HISTORY52 - New Orleans

In a recent blog, “History of the Mississippi River,” I disclosed that Pat and I will be taking a steamboat cruise on the Mississippi in the future, starting in New Orleans.  We will have an extra day in New Orleans, so I thought I’d better do a blog on the history of that city. 

 

 

I’ll start with a short introduction, then talk about New Orleans’ landscape, the area’s indigenous people, Colonial New Orleans, the early-mid 19^thcentury, the Civil War and aftermath, the early 20^th century, World War II and after, Hurricane Katrina, and finish with a snapshot of New Orleans today.

My principal sources include “History of New Orleans,” Britannica.com; “History of New Orleans,” new orleans.com; “History of New Orleans,” “Mississippi River Delta,” “Chitimacha,” “New Orleans Outfall Canals,” Wikipedia; Landforms of the; Louisiana Coastal Plain, lsu.edu; “Why is New Orleans Vulnerable?”, people.uwec.edu; “A New Orleans Jazz History, 1895-19287,” nps.gov; and numerous other online sources.

Introduction

New Orleans is the most populous city in Louisiana, located along the Mississippi River, about 100 miles upstream from the river’s multiple outlets into the Gulf of Mexico in the Mississippi River Delta.  The city extends over 181 square miles, is a major port with miles of waterfront, and an economic and commercial hub, for the broader Gulf Coast region of the United States.

The heart of the city spreads around a curve of the Mississippi River - source of the nickname "Crescent City" - while extending to Lake Pontchartrain on the north.  Lake Pontchartrain connects to Lake Borgne, a broad opening to the Gulf of Mexico.  Lakes, marshlands, and bayous extend from the city in all directions.

The New Orleans area - from Baton Rouge to the Mississippi River Delta.

 New Orleans is world-renowned for its distinctive music, Creole cuisine, unique dialects, and its annual celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras.  The historic heart of the city is the French Quarter, known for its French and Spanish Creole architecture and vibrant nightlife along Bourbon Street.  The city has been described as the "most unique" in the United States, owing in large part to its cross-cultural and multilingual heritage.  Additionally, New Orleans has increasingly been known as "Hollywood South" due to its prominent role in the film industry and in pop culture.

A humid, semi-tropical climate in New Orleans is kept from extremes by surrounding waters.  While snowfall is negligible, rain occurs throughout the year.

Landscape

The floodplain of the Mississippi River, the continent’s largest river, draining 41% of the watershed of the United States, is the dominant physical feature in Louisiana, spanning a width of 50 miles at the latitude of Baton Rouge.  Louisiana’s coastal plain, formed over thousands of years, is a mixture of floodplain sediment landforms, including flat and low-lying tablelands, prairies, river valleys, natural levees, and coastal swamps and marshes that lie between the inland hill country and the Gulf of Mexico.

The Mississippi River Delta is the terminus for the tremendous amount of sediment transported over time by the Mississippi River where it reaches the Gulf of Mexico.

Louisiana’s low-elevation coastal floodplains are subject to periodic stream flooding and hurricane storm surges.  That makes New Orleans more vulnerable than most cities when it comes to flooding during storm surges.  The site of the city was originally very low in relation to sea level, but human interference has caused the city to sink even lower.  When New Orleans was being constructed, builders ran out of good land.  To make more room, engineers drained swamplands around the area so they could continue expansion.  This drainage led to the land surface sinking to a lower elevation in relation to sea level.  Present day New Orleans is, on average, six feet below sea level.

Moreover, New Orleans is situated between levees along the Mississippi River, and those around Lake Pontchartrain.  This situation leaves New Orleans with a “bowl” effect.  Once water gets into the city, it is very difficult to get it out. 

This is an elevation map of today’s New Orleans area - also showing the current canals built to drain flood waters from New Orleans northward into Lake Pontchartrain.  The old parts of New Orleans, including the French Quarter, were built on the natural levees created by the Mississippi River (yellow/orange areas along the river in the figure), well above sea level.  In contrast, much of the newer city lies below sea level (dark blue/purple areas).  Flooding of greater New Orleans can occur when a storm surge enters Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne, and the drainage canals.

 

Indigenous People - the Chitimacha

Chitimacha Native Americans began settling the bayou region of Louisiana around AD 500.  Archaeological finds suggest that the Chitimacha’s indigenous ancestors lived in south-central Louisiana for perhaps 6,000 years.

The Chitimacha established their villages in the midst of the numerous swamps, bayous, and rivers of the Atchafalaya Basin, where the Atchafalaya River and the Gulf of Mexico converge, about 150 miles west of the Mississippi River Delta.  The site, one of the richest inland estuaries on the continent, provided them with a natural defense to enemy attack and made their villages almost impregnable. 

The Chitimacha lived along the lower Atchafalaya River.

 

Chitimacha villages had about 500 inhabitants; dwellings were constructed from available resources, making walls from a framework of poles, plastering them with mud or palmetto leaves.  The roofs were thatched.

The Chitimacha raised a variety of crops, and agricultural provided the mainstay of their diet.  The women tended the crops.  They were skilled horticulturalists, raising numerous, distinct varieties of corn, beans, squash, and melons.  The women also gathered wild foods and nuts.  The men hunted for such game as deer, turkey and alligator.  They also caught fish.  The people stored grain crops in an elevated winter granary to supplement hunting and fishing.

Living by the waters, the Chitimacha made dugout canoes for transport.  These vessels were constructed by carving out cypress logs.  The largest could hold as many as forty people.  To gain the stones they needed for fashioning arrowheads and tools, they traded crops for stone with tribes to the north.  They also developed such weapons as the blow gun and cane dart.  They adapted fish bones to use as arrowheads.

The Chitimacha were distinctive in their custom of flattening the foreheads of their male babies.  They would bind them as infants to shape their skulls.  Adult men would typically wear their hair long and loose.  They were skilled practitioners of the art of tattooing, often covering their face, body, arms, and legs with tattooed designs.  Because of the hot and humid climate, the men generally wore only a breechcloth, and the women a short skirt.

Like many Native American peoples, the Chitimacha had a matrilineal kinship sysem, in which property and descent passed through the female lines (an individual was considered to belong to the same descent group as their mother). 

The Chitimacha were divided into a strict class system of nobles and commoners, and the two classes spoke different dialects.  Intermarriage between the classes was forbidden.

At the time of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas in 1492, historians estimate the population of the Chitimacha was about 20,000.  Although the Chitimacha had virtually no direct contact with Europeans for two more centuries, they suffered Eurasian infectious diseases, such as measles, smallpox, and typhoid fever, contracted from other natives who had traded with Europeans.  Like other Native Americans, the Chitimacha had no immunity to these new diseases, and suffered high fatalities in epidemics.

By 1700, when the French began to colonize the Mississippi River Valley, the number of Chitimacha had been dramatically reduced, to about 4,000 people.

Colonial New Orleans - French, then Spanish, then back to French

In 1682, French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, canoed down the lower Mississippi River from the mouth of the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico, where he claimed the entire Mississippi River basin for France.

French explorers, fur trappers, and traders arrived in the future New Orleans area by the 1690s.  By the end of the decade, the French made an encampment, and later built a small fort to control access to the Mississippi River at a site that would become New Orleans

In 1708, land grants were given to French settlers, and in 1718 New Orleans was officially founded by French colonial administrator Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville.

The first plan for the town, encompassed what is now the French quarter neighborhood, and consisted of 66 squares in a grid pattern, including today’s Jackson Square.

 

French diagram of New Orleans’ grid (1763), centered at Place d'Armes (today’s Jackson Square) along the Fleuve St. Louis (Mississippi River).

From its founding, the French intended New Orleans to be an important colonial city.  The city was named in honor of the then Regent of France, Philip II, Duke of Orléans.  In 1722, New Orleans was made the capital of the French Colony of Louisiana.

The first residents were a mixture of backwoodsmen, settlers from eastern Canada, convicts, Indian and African slaves, prostitutes, and indigents.  In a census taken in November 1721, New Orleans had a population of 470 people.

More respectable colonists began to arrive, but growth continued to be precarious.  The main economic staples grown in the vicinity of New Orleans were tobacco and indigo for export, and rice and vegetables for local consumption.  Naval stores were also exported.

In 1763, following Britain's victory over France in the Seven Years' War (French and Indian War), France lost all its colonies in America.  Britain took over French lands east of the Mississippi River.  A year earlier, to keep additional lands from the British, France had ceded its territory west of the Mississippi River - plus New Orleans - to the Spanish Empire

In New Orleans’ Spanish period, two massive fires burned the great majority of the city's buildings.  The Great New Orleans Fire of 1788 destroyed 856 buildings in the city.  In 1794, another fire destroyed 212 buildings.  After the fires, New Orleans transformed from a village-like environment of wooden houses to a city of sturdier brick buildings with urban infrastructure, largely due to the labor of slaves. 

Much of the 18^th-century architecture, still present in the French Quarter, was built during this time, including three of the most impressive structures in New Orleans - St. Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo (Spanish City Hall and now a museum), and the Presbytere (intended to house clergy and now a museum). 

Left-to-right, the Cabildo, St. Louis Cathedral, and Presbytere - three 18^th-century structures that anchor New Orleans's Jackson Square, stand as a visual monument to Spanish rule in Louisiana, 1851.

 

The Spanish Colonial architectural character of the French Quarter included multi-storied buildings centered around inner courtyards, large arched doorways, wrought-iron balconies, and above-ground cemeteries.  This Spanish influence on the urban landscape in New Orleans may be attributed to the fact that the period of Spanish rule saw a great deal of immigration from all over the Atlantic, including Spain and the Canary Islands, and the Spanish colonies.

Because the city is below sea level, interring a body six feet under is not a viable option (caskets literally float back up out of the ground).  So, New Orleans developed a unique cemetery culture of above-ground tombs.

 

In 1795 and 1796, the sugar processing industry became prominent.  The last twenty years of the 18^th century were especially characterized by the growth of commerce on the Mississippi, and the development of international interests, commercial and political, of which New Orleans was the center.  New Orleans functioned as an important trading and cultural partner with Cuba, Mexico, and beyond.   

The Spanish also liberalized policies governing slavery, which enabled the dramatic growth of a caste of free blacks.

In 1800, the Spanish ceded Louisiana back to France in exchange for territories in Tuscany, Italy, only to have the French leader Napoleon sell the entire Louisiana colony, including New Orleans, to the United States in the $15 million Louisiana Purchase, finalized on December 20, 1803.

Hoisting of American Colors over Louisiana.  Painting by Thure de Thulstrup depicting first raising of the USA flag after the Louisiana Purchase in New Orleans’ main plaza (now Jackson Square).

 

Early - Mid 19^th Century:  Americans Take Over

New Orleans’s population in 1803 was approximately 8,000, consisting of 4,000 whites, 2,700 slaves, and about 1,300 free persons of color.  Its prosperity was reflected in its 1803 exports, which had a value approaching $2 million and were bound mainly for American ports.  

Just one year after the Louisiana Purchase, the Haitian Revolution brought an influx of French-speaking immigrants to New Orleans, followed by another wave of immigrants from St. Domingue in 1809-1810. With French, French Canadian, Spanish, Creole, African, and new arrivals from Haiti and St. Domingue, the city started to become a cosmopolitan destination, while remaining notorious for its wildness and frontier-like feel. 

In 1807, the American Territory of Louisiana officially adopted “parishes” as the territory’s local area of organization, instead of the more common “counties.”  Under the prior years of French and Spanish colonization, with Catholicism the official religion, church parishes were common in Louisiana; that organization sustained through American times to today.  (The only other U.S. state with non-county organization is Alaska, which has regions separated into boroughs.  Today, Greater New Orleans has 10 parishes.)

Early in 1811, hundreds of slaves in New Orleans revolted in what became known as the German Coast Uprising.  The slave insurgency was the largest in U.S. history.  Rebels killed two white men; confrontations with militia, and executions after locally-held tribunals, killed 95 black people.

Meanwhile, the flow of goods between the Gulf of Mexico and port of New Orleans attracted smugglers, privateers, and pirates, with Jean Lafitte and his brother Pierre among the most infamous.  

Louisiana became a U.S. state in 1812.  Just a few months later, the U.S. went to war against Britain (War of 1812).  In 1815, U.S. General Andrew Jackson led an unconventional defense force (including the pirate Jean Lafitte) to victory over a large attacking British force, in the famous Battle of New Orleans, that ensured the U.S. victory over Britain.

Although no longer a French colony, residents in the new American city of New Orleans held tight to their Francophile ways, including language, religion, customs, a complex social stratum, and a penchant for good food.  The Creoles - locally born descendants of early inhabitants, many with French blood - created a sophisticated and cosmopolitan society that stood apart from nearly every other American city.  Vestiges of French colonial times persist to this day.

With the advent of Mississippi River steamboats, sugar and cotton came downriver enroute to global markets and New Orleans became a great commercial port.  The first steamboat to reach the city, in 1812, was appropriately named the New Orleans.  Steamboat numbers increased to 400 by 1840, and local commerce skyrocketed in value, reaching $54 million by 1835.  

The steamboat New Orleans in an 1856 engraving.

 

In 1838, the commercially-important New Basin Canal opened a shipping route from Lake Pontchartrain through uninhabitable swamp land to the booming uptown New Orleans.  The canal was used by river boats, steamers, and ocean-sailing craft.

In 1840, New Orleans ranked as the third-largest city in the nation, the largest in the South, and the fourth-busiest port in the world.  The city had started to expand to the south, across the Mississippi River.  It had a population of 102,193, of whom 58 percent were white, 23 percent were enslaved African Americans; and 19 percent were free people of color.  New Orleans’ two primary ethnicities, French-speaking Creoles and English-speaking Anglo-Americans competed for power.

But booming prosperity could not hide the fact New Orleans was the biggest slave trading center in the country.  In the 1840s, there were about 50 people-selling companies.  Some whites went to the slave auctions for entertainment.

 

Engraving of slave market held in the luxurious rotunda of the Saint Louis Hotel in New Orleans, 1842.

In spite of New Orleans rapid growth and commercial success, in 1849, Baton Rouge replaced New Orleans as the capital of Louisiana.  

Flooding after heavy rains and storm surges had plagued New Orleans for years.  In 1794, Spanish Governor Hector de Carondelet had a canal dug to speed the flow of runoff from the northern edge of the French Quarter into the natural Bayou St. John that drained northward into Lake Pontchartrain.  Gravity was the sole source of energy - and for urban drainage, it just wasn't enough.  North of the city, intervening ridges made it difficult for rainwater to move out of the city, since the water would have to flow over these ridges in order to be drained northward into Lake Pontchartrain.  Mechanized pumps would be needed to give gravity a boost, and steam engines would be the technology to do it.

With flood protection a huge concern, man-made canals were constructed by the mid-19^th century.  Drainage machines and pumps were built to lift the drained water over the high ridges and into the outfall canals.  On May 3, 1849, a Mississippi River levee breach upriver from New Orleans, created the Sauvés Crevasse flood, the worst flooding the city had yet seen, that overran the existing outfall canals and natural Bayou St. John - leaving 12,000 people homeless. 

The figure below (admittedly difficult to read) is map of New Orleans from 1849, showing the area of the city (dark center) inundated with flood water, up to six feet deep.  Note the then uninhabited swamp and forest area between the city and Lake Pontchartrain to the north.  Also, note the outfall drainage canals reaching from the city northward across that land.

 

Map of New Orleans from 1849, showing the part of the city (dark center) inundated with flood waters.

In 1850. telegraphic communication was established with St. Louis and New York City.  And in 1851, railroad connections to the outside world were begun, including the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern railway - the first railway outlet northward, later part of the Illinois Central.  In 1854, construction of a western outlet, now the Southern Pacific, was started.

German and Irish immigrants arrived in New Orleans in large numbers in the 1840s.  By 1850, the city’s total population had swelled to 116,375.  New Orleans, however, had not learned to cope with the health hazards of its mushrooming growth:  drinking water came from the river or cisterns; no sewerage system existed; drainage was deficient; and flooding was common after heavy rains.  The results were sporadic outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever, the worst of which was the yellow fever epidemic of 1853, accounting for more than 8,000 deaths.

In the mid-1800s, the highest concentration of millionaires in America could be found between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.  Their wealth came largely from sugar cane plantations, which depended on the labor of thousands of enslaved African Americans.  In the 1850s alone, Louisiana plantations produced an estimated 450 million pounds of sugar per year, worth more than $20 million annually

Mardi Gras, which had been celebrated for more than a century and a half, had remained a raucous but generally informal affair until 1857, when a group of Anglo-Americans introduced formal parades and elaborate floats organized by social organizations, setting the template for Mardi Gras for decades to come.

Note:  Mardi Gras was first recorded in the present-day United States in 1699, as New Orleans founder Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville Iberville sailed up the Mississippi River and made note of the midwinter feast in his journal as he camped at Point du Mardi Gras.  After that, French colonists celebrated Mardi Gras in Mobile, and, following its founding in 1718, in New Orleans, mostly in the form of public festivity and private costumed balls. 

The Civil War and Aftermath

In May 1862, during the U.S. Civil War, Union troops captured Confederate New Orleans, the largest city in the South, without a battle in the city.  New Orleans was thus spared the destruction suffered by many other cities of the American South.  Union troops occupied the region for the remainder of the Civil War, until 1865.

Afterward, a racially integrated Reconstruction-era government passed a progressive state constitution and sought to establish civil rights for emancipated slaves.  New Orleans again served as capital of Louisiana from 1865 to 1880, and the city became the center of dispute in the struggle between political and ethnic blocks for the control of government.

After the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white-supremacist forces steadily regained control, and racial subjugation and segregation ensued for a century to come.  (The 1896 Supreme Court decision on Plessy versus Ferguson, which legally sanctioned “separate but equal” policies, derived from a local New Orleans case)

After paying off heavy city debts incurred since the end of the Civil War, New Orleans began sorely needed municipal improvements such as railroad construction, port modernization, levee-building, and urban improvements.  The city made infrastructural advancements in municipal drainage, water treatment, sewerage, sanitation, public health, and urban beautification.  Locals also pioneered the preservation movement, starting with the French Quarter.

Meanwhile, New Orleans continued to expand, both to the south, across the Mississippi River, upriver, and to the north. 

As the population expanded northward toward Lake Pontchartrain, low-lying swamps were reclaimed by constructing shallow drainage ditches that fed into the newly created system of drainage canals.  However, the reduction in the groundwater table, as a result of the drainage and reclamation of swamps and marshland, produced significant loss of land elevation in the drained area.  (The lowering of land elevation continues today.)

The construction of the outfall canals had another major consequence.  By digging canals through the intervening ridges, the canals opened up storm surge avenues into the heart of New Orleans via Lake Pontchartrain.

By 1878, there were approximately 36 miles of drainage canals feeding into Lake Pontchartrain to remove rainwater from populated areas.  (Today there are 90 miles of covered drainage canals, 82 miles of open channel canals, and several thousand miles of storm sewer lines that feed into the system.)

New Orleans hosted the 1884 World's Fair, called the World Cotton Centennial.  A financial failure, the event is notable as the beginnings of the city's tourist economy.

By 1900, the modernizing city extended northward through the recently drained swamps to the shores of Lack Pontchartrain, and its population had increased to 287,104.

By 1900, New Orleans extended northward to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

 

Early 20^thCentury

Just after the beginning of the 20^th century, jazz began to emerge as part of a broad musical revolution encompassing ragtime, blues, spirituals, marches, and the popular fare of "Tin Pan Alley."  It also reflected the profound contributions of people of African heritage to this new and distinctly American music that would become New Orleans’ greatest cultural contribution to the nation and world.  The early development of jazz in New Orleans is most associated with the popularity of bandleader Charles "Buddy" Bolden, an "uptown" cornetist whose charisma and musical power became legendary.

 

In this circa 1905 photo, Charles “Buddy” Bolden is pictured standing second from left with his band.

 

In 1905, New Orleans suffered a devastating outbreak of yellow fever; it turned out to be the last yellow fever outbreak in the U.S. 

Then in 1909 and 1915, the city experienced major hurricanes, suffering significant damage and flooding in lowlands.

River steamboats, unable to compete with railroads, disappeared in the early 20^th century; the Port of New Orleans, attracting less railroad freight than Eastern ports, reached a low ebb shortly before World War I

When the U.S. entered the war in April of 1917, the military had to quickly mobilize a large force to engage in the massive conflict.  This took troops and money, and New Orleans contributed both.  America’s first known permanent tribute to U.S. servicemen in World War I, the Victory Arch, can still be seen in New Orleans in the Bywater neighborhood. 

The decade of the 1920s has come to be known as "The Jazz Age."  This was the time when jazz became fashionable, as part of the youthful revolution in morals and manners that came with the "return to normalcy" following World War I. Americans were now more urbanized, affluent, and entertainment-oriented than ever before.

The Jazz Age in New Orleans also saw the rise of a literary and artistic community.  The “French Quarter Renaissance” involved figures such as writers William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, artists Ellsworth Woodward and Caroline Wogan Durieux, and famed playwright Tennessee Williams, who took inspiration from the “rattletrap streetcar” that ran down Bourbon and up Royal Street as he penned his 1947 masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire.

In 1923 the Industrial Canal opened, providing a direct shipping link between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was a near-miss for New Orleans, with waters almost topping the levees, while heavy rain still flooded parts of the city. 

World War II and After

New Orleans played a critical role in the epic struggle of World War II.  Local shipbuilder Andrew Higgins, who had designed special vessels to navigate shallow Louisiana bayous, realized they would serve well to deliver soldiers and materiel onto shallow beaches.  Developed and produced in New Orleans, “Higgins Boats” were used on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and throughout the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific.  They were so successful that General Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed these landing craft vital to the Allied victory in the war.

After World War II, with the development of towboats and barges large enough to hold almost an entire trainload of cargo, New Orleans’ port grew to be second largest in the nation.

The 1947 Fort Lauderdale Hurricane hit the city in September 1947.  The levees and pumping system succeeded in protecting the city proper from major flooding, but many areas of new suburbs were deluged, and a local airport was shut down under two feet of water.

Following World War II, the suburbs saw great growth, and it was only in the post-World War II period that a truly metropolitan New Orleans comprising the New Orleans center city and surrounding suburbs developed.

New bridges and highways were built to access expanding suburbs; a new city government complex opened in downtown, and modern skyscrapers broke the city’s formerly modest skyline.  A new railroad terminal was constructed, streets were widened, railroad ground crossings were spanned with overpasses, and the 11-story City Hall, was built.

Also in the 1950s, petrochemical industries began locating in New Orleans, followed in the 1970s by oil refineries.

In 1956, a two-lane, 24-mile-long bridge across Lake Pontchartrain was opened, connecting New Orleans with the small town of Mandeville on the northern shore of Lake Pontchartrain.  In 1969, a parallel bridge was opened.  The two bridges are the longest continuous bridges over water in the world, and reduce driving time from Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore to New Orleans (and vice versa) by 50 minutes. (See the map at the beginning of this article.)

The Causeway across Lake Pontchartrain is 24 miles long.

 

In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement brought dignity and new opportunities to Black New Orleanians.  But, as elsewhere, resistance to school integration, white flight, and a reduced tax base left some inner-city neighborhoods impoverished and devastated.  In 1961, a meeting of the city's white business leaders publicly endorsed desegregation of the city's public schools.

In September 1965, the city was hit by Hurricane Betsy.  A breach in the Industrial Canal produced catastrophic flooding of the city's Lower 9^th Ward, as well as the neighboring towns of Arabi and Chalmette (see map below).

The neighborhoods of New Orleans.

 

In 1975 New Orleans opened the Louisiana Superdome, a stellar stadium for many sports, including several NFL super bowls.

An oil bust in the early 1980s, coinciding with the mechanization of port activity and the decline of well-paying shipping jobs, led to a regional recession and population exodus.  Movement of middle-class citizens to the suburbs, which had begun in the 1960s, continued in earnest.  High rates of crime and police corruption characterized the city into the mid-1990s.  By the late 1990s, a more diversified economy helped mitigate the losses.

A view across Uptown New Orleans, with the Superdome and the Central Business District in the background, 1991.

 

The city experienced severe flooding in the May 8, 1995, Louisiana Flood, when heavy rains suddenly dumped over a foot of water on parts of town faster than the pumps could remove the water.  Water filled up the streets, especially in lower-lying parts of the city.  Insurance companies declared more automobiles totaled than in any other U.S. incident up to that time.

Tourism boomed in the last quarter of the 20^th century, becoming a major force in the local economy.  Areas of the French Quarter and Central Business District, which were long oriented towards local residential and business uses, increasingly catered to the tourist industry.

Hurricane Katrina

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, in combination with storm surges, levee failures, and heavy rain, devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas.  The figure below shows the path of the powerful hurricane and the enormous death toll and cost.  Katrina landed east of New Orleans, driving a storm surge into manmade canals and breaching federal levees and floodwalls in numerous locations.  Hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes, not knowing when or if they would be able to return home.  Katrina was extensively covered in national and international news, but communication mishaps, fear, and lost links in the chain of command, made it difficult for New Orleans to get aid.

The path of Hurricane Katrina, with maximum storm surge, number of lives lost, and cost data.

 

Regions of flooding in New Orleans dur to Hurricane Katrina.

 

An aerial view of Hurricane-Katrina-flooded areas of New Orleans’ Central City and Central Business District, with the New Orleans Arena and the damaged Louisiana Superdome at center.

 

In the months and years following Katrina, many areas of New Orleans were rebuilt, with residents returning to their homes and businesses, but up to 40% of the people displaced, never came back.  Before Katrina (2000 census), the population of greater New Orleans was 1.34 million, having shown steady growth in the previous decades.  By the 2010 census, after Katrina, the population had dropped 11.1% to 1.19 million.  And by 2020, the population had only recovered to 1.27 million.

Hurricanes had not finished with New Orleans.  On August 29, 2021, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana, passing through New Orleans on the 16^th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  A citywide power outage and significant damage was reported.  The post-Katrina levee system successfully defended the city, but some suburbs without levees, or where levees were still under construction, flooded.

New Orleans Today

Today, New Orleans has a diverse economy with the main sectors being energy, advanced manufacturing, international trade, healthcare, and tourism.  Home to internationally-known universities, hospitals and a Bioinnovation Center (encourages biotech business), the city is also one of the country's top meeting and convention destinations.

Some of the largest companies in New Orleans include: Ochsner Health System, Tulane University, Woodward Design + Build, Entergy Corporation, Whitney Holding Corporation, Boh Bros Construction, and Superior Energy Services.

The deep-water Port of New Orleans handles a wide range of cargoes that include rubber, coffee, steel, containers, and manufactured goods.  Some 6,000 vessels and 500 million tons of cargo travel up and down the Mississippi River each year, including over half of the country's grain exports. 

The Port of New Orleans with the city center in the background.

 

In cultural matters, New Orleans is the scene of vibrant local music, a world-renowned culinary destination, historic neighborhoods. and a unique blend of cultures that has characterized the city from its very beginning.  Since 2005, the city has seen a surge in local enterprise, including many neighborhood arts and farmer’s markets.  Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, and countless other festivals continue to draw visitors to the Crescent City.

Tourism still remains one of the top revenue generators and contributes almost 43% of the city's sales taxes paid by visitors.  Tourism largely led the post-Katrina economic recovery and brings in an average of $9 billion per year.  More than 18.51 million visitors came to New Orleans in 2018, supporting hundreds of restaurants, hotels and tourism-related businesses and employing tens of thousands of workers.

 

Tourist buggies line up in front of Jackson Square at sunset.  The equestrian statue in the center of the photo is of Andrew Jackson, and was erected in 1856.