A Historical View

New Orleans was built on a sandbar of the Mississippi river. It was a very poor location physically, but so critical as a transportation point that the city for a while was the largest port in the country. All the commerce between the Appalachians and the Rockies flowed through New Orleans. Through the years levees were built to shut out the water from the city. Meanwhile silt was being deposited in the bottom of the river. As a consequence the river got higher and higher which made it necessary to continually make the levees higher.

In the fifties when one sat on the front porch of a house on the West Bank just behind the levee, one could see ships from a dozen nations proceeding up or down the river far above the porch and the chairs.

New Orleans has always been noted as a corrupt place. In the forties the mayor was reported to own (or collect rent from) every brothel in the town (of which of course there were many). Every four years a reform candidate would come along, but quite rarely with any appreciably improvement. An agency called the Levee Board controlled the port and in effect controlled to a great degree the politics of the place. The Levee Board was so grasping that gradually 95% of the shipping was moved to Houston and/or other southern ports. By the sixties the wharves were deserted.
 

With advancing technology a new New Orleans port was created near the mouth of the river about 70 miles or so south of the city. Gradually commerce came back to New Orleans.

As most people know, New Orleans suffered a big change when Katrina came along. In fact Old New Orleans was gone forever. A strip behind the levee was high enough to escape the Flood - including the French Quarter, Audubon Park, Tulane University - what had been New Orleans in the early days before it spread into thousands of acres of marsh and swamp surrounding the area. Most of that had 10-15 feet of water; that included some very affluent areas, but the 9th ward (where the present writer lived long ago) suffered complete destruction.

Commerce continued after Katrina at the mouth of the river. The other primary industry is tourism; the French Quarter is slowly coming back to its old glory. But things will never be quite the same. Mardi Gras is a pale imitation of what is was in the old days. The real Old New Orleans is gone forever more.