Upbeat notes from a city that's down but not out

Many of New Orleans' tourist spots have survived, and locals vow their beloved town will bounce back too.

By Chris Erskine, Times Staff Writer

New Orleans — Marguerite smith has seen a few sights in her 34 years in the French Quarter, but the jailbreak at the buggy barn ranks among the most memorable.

To hear Smith tell it, the carriage horses and mules were hungry and jittery after being cooped up during Hurricane Katrina. After the storm passed, they kicked down the doors and dashed — or walked, some of the older ones — to the nearby Mississippi River in hopes of finding food and a modicum of freedom. Like many Quarter residents even in the best of times, they were ornery and in no mood for authority figures.

"You shoulda seen it, the sheriffs chasing the mules through the dog park," said Smith, a painting contractor and musician.

The posse eventually caught up with the herd near the riverfront warehouses at the Governor Nicholls Street Wharf.

In the aftermath of Katrina, those who are here are as full of kick as those mules, stubbornly insisting they can rebuild a tourist infrastructure to be better than ever.

"New Orleans will bounce back," said John Hyman, who has lived in the Quarter for 30 years. "There is no question the French Quarter will bounce back. A few chimneys were knocked to the roof.... There was no high water."

A tour last weekend of New Orleans attractions, large and small, found them largely intact, spared the sort of wrath that destroyed so much of the rest of the city. At first blush, New Orleans' hospitality industry appears poised to find its way out of the barn — and maybe even to bring back the 10 million visitors and 93 trade shows it hosted last year.

New Orleans has always been a strange location for a tourist mecca, plopped between a lake you can't drink and a river you can't swim. Know where the city gets its drinking water? The septic end of the Mississippi. It's a hearty populace that can drink the silt and insecticide flushed from nine agricultural states. It's a hearty horse that can slurp such stuff, then pull a carriage full of tourists through the sweaty brick streets.

Longtime haven for misfits, malcontents, literary geniuses and trumpet prodigies, the city is better suited to mirth than self-pity. So far, the word on the streets is mostly positive. >>>continued

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