At the entrance to an alley leading to a Royal Street cafe, the sign reads "Katrina Walk, 4pm Daily. An informative tour with people who've been there." The tours, according to a a sign in the cafe, cost $20 per person.

I cringe, but on Saturday I was a tourist myself in Lakewood and the Ninth Ward, two of the most devastated areas, with my host playing tour guide. In Lakewood, we followed two Gray Line tour buses down street after street of damaged homes. In the Ninth Ward, shiny new cars clogged the streets as we neared the place where the Industrial Canal levee broke.

Bearing Witness
It seems wrong that people would spectate at these sites of suffering--and even more so that tour companies would profit from it. On the other hand, actually visiting the place does offer insight into the disaster that images alone cannot. Photos can powerfully convey the complete wreckage of a property.

What they can't show is the wreckage of a neighborhood. The houses in the blocks closest to the levee break were mown down by the force of the waters. In the next blocks, some were scooted over. In the rest of the neighborhood--for blocks and blocks and blocks--houses still stand, damaged, flooded, and spray painted with the symbols of rescuers.

By visiting, I finally appreciated the scale and scope of the damages. The Ninth Ward is an extreme case, but neighborhoods throughout the city are suffering. Neighborhoods that seem relatively well off have visible flood lines that are only knee-high and scattered blue tarps covering damaged roofs. In the French Quarter, which is in very good shape, flood lines are gone and spray-painted symbols are rare because inhabitants have reclaimed and restored most of the buildings in the neighborhood. But the enormity of the problems the city faces came into sharp relief when I realized that I now look at structurally sound buildings with windows still boarded up and think that they're not too badly off.

By visiting, I can also feel the damage to the city. Breathing the air in the Ninth Ward gives me a sore throat and makes me want to cough. And the neighborhood, at least where there are no tourists, is unnaturally still. Nothing stirs. But even the French Quarter is unusually empty: it is only pleasantly populated when, three weeks before Mardi Gras, it should be beginning to burst with tourists. The path along the Mississippi River, previously a refuge from the bustle of the Quarter, is now just a lonely place to be.

Where No Tourist Has Gone Before
Part of my discomfort with the sudden surge of tourism in the Ninth Ward stems from the fact that, when it was inhabited, this was a place visitors never ventured. It's an African-American district with a reputation as a "rough neighborhood"--and while that reputation is at least partially borne out by statistics in this case, it's important to realize that many whites here would have considered it unsafe because it was African-American. The reputation was reinforced by post-Katrina news coverage of conditions in the Superdome, in which the squalor and anarchy of the temporary shelter seemed to get associated with the poverty and crime of evacuees' former neighborhood.

I thus went to the Ninth Ward (which I never visited even as a white resident of New Orleans) expecting to find a housing project. Instead I saw the remains of a community like the ones with which I have become familiar through my research. The neighborhood is made up of single-family homes, each with a yard. They range in size from small wooden shotguns, probably ramshackle before the flood, to large brick ranchers. There were a few two-story houses, and I counted at least three churches.

I can't speak directly for the Ninth Ward, of course, but the nearby African-American communities that I know that look like this are made up of working people. Not everyone is as well-off or as well-educated as his or her neighbor--some people are blue collar or service sector workers, while others are college-educated professionals-- but they all try to take care of their homes and their yards. Residents have typically lived there a long time: they may have been building on to and improving their houses over 40 years. Or maybe their families have lived there for generations and the current residents inherited their house from a grandparent. Either way, everybody knows everybody, who they're related to, and which church they go to.

In contrast to the Ninth Ward, the tight-knit, mixed-income communities on the outskirts of New Orleans that I studied are thought to be pretty safe. Nonetheless, there are a few residents that everyone knows are drug addicts or alcoholics, and others who don't take care of their properties or make sure their children stay out of trouble. And there are residents who are trying to remedy these problems by setting up after-school programs to keep kids off the streets, and making sure that elderly residents get help with yard- and housework.

Perhaps other visitors to the Ninth Ward, by seeing the kinds of homes in which people lived and imagining the kind of community it might have been, will start to think that crime statistics and lurid tales of restroom rapes in the Superdome tell a very partial, and probably unrepresentative, story of New Orleans's African-American communities. But I think that Katrina tourism is unlikely to have such an effect. This weekend, sight-seeing was concentrated in the block closest to the levee, where the spectacle of completely flattened houses, and not the shape of those houses when they were standing, commands attention. "Respect this Community" signs at the one house showing signs of life tried, I think, to draw attention back to the people, the community, that inhabited this area. I doubt they succeeded.

More Familiar Ground?
It is telling that Gray Line's Hurricane Katrina tours specifically do not visit the Ninth Ward or New Orleans East. Whatever its motives (Gray Line says that they are focused on "areas of the city that did not receive the main focus of the media," presumably in keeping with the operator's expressed interest in "educating the public" about what happened), this decision means that their tour focuses on predominantly white areas of the majority African-American city.

In one of the areas that the Gray Line tour visits, Lakeview, the houses are uniformly huge and relatively new. There are more signs of life, and of rebuilding, in this neighborhood. The signs are different, too: they emphasize to tourists that the properties are private, instead of reminding them of the existence of a community that deserves respect.

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