BECAUSE THE OLD New Orleans is no more, it could resurrect itself as the great new American city of the 21st century. Or as an impoverished tourist trap.
Founded by the French in 1718, site of the first U.S. mint in the Western United States, this one-time pride of the South, this one-time queen of the Gulf Coast, had been declining for decades, slowly becoming an antiquated museum.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday October 23, 2005 Home Edition Current Part M Page 2 Editorial Pages Desk 0 inches; 26 words Type of Material: Correction
French Quarter: A Sept. 4 article about rebuilding New Orleans ("A New New Orleans") referred to the city's Latin Quarter. It should have said French Quarter.
Now New Orleans must decide how to be reborn. Its choices could foretell the future of urbanism.
The sheer human tragedy -- and the fact that the Gulf Coast is critical to the nation' s economy as well as the Republican Party's base -- guarantee that there will be money to start the project. Private corporations, churches and nonprofits will pitch in with the government.
But what kind of city will the builders create on the sodden ruins?
The wrong approach would be to preserve a chimera of the past, producing a touristic faux New Orleans, a Cajun Disneyland.
Sadly, even before Hurricane Katrina's devastation, local leaders seemed convinced that being a "port of cool" should be the city's policy. Adopting a page from Richard Florida's "creative class" theory, city leaders held a conference just a month before the disaster promoting a cultural strategy as the primary way to bring in high-end industry.
This would be the easy, bankable way to go now: Reconstruct the French Quarter, Garden District and other historic areas while sprucing up the convention center and other tourist facilities. This, however, would squander a greater opportunity. A tourism-based economy is no way to generate a broadly successful economy.
For decades before this latest hurricane, public life, including the police force, were battered by corruption and eroded by inefficiency. Now Katrina has brought into public view the once-invisible masses of desperately poor people whom New Orleans' tourist economy and political system have so clearly failed.
Although the number of hotel rooms in the city has grown by about 50% over the last few years, tourism produces relatively few high-wage jobs. It encourages people to learn extraordinary slide trombone technique, develop 100 exquisite recipes for crawfish and keep swarms of conventioneers happy -- none of which are easy or unimportant tasks. But this economy does little to nurture the array of skills that sustain a large and diverse workforce. Contrary to Florida's precepts, having a strong gay community, lively street culture, great food, tremendous music and lively arts have not been enough to lure the "creative class" to New Orleans. The city has been at best a marginal player in the evolving tech and information economy.
