A Neighborhood Staggers to Its Feet
NEW ORLEANS — Come hell or high water -- and there's been plenty of both around here -- Summer Anderson was going to give birth in her beloved New Orleans. Even her insurance adjuster, who is not in the habit of persuading clients that their homes are uninhabitable, told her to stay away. You're too pregnant, he told her. There's nothing here for you.
"But the house was in good shape," she said. "And there's no place like home."
Two weeks ago, she and her husband, Mark, returned from exile. And Thursday night, she brought her baby home from the hospital. Isabelle Cortina Anderson, all 8 pounds, 15 ounces of her, became the 12th resident of Elysian Fields Avenue, which was home, not long ago, to hundreds of families.
Elysian Fields is not the worst street in town; there are houses, not far away, still entombed in 10-foot piles of mud left when the levees broke after Hurricane Katrina. Nor is it the best street; it is not in the French Quarter or Uptown, neighborhoods that have declared themselves open for business.
It is just another street clinging to life. There are suggestions of hope. But a walk down the avenue provides a vivid reminder that the exhausting slog has only begun here -- a reminder that New Orleans, when it is a city again, will be smaller, wealthier and whiter, none of which is welcome news to many of those who loved it.
When Isabelle came home, Summer's mother had pork chops simmering on the stove. Two-year-old Luke was more interested in the red bicycle he had received as a consolation prize than in meeting his new sister.
For a moment, it was easy to look past the spray-painted Day-Glo "X" left by a search-and-rescue team on the front door, surrounded by hieroglyphics indicating that they had found no bodies inside. It was easy to forget that a few blocks away, there was a car sitting in the limbs of a tree.
The Andersons -- she a 29-year-old teacher whose career is on hold, he a 31-year-old dentist -- are pioneers. Of the 438 homes on Elysian Fields, six are occupied. Of the 131 businesses, 13 are open, if you count the enterprising man selling barbecue in a parking lot. Of the 11 churches, one is open.
And that is where the walk begins, at the northern tip of Elysian Fields, in a small chapel where the priest will run the organ off a diesel generator this morning; where the faithful, when they come at all, come to cry.
