2 years later, New Orleans a mix of good and bad

NEW ORLEANS — It is hurricane anniversary season in New Orleans, and the beleaguered city is threatened with a new inundation: a tidal wave of reports, assessments, stock-takings, prognostications and tongue-lashings.

On Wednesday, New Orleans will have endured exactly two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, and the moment will be marked by ceremonies solemn and silly, in keeping with the city's twin masks. President Bush, an object of lingering if unfocused resentment here, is expected to drop in. In the meantime, nothing in the city's halting march back is too small, or too large, to be examined in earnest prose and PowerPoint presentations raining down from Washington and points north, sometimes accompanied by overnight politicians or think-tankers vowing to bravely fight on.

The condition of the swamps, the progress of the poor, arsenic in the schoolyards, awful conditions at the jail, great conditions at the hotels, the generosity of corporate donors, the parsimony (or beneficence) of the government, the wisdom of the bond-rating agencies, the in-migration of the young, the out-migration of the old, the hopeful (or hopeless) schools: all of it is grist for the report-making, assessment-mongering frenzy in a slow August news season.

The bewildering range of outlooks adds up to a giant question mark, a collective split personality. Is the city recovering, standing still or sinking back?

What the reports seem to suggest, taken together, is that there is no useful yardstick, and no clear indicator of whether the arrow points down or up. Signs of progress and hope in latter-day New Orleans are always accompanied by their opposites.

Downtown blocks are moribund while Magazine Street, in the Uptown section, is humming. The Lower Ninth Ward remains a wasteland, and the Gentilly neighborhood is reawakening. Crime is up, but so is tourism. The medical district in central New Orleans remains empty today, but in an announcement this week, the Department of Veterans Affairs appeared committed to re-establishing a hospital there.

An anniversary-assessment briefing here Friday by the state agency that has helped organize the halting reconstruction, the Louisiana Recovery Authority, was typical of this Jekyll-and-Hyde picture. Grim and hopeful news, reams of figures promising and discouraging, were dispensed in equal and bewildering bursts.

All of it was accompanied by the muffled sounds of drilling and hammering in a building housing the state university's dental school, which sustained severe flooding in the hurricane and is preparing to reopen this week. Many of the construction workers were Hispanic, the immigrants legal or otherwise who have played a critical role in this city's reconstruction.

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