News Roundup

After Katrina, group keeps things humming along

The Dallas Morning News
By KAREN BROOKS
10:13 PM CDT on Saturday, September 24, 2005

NEW ORLEANS — Just a few hours after hell broke loose, bar owner Kenny Claiborne took his own security, and that of his friends, into his own hands.

A friend’s grocery store was being threatened by looters, so Mr. Claiborne kept a close watch — and a pistol nearby. After a few days, a panicked and dazed neighbor that he and the owner had always liked approached him looking for cigarettes.

“Let’s kick in the door,” he said.

Even in a city devoid of law and order, Mr. Claiborne thought, there was still a moral line that needed to be drawn — however tempting it may be to cross it in desperate times.

“Man,” Mr. Claiborne replied, “I’m here to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

It was a sign of a new order in the Marigny Triangle, a high-and-dry maze of angular, colorful blocks in the historic music district near the French Quarter. While New Orleans drowned, burned and teemed with chaos in the days after Hurricane Katrina, a tiny crew built a self-sufficient, post-apocalyptic society.

With no electricity or running water, no easily available food, and no gas for miles, a rag-tag group of strangers was forced to either trust one another with their lives or forge into the unforgiving darkness alone.

Mr. Claiborne compared their situation to the Stephen King novel The Stand, where pure intentions allow society to survive.

“You have to go into this with a good heart,” he said.

They included: Mr. Claiborne, 42, a philosophical singer and part-owner of the Mermaid Lounge; Josh Nascimiento, 28, a soft-spoken bartender at Marigny Brasserie; the “Alley Katz,” a pair of young lovebirds who camped out in an upstairs bar with their dogs; Jimbo, the Cafe Brazil owner with a beard to his belly; and a handful of others.

They refused to leave because they didn’t want their storied neighborhood to splinter and fall apart. And after three weeks of depending on one another and their own strengths, after moments of high spirits and bleak days of exhaustion, hope rises again in their little tangle of streets.

City officials hint that residents could return before month’s end. The residents were even planning to stick out Hurricane Rita.

“It was like a big, group psychological experiment,” Mr. Nascimiento said. “And we were the subjects.”

Brothers in arms

One of the oldest neighborhoods in New Orleans, the “Faubourg Marigny” is a mix of vegetarian and international restaurants, bars, shops, colorful Creole cottages and crazily angled streets.

The day the storm hit, Mr. Claiborne stood outside on the corner of Frenchmen and Chartres streets and watched Hurricane Katrina roll by. The neighborhood would be fine without electricity for a few days, he figured.

But the next day, the levee broke and Lake Pontchartrain poured into the city. New Orleans became a nightmare of desperate people, putrid water, abandoned animals, total darkness, fires, empty stores, smashed windows, rotting garbage and not nearly enough police or military to make the residents of Marigny feel safe.

Mr. Claiborne and Mr. Nascimiento became instant brothers in arms. They took a head count of who was staying around. They had about 30 in their ranks.

Then, they set about the task of survival.

When he wasn’t guarding his own life and home and those of others, Mr. Claiborne was cleaning out refrigerators and making sure that roof holes had buckets underneath them in case it rained.

Mr. Nascimiento knew where the outside ice machines were, so residents set off in groups, scaling the fence behind a friend’s bed-and-breakfast to scoop out ice that would have melted without electricity anyway.

They pooled their resources – batteries, water, canned beans and other food that wouldn’t spoil. Friends who evacuated had given Mr. Claiborne and some of the others keys to their homes, so they had access to the perishables in their refrigerators and the meats in their freezers for as long as they stayed cold.

About 10 people on Mr. Nascimiento’s block held a round-the-clock communal barbecue.

The city shut off the contaminated water supply in the first week, and another panic began. The group fanned out to identify and label area swimming pools. The bad water from the dirty pools was collected to use in toilets. They bottled up clean water in other pools for bathing.

Absolutely no “precious” bottled water could be used to bathe. In the slimmest days, they rinsed their hands with Coke or champagne and then washed off the stickiness with sanitizer.

Even when relief workers brought bottled water, ice and military meals ready to eat, public safety was still a concern. As the city spun out of control, the triangle was cut off from the rest of the city and the outside world. The only information coming in was rumors of home invasions and robberies.

Most of the neighbors were armed, some of them carrying their weapons in full view.

Crystal Embrey, 27, and Josh Moody, 26, their house flooded out, moved into the Alley Katz bar, upstairs from the Blue Nile bar across Frenchman Street. They laid their bedding on the stage and their supplies on the pool table.

They sat on their balcony in quiet vigilance, protecting their home from intruders with a can of pepper spray and a slingshot. The real reason they hadn’t left yet, they admitted, was because “we’re never going to see another adventure like this.”

Music and movies

At the beginning of the second week, federal agents came around and asked Mr. Claiborne and Mr. Nascimiento if they were armed. When Mr. Claiborne said yes and started to point to his weapon, they spread him out on the ground for a search and took the gun.

“Are you taking everyone’s gun?” he asked the agent.

The agent answered yes.

Mr. Claiborne, relieved, replied: “Man, I’ve been waiting for you.”

Finally, it seemed, the city was turning a corner, and so were they. Mr. Nascimiento’s neighbor, a friendly redhead named Kae, had access to a generator owned by a friend who had evacuated.

It ended up in Mr. Claiborne’s living room, and he set up two-foot speakers on the balcony and began blaring music over his neighborhood. He called his operation “Radio Marigny.”

A slow, easy rhythm of life began to descend on the Marigny Triangle. Food runs were on a regular schedule; the nights were filled with laughter and music. The days had become numbers: Day 1 was when the storm hit. Day 5, when things were as bad as they could get, everyone was afraid and hungry and sleep-deprived.

But by Day 10, even helicopters pounding overhead didn’t drown out Movie Night. The neighbors splurged, running the generator so they could watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? That the movie ends in a great flood was lost on none of them.

They used “three motivated guys and a pickup truck” to pick up trash off the streets in the cool morning hours and take it to the city dump. They had a veterinarian and Mr. Nascimiento’s dad, a doctor in North Carolina, on call to give them medical advice.

During this time, they let themselves dream about Mardi Gras, about how nice it was to have the city to themselves.

They could assure friends and family checking in by cellphone that the worst was over, that the streets were safe and that they would take care of their animals.

Still, the city’s despair and grim future were undeniable. Mr. Claiborne vowed to move to San Francisco with his girlfriend, lamenting that, “New Orleans will never be any better again than it is right now.”

Mr. Nascimiento said that while he wanted to stay, “everything is so uncertain” about the future.

Military police carrying assault weapons began stopping by several times a day, each time threatening arrest and forced evacuation.

On Movie Night, the U.S. Border Patrol swung by to check on them, promising water and ice.

“We’re not enforcing any mandatory evacuations,” an agent said. “But at some point, someone else will. It’s not us; it’ll be someone who comes after us.”

Then the agent looked up at the big sheet Crystal had painted that read, “We [heart] Radio Marigny.”

“Hey, I know you guys! Can you play some Eagles?”

Keeping the hope alive

By the third week, hope began to edge its way into the Marigny Triangle.

Around Day 18, the group heard that electricity would soon come back to the French Quarter, Garden District, Central Business District and other nearby neighborhoods.

By Day 20, it had been nearly a week since anyone asked them to evacuate. And they began reflecting on what their unavoidable social experiment taught them.

“I don’t feel like a young man anymore,” Mr. Nascimiento said. “I had a lot of purpose the first five days after the storm.”

The lights will come back on in the Marigny Triangle soon. The bars will reopen, and the neighbors who trickled out will come back.

When that happens, Radio Marigny will keep broadcasting – if not from the balcony, then in the memories of those who kept the neighborhood alive while the rest of the city was falling apart.

And Mr. Claiborne, filled with the confidence that comes with the light at the end of the tunnel, said he may be around for the renaissance, too.

“I feel like I’m fiddling while Rome burns, but I’m not trying to be Nero,” he said. “This is the spirit of New Orleans, and we need to keep it alive.”