NEW ORLEANS — As cars trundle through a maze of narrow potholed residential streets, they are followed by the watchful eyes of youths gathered on corners outside small shops and on stoops of dilapidated buildings and houses.
Two miles from the downtown New Orleans business district, the Central City neighborhood has long been the scene of drug traffickers' turf wars, but since Hurricane Katrina, it has emerged as the epicenter of an increase in crime.
Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco dispatched 100 Louisiana National Guard members and 50 state troopers to New Orleans on Tuesday after five teenagers were shot to death here last weekend. Another youth was slain in the same area and a second critically wounded Tuesday.
There have been 54 homicides in New Orleans since the beginning of the year, 37 of them since April 1. About a quarter of the homicides were in Central City, according to police.
A large part of the neighborhood escaped the flooding that ravaged most of New Orleans, so it was inhabitable much sooner than other neighborhoods. Although the overall population in New Orleans is down by more than half, community leaders estimate that Central City's population has swelled from around 19,000 residents pre-Katrina to between 25,000 and 27,000 today.
Jim Singleton, a former City Council member who grew up there, attributed some of the neighborhood's current problems to newcomers and outsiders who use Central City as a drive-through drug mart.
"Central City gets a bad name because people bring their dirty linen into our area and they want to wash it in our area," said Singleton.
But there were troublemakers who terrorized the neighborhood before the storm, and Singleton said they are "the ones you don't want to come back. But they are the ones with the resources."
"The thugs came back first to take advantage of other people," said Craig Cuccia, executive director of Cafe Reconcile, a nonprofit group that provides young people with on-the-job experience in restaurants.
Multicolored, box-shaped wooden shanties, abandoned since the storm, line block after block of Central City, together with vacant lots.
On other streets, close-standing, dilapidated shotgun-style homes are perched on raised brick piers, with front porches and stoops that jut out against the sidewalk or street.
Nearby are sprawling barracks-style tenements that today stand empty, windows broken and boarded up. C.J. Pete and B.W. Cooper, two such multistory public housing complexes, have been scheduled by the federal housing authority for demolition. For now, however, they make attractive lairs for illicit activities and squatters, residents said.
On LaSalle Street, the once-famous Dew Drop Inn and Hotel, which hosted stars like Ray Charles during the days of segregation, is a derelict shell next to an abandoned hip-hop fashion shop and a shuttered grocery store.
Winnie Rainey, 43, a cook at Cafe Reconcile in Central City, said: "The gangsters have nothing to live for. All they know is to sit on the corner and sling dope. They can't go and sit inside and have a meal and watch TV like normal children, so they go out on the street corner."
Stanley Meyers, director of the Central City Housing Development Corp., said that before the storm, there were at least three high schools in Central City.
Today, they are all closed, and the only public education facility for children is an elementary school.
Playgrounds have become trailer parks. And the neighborhood's few parks -- grassy fields devoid of trees, flowers or benches -- have become off-limits for leisure, community leaders said, because drug dealers and gangsters had made them their domain.
Teenagers and young adults gathered on the streets of Central City said they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.
"We just be chilling," said Dwayne Holmes, a heavyset 16-year-old who sat on a stoop outside a house near the Discount Supermarket. "We don't be selling nothing. We just be hanging on the corner."
"You don't have to be selling nothing to be sitting in front of the store," an indignant Eric Johnson, 18, hastened to add. "It's just a misconception. That's how society feel about you."
Holmes and Johnson were joined by four other youths, all dressed in black pants and white shirts or T-shirts. Their chatter was constantly interrupted by the rap lyrics and buzz of their cellphones.
The teenagers said they attended McMain High School, a magnet school outside of Central City. They said they were familiar with the crime epidemic but it didn't scare them.
"I'm not afraid; been around too long to be scared," said Johnson.
A few blocks away at the corner of Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and Jackson Avenue, a young man who gave his name as Derrick Sam sat perched on the curb.
He said he and his friends had no choice but to hang out at the street corner each day.
