A tale of two neighborhoods in one city

updated 9:55 p.m. ET Oct. 17, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - Seven weeks after the storm, the signs tell the story of two different roads to recovery.

“Help!” “Help!” scream the spray-painted messages still scrawled on the side of a barber shop on the way to the drawbridge separating the Lower Ninth Ward from the rest of New Orleans.

Six miles west, in the neighborhood called Uptown, a smiley face peers out from a poster saying, “Creole Creamery Now Open. Eat Ice Cream. Be Happy.”

From her porch on South Salcedo Street, Sheila Gregory looks toward the curb and sees a waist-high mound of trash hauled out by Church of Christ volunteers. They carried out Oriental carpets and books sheathed in muck, then began tearing down walls covered floor to ceiling with green-black mold, making a week’s worth of progress in a matter of hours.

Over the bridge in the Ninth Ward, no volunteers helped Edwin Jackson and his friend, Melanie Slack, as they carried whatever their arms could hold from Jackson’s house on Praro Street. The items included his high school yearbook and granddaughters’ pictures. Jackson had to talk his way in past a roadblock.

Long before Hurricane Katrina came and went, much more than a drawbridge separated these two neighborhoods and their people. Color, class, misconceptions, fear — differences of the heart and mind, as much as the pocketbook, made these two places two very different “New Orleans.”

Now there are other differences. In Uptown, a booming ballet of bulldozers scoops up tree limbs and drywall as workmen in hardhats direct traffic. Homeowners have hired crews to clear out and sanitize houses. Smiles have returned, along with some optimism.

In the Ninth Ward, an eerie silence prevails as residents slowly arrive home. Officials only allowed them back in beginning this past Wednesday, so long as they’re gone each night by sundown. A few insurance adjusters roam deserted roads, but there are no humming generators nor pile after pile of debris awaiting curbside pickup. Tears are still here, and much concern about the future.

Differences of opinion
There also are differences of opinion regarding how the city should go about starting over and what has happened so far.

In both neighborhoods, people wonder whether the city isn’t ignoring them while paying attention to others. And there’s a question they share: Will the comeback in New Orleans be fair for all?

Their houses are both still standing.

Gregory’s is a one-story peach cottage in a middle-class slice of Uptown — nothing nearly so fancy as the columned mansions on either side of the streetcar line along St. Charles Avenue.

Jackson’s is a red-brick house that once was his father’s, with a second story, wrapped in vinyl siding, that he added himself.

Whether they will be saved is another matter.

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