold in mint green, blue, blood orange and yellow. Neat porches were decorated with hanging baskets and Pride flags, and bright murals crawled over the backs of warehouses. Artists’ studios, music venues and cafés fill many of these centuries-old buildings now.
Among them is StudioBE, an art gallery that, quite literally, rose from Hurricane Katrina’s wreckage. The endeavour started in a housing development in the Lower Ninth Ward. The brawny, 1940s-built Florida Housing Project was left abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, standing as a chilling symbol of Mother Nature’s might. But New Orleans native and artist Brandan “BMike” Odums saw the potential for something beautiful.
He illegally spray-painted a portrait of civil rights leader Malcolm X onto the building’s blistered walls. Later, he painted John Coltrane, the jazz saxophonist, and after that the author James Baldwin. What transpired was an underground art movement – later dubbed ProjectBE – that drew other creatives and the attention of the local community. Odums saw it as a journey to healing.
“120 blocks in the Bywater neighbourhood are protected as a Historic District”
I stood before him as he gestured around his Bywater gallery space, which opened in 2016.
“There’s a quote in one of the rooms that says: what do we build on the ashes of a nightmare? Post-Katrina, people in New Orleans were grappling with that question,” explained Odums. “For me, as an artist, painting walls was a very simple thing that helped build something. It was a way of saying: ‘Here’s something that reminds me of pain – how do I paint on it so I see beauty?’”
Next came ExhibitBE, a similar undertaking in which Odums painted on a Katrina-withered building (now torn down) in Algiers, one of New Orleans’ oldest neighbourhoods. And finally came StudioBE, a gallery housed in a former coffee warehouse. Here, Odums exhibits his mammoth works alongside those of young talent nurtured by his creative non-profit, Eternal Seeds.
I walked around the space. Bare brick walls and beamed ceilings offered up whispers of the building’s past industrial life. Odums’ work mostly consists of striking portraiture, spotlighting Black history, culture and resilience, and confronting issues such as police brutality. In one image, a Black man drinks from a fountain marked ‘white only’, his eyebrow raised in perceived defiance; in another, the musician Paul Robeson’s face is crinkled in a smile next to the words ‘Artists are the gatekeepers of truth’.
Odums told me that New Orleans – its spirit, its grit and its hardwired creativity – serve as a muse for him.
“In New Orleans, you’re surrounded by so much art and culture all of the time. Art was never a language that felt out of the ordinary for me; it was a language that so many people spoke.”
“A word that’s been used to describe my work is ‘palimpsest’,” Odums continued, “which means something that’s been written over repeatedly while still retaining hints of its earlier form. And that could describe New Orleans too: everywhere you stand there are layers of history.”
Brandan “BMike” Odums opened StudioBE in 2016 in the Lower Ninth Ward as the final part of a trilogy of works and as a place to show his murals and those of young and emerging artists from the community (Alamy)
The dawn of the paddlesteamer on the Mississippi was back in 1811, when the first steamboat (the New Orleans) traversed the waters between Pittsburgh and NOLA, ushering in an era of steamboat travel that continues to this day – yet one more reason why water is everything to this city (Shutterstock)
Force of nature
Nowhere are these layers more pronounced than in the French Quarter, the beating heart of the Big Easy and my next stop. I explored the neighbourhood with guide Ashley Degeyter, who leads the New Orleans Green Tour, created by a non-profit called the Water Collaborative, which is focussed on protecting the community’s access to water (neworleansgreentours.org). The tour looks in particular at NOLA’s history and the city’s relationship to the water.
The French Quarter reveals the past at every turn, Ashley told me as we walked. Stratums of yesteryear are built into brightly painted stucco buildings left over from the Spanish colonial era and the odd timber-framed structure. The latter is a rare echo of New Orleans’ early French rule, owing to the fires in 1788 and 1794 that obliterated swathes of the original quarter. I was here during Mardi Gras season, and everywhere I looked I saw beads hanging from the wrought-iron balconies in glittering clumps.
On past tours of the French Quarter, I’d learnt how enslaved Haitians brought Vodou to the city, and how jazz music evolved from rhythmic African drum circles held in nearby Congo Square. I’d feasted at the quarter’s Creole restaurants too, where helpings of French, Spanish, Caribbean, German and Italian heritage are dished up in steaming plates of crawfish étouffée, jambalaya, gumbo and red beans and rice.
Ashley told me that all this culture can be traced back to the water. During Hurricane Katrina, water became a destroyer – but it has the capacity to create too.
“Water brings in not just commodities but culture,” she said. “We were the second largest immigration port next to Ellis Island. The same waves of immigration that were coming through New York’s Ellis Island – Italians, Sicilians, Irish, Germans – were coming through New Orleans, just in smaller numbers. A lot of them ended up living and working in the French Quarter. At one point, there were so many Sicilians in the quarter that they were calling it Little Palermo.”
Hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were forcibly transported to the city via water too, she said. Their West African and Caribbean customs fed into every facet of the city’s culture, from food to music to architecture.
Eventually, we reached the French Quarter’s natural border: the Mississippi. A steamboat ploughed the river as we looked out.
“It looks pretty calm right now but there are millions of cubic tonnes of water going by us per second. Even when the surface is glassy, I remind people that the water underneath is churning.”
It’s another reminder of the enduring force of water in this slice of Louisiana: its power to forge an entire city from swampland and then all but swallow it whole. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina left an indelible mark on New Orleans; however, two decades on, the city’s capacity to rise, rebuild and reconcile with the past is a legacy worth celebrating.
Beyond the French Quarter
Garden District
The Garden District’s relatively high perch meant it was spared the devastation suffered by other parts of the city during Katrina. This is one of the most elegant swathes of New Orleans. It’s a joy to wander among its Italianate and Greek Revival-style mansions and live oaks drenched in Spanish moss. Walking tours with Unique Nola Tours (uniquenola.com) dive into the district’s history, identifying buildings connected with movies and writers (such as New Orleanian Anne Rice).
Tremé
A longtime cradle of African American culture, Tremé is most notably home to Congo Square, a location widely considered the birthplace of jazz (a genre rooted in the rhythmic African dance and drumming sessions that took place here). The wider Louis Armstrong Park includes an imposing statue of the New Orleans-born trumpeter and regularly hosts free concerts and cultural events. Beyond the park, duck into the Backstreet Cultural Museum – where intricate Mardi Gras Indian regalia is the highlight – and spare time to eat at Dooky Chase Restaurant, a beloved Creole spot and former meeting place for Civil Rights activists.
Arts/Warehouse District
Some of the city’s finest museums take up residence in this formerly industrial area. Hop between the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, whose displays include sculpture, photography and paintings by creators from the American South, and the cutting-edge Contemporary Arts Center. Then make a beeline for the interactive National WWII Museum, regularly praised as one of the USA’s best war museums.
Dr Bob’s Folk Art studio is one of many spaces that have opened in the Bywater district since the collapse of its industry in the latter half of the 20th century (Alamy)
A horse and carriage crosses Royal Street, one of the oldest streets in New Orleans and among those originally laid out by French colonists (Alamy)
The marching bands come out in force for Carnival season (Shutterstock)
Need to know
When to go
Summers get hot in southern Louisiana, so aim for spring or fall, or enjoy the region’s mild winters. New Orleans is well-known for its festivals too. Time your trip for annual celebrations such as Mardi Gras (Feb/Mar), the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (Apr/May) or the New Orleans Film Festival (Oct).
Getting there & around
British Airways (ba.com) offers direct flights from London Heathrow to New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International Airport from £563 return. The journey takes around 10 hours. The French Quarter and its surrounding neighbourhoods are compact and easy to walk. Ride-share apps allow you to travel between areas.
Where to stay
In the French Quarter, grande dame Hotel Monteleone (hotelmonteleone.com; from £100pn) is a Big Easy classic, known for its literary history and opulent Carousel Bar. The NOPSI (nopsihotel.com; from £72pn) is another great option, with its CBD location and glittering rooftop pool. Or try Hotel Peter and Paul (ash.world; from £102pn) in the Marigny district – this ultra-stylish boutique was converted from a church, convent, schoolhouse and rectory, and the onsite Elysian Bar is a top spot for one of NOLA’s famous cocktails.
The trip
The author travelled with support from New Orleans and Company (neworleans.com)
City Park spans 5.3 sq km – more than 1.5 times larger than New York’s Central Park (Alamy)
