Read The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story for Free Online Page A

a community and all that it entails. I had been a woman without a country—or at least a city—for too long.
    It was time for me to dig in and if there was ever a place that needed civic involvement, New Orleans was it. The only problem was that it had been so messed up for so long that it was hard to know where to begin. The school system had been looted by its board and was on the brink of being taken over by the state; classes were conducted in buildings that had been condemned. The administration of the previous mayor, Marc Morial, like those of his predecessors, had been rife with corruption, and the police department had a similar history. Since I’d been in New Orleans, officers had been prosecuted for crimes ranging from being on the take to kidnapping, rape, and murder. Violent crime, most of it crack-and-gang driven, was rampant; the day we closed on the house there had been 170 murders so far, and there were four months left in the year.
    Worse, amid this seemingly intractable mess, much of the white population, in the minority since the late 1970s, had either given up, or had never been involved in the wider life of the city in the first place. There were notable, hardworking exceptions, but among many of the so-called ruling classes, a complacency had set in that allowed most of the city’s institutions—other than their beloved Mardi Gras organizations called krewes—to rot. When controversial black councilwoman Dorothy Mae Taylor introduced an ordinance in 1992 that essentially required the integration of the krewes (they are private social clubs but parade on public streets), it was the first time I had seen a certain segment of the population muster outrage over anything. When I’d tried to raise money for the housing project newspaper among some of the same folks—most of whom lived within walking distance of the now-razed project and who would have been among the chief beneficiaries of a productively engaged young population—I was roundly rebuffed, usually with the line “I pay my taxes.” When Taylor’s ordinance passed, two of the city’s oldest and most exclusive organizations, the Mistick Krewe of Comus and Knights of Momus, simply chose not to ride at all.
    Very little, it seemed, was worth fighting for. Though New Orleans was once thought of as an “oil capital,” a great many of the oil companies began leaving in the 1980s, driven by the depressed oil and gas market, but also because of the deplorable state of the city’s schools and services, and the fact that their executives were generally treated as social outsiders. Barred from the more exclusive clubs, they started their own, the now-defunct Petroleum Club. By the 1990s, the New Orleans economy was almost entirely dependent on tourism, which was a mixed bag at best. The great majority of the hotels, for example, were owned by out-of-town corporations that paid the bulk of their employees minimum wage.
    Added to the mix was the fact that the newspaper was hardly a crusading organ or even a conscientious voice for change—settling instead on a policy best described as benign boosterism. During the 1991 governor’s race, I asked a top editor why they had held back on some of the most damning coverage of David Duke in his race against Edwin Edwards, and he told me he had not wanted to “rile” the populace. I was speechless. The populace was in desperate need of riling.
    I had known all this for years, obviously, but during those years I’d been primarily an observer, perfecting mordantly amusing tales to tell in print or in conversation to people who wanted to know: “What’s it like down there?” I’d always felt a little like I had during a typically merry lunch at Galatoire’s one Friday (the day lunch almost always runs into dinner) when I’d been mesmerized by a table of guys either celebrating or forgetting—it was hard to tell which—their impending bankruptcies. It could well have been the booze—each man had