HotmailOld worries may still plague new New Orleans
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 The last roll Nov. 27: Parsons, Kansas, is place that still processes Kodachrome color film, but Kodak has stopped making it, leaving this little town pondering a big question. NBC’s Bob Dotson reports. |
Bittersweet tourism
Katrina continues to bring pain.
On a recent day, Stanley Joyce, 68, stood in line at City Hall with hundreds of others seeking to challenge their new property assessments. The valuation on his house just outside the French Quarter more than doubled. He knows the city needs the tax revenue. But that’s a lot to swallow all at once, especially in a city whose waterlines are crumbling and streets are riddled with tire-swallowing potholes.
“If they want to go ahead and buy my house for the price that they assessed it for, I’d sell it to them tomorrow,” said Joyce, waving a manila folder with his property records.
Tourism is a bittersweet bright spot. The French Quarter survived Katrina, and the music and restaurant scenes continue to rebound. Some musicians are still missing in action. But Jazz trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, a co-founder of the renowned Rebirth Brass Band, says he and friends are busy as ever.
“It’s just so wonderful to be alive and swinging in New Orleans,” he says. “We’re going to be buried here, man. That’s for sure. That’s for DAMN sure.”
Hotels, restaurants return
Most of the city’s signature restaurants — Brennan’s, Emeril’s, Commander’s Palace — have reopened.
A 70-story Trump hotel and condominium tower is planned for the central business district.
“There will be a Trump Tower,” Cliff Mowe, one of The Donald’s co-developers, said last week during a visit to the city for meetings with project attorneys and real estate people.
The building is not scheduled for completion until 2010, but Mowe says developers have received several hundred reservations and deposits from prospective tenants — many for units costing nearly $2 million.
But as millionaires stake out lofty digs, the city continues to bleed jobs. Tourism is notoriously poor-paying. There are huge questions about where thousands of good-paying jobs needed to sustain the city’s rebound will come from.
Future safety questionable
Since Katrina, the oil industry has continued a shrinking that began in the 1980s. In November, Murphy Oil Corp. closed its New Orleans production office and shifted 100 employees to Houston. Chevron Corp. is building a new office across Lake Pontchartrain in St. Tammany Parish and will move 500 workers from New Orleans later this year.
Entergy Corp. was and likely will remain the city’s only Fortune 500 company, says Robert Hartwig, chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute. “It’s unlikely that it’s going to emerge ... as a major business center,” he says.
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Alex Brandon / AP New Orleans City Council member Oliver Thomas, center, announces his resignation after he pleaded guilty to taking $15,000 in bribes from a prominent businessman. |
And there, the jury is out.
Local businessman Aidan Gill doesn’t need Tarots or tea leaves to know what New Orleans will look like in 2015. All he has to do is read the local newspaper and history books: It’ll be just as corrupt and seedy as before Katrina, he believes.
“I am mystified at grown-up, mature, intelligent, educated people for talking about this ‘new New Orleans,”’ says the Irish native, who dispenses $45 haircuts and $600 alligator belts from his men’s haircuttery and haberdashery on Magazine Street.
“A simple way of putting it for the simple natives: You cannot make a gumbo using the same ingredients every day, and then at the end of every day expect it to taste any different.”
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