Levee Town

Weather can wipe out cities forever. It's what happened to America's first city, after all, as a visit to Chaco Canyon northeast of Gallup, New Mexico, attests. At the start of the thirteenth century it got hotter in that part of the world, and by the 1230s the Anasazi up and moved on. As the world now knows, weather need not have done New Orleans in. There are decades' worth of memos from engineers and contractors setting forth budgets for what it would take to build up those levees to withstand a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane. The sum most recently nixed by Bush's OMB--$3 billion or so--is far less than what the Pentagon simply mislays every year.

New Orleans has bounced back before--though after the Civil War the city never really returned to its former glory. According to Lyle Saxon's Fabulous New Orleans, the last great social season came in 1859 with the largest receipts of produce, the heaviest and most profitable trade the city had ever done. The total river trade that year was valued at $289,565,000.

On April 24, 1862, New Orleans fell to the federal forces. Farragut's fleet broke through the blockade at the river's mouth. Soon thereafter federal ships passed the two forts below New Orleans. Tumult and confusion prevailed. To keep them out of enemy hands, 12,000 bales of cotton were rolled from the warehouses and set on fire. Warehouses crammed with tobacco and sugar were torched. Ships on the Mississippi, loaded with cotton, were burning too, and the sparks jumped to the steamboats. The Mississippi was aflame. As Saxon puts it, "gutters flowed molasses: sugar lay like drifted snow along the sidewalks." New Orleans had been sacked by its own people. The years of poverty and misery began.

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