Aching for Lost Friends, but Rebuilding With Hope

“Backwater.” Or “cypress swamp.” That is how antique maps of this city describe what eventually became its far eastern edge, an area that juts out from the rest of the old town, hugging Lake Pontchartrain, and home for centuries to little more than wildlife and trees.

This came as a surprise to me years ago, because by the time my family moved to eastern New Orleans in the early 1990s, it had long been drained and tamed and offered some of the most attractive undeveloped land anywhere in the city. More than anyone else, black middle-class families like mine flocked to it, architectural plans in hand, eager to escape the crime and congestion in the tight neighborhoods of older New Orleans. They wanted to build something new.

And they did, by the tens of thousands, creating the only major upscale black suburbs in the region, although a significant number of white and Vietnamese families lived there, too. If there was already a new New Orleans — in contrast to neighborhoods like the French Quarter — before Hurricane Katrina, then this was it: New Orleans East, as the locals call it, a collection of typically American suburbs for a most atypical American city, born sometime in the early 1970s.

About 20 minutes northeast of the French Quarter, in Lake Forest Estates, the house my family designed was bigger, better-built and higher than the one we left in our old neighborhood, so we thought we were safer, too.

We were wrong. During the storm, the Gulf of Mexico ended up in my parents’ living room. Deep water. Just poured right in to the first floor and stayed for a while.

Hurricane Katrina left most of New Orleans East in a shambles that way, although as a whole, it received less attention than needier black areas or equivalent white neighborhoods. In terms of size — both geographically and in population — it dwarfs the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview. It had close to 100,000 residents. As of May, about 30 percent of them were back.

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