New Orleans La

New Orleans' black population dropped 57% a year after Hurricane Katrina, while the white population declined 36%, according to an analysis by three demographers of new U.S. census data that confirm the disaster's disproportionate impact on the city's racial composition. Billed as the "first full picture" of the mass migration after the hurricane, the analysis also found that New Orleanians displaced to Houston and other cities were more likely to be black, uneducated and poor.

New Orleans Shortly after arriving in New Orleans in March 2006, I took a wrong turn and headed over a bridge into the city's Lower 9th Ward, which was still largely deserted after being devastated by Hurricane Katrina. A knot tightened in my stomach. I had unintentionally broken my self-imposed rule of not traveling into an unfamiliar area late at night. Suddenly, something darted in front of my car. A small dog, I thought. It turned out to be a rat. Another one followed shortly afterward.

Against a backdrop of criticism over the slow pace of the federal rebuilding effort two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, President Bush marked the storm's anniversary Wednesday with an optimistic message. "This town is coming back," he said at a charter school in one of the city's most flood-ravaged neighborhoods. "This town is better today than it was yesterday, and it's going to be better tomorrow than it was today."

There was a time when New Orleans' Canal Street was the Champs Elysees of the American South -- a smart stretch of glitzy stores, bright lights and glamorous theaters. Today, it is a tired place, home to T-shirt shops and empty storefronts. Enter Roger Wilson, 50, a New Orleans native and star of "Porky's." Wilson left town when he was 14, but he was called back after the storm. First, he coordinated private relief efforts.

Before katrina, John Knost hadn't really invented anything -- unless you count the foam insulation he stuck on the edges of his apartment's metal spiral stairs. They keep visitors from bruising their heads. But last year, he grew frustrated with the federal government's plans to make New Orleans safer. Raising houses, raising levees -- it seemed like the same old, same old, he said. Knost, 61, (above) is no engineer, but he had worked on the business side of the construction industry.

It's difficult to nail down the last time this antique city was considered cutting edge. Was it the 1850s, when a coffeehouse owner created the Sazerac cocktail? Or perhaps the 1940s, when a teenager named J.M. Lapeyre invented the automatic shrimp peeler? Whatever the answer, New Orleans was not defined by its spirit of innovation in the decades preceding Hurricane Katrina.

Elizabeth teel galante says there is a reason New Orleans never embraced the "green building" movement before Hurricane Katrina: The economy was so slow that very little was being built. Today, New Orleans needs to rebuild thousands of homes, and Galante's nonprofit, the Santa Monica-based Global Green USA, has stepped in to push aggressively for environment-friendly building practices. The group's most visible project is in the Holy Cross section of the Lower 9th Ward.

Rising from a familiar morass of 9th Ward wreckage is a cluster of modest, brightly painted new homes. More are being built every day by a seemingly endless workforce of out-of-town volunteers. The music today is mostly saws and hammers. But when this project is completed, the majority of the subsidized, low-income homes will be occupied by New Orleans musicians. Musicians' Village is an unprecedented effort to sustain that diffuse and informal organism that is the New Orleans music scene.

Developer sean cummings envisions miles of parks stretching along the east bank of the Mississippi River. He envisions daring new architecture to complement the old: an amphitheater, cruise ship terminals, a hotel, a chapel. His design team has sketched pictures of elegant, glassy mid-rise residential buildings overlooking the historic, bohemian backstreets of the Bywater District.