New Orleans Then: When I finally floated up to my house on Sept. 11, 2005, I was relieved to discover the floodwater had already receded enough to allow the first floor to begin drying out. The high water mark ringing the walls showed the extent to which the flood had reached inside, but this first visit gave me hope at least that there would be something to rebuild.
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New Orleans Then: After the floodwaters were finally drained away, the streets of Mid-City were a tattered mess. Seemingly endless blocks were littered with ruined cars, whatever flotsam had drifted by and a crust of dried filth that crunched under my shoes. People were so scarce at times that spotting a solitary figure walking a block or two away became noteworthy. The picture above was taken on my block of South Scott Street two months after the storm hit.
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New Orleans Then: This entry is purely for fun, but how could I leave out my faithful companion, the Amazing Dr. Watson? He was with me for the entire Katrina experience related in “A Season of Night.” If you can’t have electricity for an extended period of time, I highly recommend having a big, intelligent dog along for the ride. Above, Watson is pictured keeping watch from my porch one blacked-out night with an oil lamp.
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New Orleans Then: Ginger is the name I gave to the dog I eventually brought in from the streets in November 2005. For weeks, she had followed me from a distance when I walked my Labrador, the Amazing Dr. Watson, around the ruined blocks. When I finally brought her in, she turned out to be extremely jumpy and skittish, fearful of any loud noise and given to preemptive cowering. She was covered in scars and welts, and proved adept at finding hiding spots. Above, pictured in December of that year, she is attempting to hide in an empty hearth during a visit to a friend’s house.
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Miss Anne, my 80-something-year-old neighbor on South Scott Street, furnished the title for the second chapter of the book when she described to me what happened to her after the levees failed. Above is the photo I snapped of us that day while holding the camera out with my arm.

New Orleans Then: Finn McCool’s Irish Pub was a touchstone for the Mid-City neighborhood prior to Katrina. A trio of Irish expats opened the place the same year I moved to the neighborhood, taking over what had been a dismal dive and transforming it into one of the most inviting pubs in New Orleans. It took something like eight feet of floodwater after the levees failed and was savagely looted to boot. I took the photo above on Sept. 11, 2005 as I floated slowly toward my house.
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New Orleans Then: Above is a picture I took on Sept. 11, 2005, two weeks after Katrina struck and the day I first made it back into New Orleans. Pictured is my friend Keith O’Brien, and here he is trudging slowly through the floodwater as we made our way to check out what might have become of my house. We are traveling along Jefferson Davis Parkway, one of the major streets in Mid-City. Check out an excerpt from Chapter 1 to read a short description of that journey through the swampy wasteland of my neighborhood at that time.
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New Orleans Then: Two blocks from my house is Mandina’s, a Creole restaurant that opened just after Prohibition was lifted in 1933 in an old corner grocery. The business had expanded into a collection of small dining rooms added over the generations that followed and the rooms were always crowded. Old folks piled in early for dinner and after church on Sundays. Men in ties crammed the doorway for weekday lunches. The waiters knew from countless repetition which ones wanted martinis and which ones wanted Old Fashioned cocktails and would deliver them even before the garlic-smeared French bread arrived. There were neon signs in the windows facing the streetcars on Canal.

When the levees failed after Katrina, the floodwater rose high enough inside Mandina’s dining room to cover the bar. Things looked bleak. I walked by one day in the fall of 2005 to find a work crew gutting the place and a 10-year-old boy perched on the ruined bar tossing bottles of damaged liquor into a garbage barrel.

But Mandina’s family owners said all along that they were committed to reopening the Mid-City restaurant, and before there was much in the way of electricity restored to our neighborhood they hoisted a banner high up on the building facing a mostly empty Canal Street that read, “We Shall Return.”

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New Orleans Then: The gigantic root beer mug over the local hamburger stand Ted’s Frostop was a commercial icon along South Claiborne Avenue for generations. Katrina’s storm winds upended the sign, planting it in the parking lot of the flooded and wrecked burger joint.
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New Orleans Then: A crash-landed helicopter, marooned boats and scattered detritus made the banks of Bayou St. John look like a battlefield in the wake of the flood.
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New Orleans Then: Neighbors sometimes left heartening messages on the plywood they used to board up their flooded homes before they could return.
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