The mayor, who took heat in 2005 for his own erratic performance in preparing and evacuating the city, warned holdouts that looting would not be tolerated. Anyone arrested for looting would be transported directly to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
"You'll go directly to the big house," Nagin said. "God bless you if you go there."
In the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, looters took advantage of a lack of police and Guardsmen to break into stores and homes. Some police officers fled their posts.
"We assure you that's not going to happen again," Police Chief W.J. Riley said of the looting and AWOL officers. "We are better equipped and a lot more knowledgeable this time."
Nagin said the only "reports of resistance" were in the Uptown area, the city's highest ground, where holdouts lingered. The area is home to a mix of rich and poor, white and black, and showed flickers of defiance even as the rest of the city returned to its post-Katrina ghost-town state overnight.
Landscape architect Louis Vitrano, 47, parked his car in a grocery lot that is the highest point in the neighborhood, then hustled back to his house on Neron Place, a side street lined with mature oaks and turn-of-the-century homes.
Vitrano's place is 103 years old, a handsome, two-story cottage that was filled with two feet of water during Katrina. Vitrano had evacuated then, and while he was gone, the flood ruined everything.
This time, he said, he was staying to run the generator to pump the water out. "I'm going to solve a whole lot of problems by staying," he said.
As it emptied, New Orleans outwardly looked little different than the half-finished recovery project it has been since Katrina's onslaught. In some cases, the freshly-painted old houses were boarded up with the same plywood used during the 2005 storm.
A trip down a major thoroughfare like St. Charles or Claiborne Avenue was a study in absence. Police squad cars and fire trucks were largely the only vehicles. On side streets, diehards sawed plywood for storm windows, drank beer or just watched the eerily calm sky that preceded the billowing storm clouds far to the south.
In the French Quarter, most bars and restaurants were shuttered. Mr. Chubby's Cheesesteak had a line of hungry patrons watching cooks grill meat and onions dripping with melted cheese.
Owner Eric Cohen, a Philadelphia native, said he and his staff planned to sleep at the restaurant and stay open every day, whatever the storm does. He said he had ample supplies of beef, bread, onions and beer.
"Bring it on," he said of Gustav. "I'm not going anywhere."
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david.zucchino@latimes.com
richard.fausset@latimes.com
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Times staff writer Stephen Braun in Washington contributed to this report.
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On latimes.com
Fleeing Gustav
For more images from the massive evacuation of the Gulf Coast, visit our website at latimes.com/gustav.
