Letter from Nola (and New Orleans, too)

Part 2 of 3

Part 1 of this series is here.

There is a counter-narrative to the New Orleans story over the last ten years. Instead of a city portrait defined by lingering evidence of tragedy’s aftermath, it offers a tale of a “resilient” place and its “miracle” comeback; of building and rebuilding and new development and urban experiments; a beacon attracting ambitious young people from all over, contributing their talents and energy to a “reinvention” of the city, and its economy.

It’s been reported, for instance, that there were about 1,400 restaurants in New Orleans as of 2015 — compared to 800 before Katrina, when the actual population was significantly greater. This includes plenty serving traditional fare, but also quite a number coming from new perspectives, specializing in nouveau “craft” cocktails, dabbling with molecular gastronomy, and offering fusion-everything, often with kale. A number of the newer places look and feel more L.A. than La., and at least one touted its willingness to accept bitcoins.

Nothing wrong with any of that, really. It just happens to be one convenient way of benchmarking the broader perception that artisanal carpetbaggers, however well-intentioned, really are fueling a reinvention of a place that has never been known for embracing change — and that always worries about what might be lost.

“If the New Orleans that made us is disappearing, what happens to us now?”

“My enthusiasm for the wave of bright young newcomers with their start-ups and pop-ups and entrepreneurial energy is tainted by the loss of the 100,000 New Orleanians, mostly black, who never returned after the storm,” Anne Gisleson observed in a terrific essay for the Oxford American website. “And many who stayed are still struggling greatly under past injustices and fresh ones, byproducts of the ‘New Orleans Miracle.’ I have a hard time separating out the loss from the gain. A hard time finding the right attitude.” Gisleson’s piece was pegged not to the anniversary of the 2005 flooding, but to the city’s relatively recent bar-and-restaurant smoking ban. Even though she “never smoked,” the change sent her on a quest to face a “larger existential issue: if the New Orleans that made us is disappearing, what happens to us now?” That could serve as the asterisk on every sentence of the reinvented-New Orleans counter-narrative. And while the sentiment is not always articulated so concretely, it’s pervasive.

Having visited often and otherwise tracked the city’s evolution from afar, we knew about all this. But it was by way of that anniversary coverage that I decided it can all be summarized in a single word: Nola.

“If I’m out of the city in some other part of the country and I tell someone I’m from New Orleans” a New Orleans native who dislikes that term told The World In Words, “ they’ll say, ‘Oh my god I just love NOLA,’ or ‘I was just in NOLA a few months ago for a bachelor party.’”

Evidently that term dates back as far as 1900, and when we lived here the first time, Nola certainly existed as a sporty little city nickname. But of course New Orleans has other nicknames, and that one wasn’t notably pervasive. In the last 10 years, however, it has evidently become far more popular: Of 1,750 businesses whose name includes “Nola,” only 134 pre-date Katrina. According to The World in Words, it is believed by some to be more appealing to young people. And it clearly strikes many as connoting something distinctly contemporary — the new New Orleans that has emerged in the recovery decade. “It carries this weight of so much of the changes that people have seen post-Katrina,” that New Orleans native told The World In Words. “And the way that they feel like so much of this city that they loved before, they don’t really recognize anymore, and it’s not the same place that they remembered.”

“Nola is a tritone without the third sound, a shadow of the real thing.”

Writing in Next City, Aria M. Mason was more blunt in describing the term’s de facto function as the name of another city altogether: “Nola is a twee, cutesy, sparkly place with organic gluten-free gumbo, artisanal beignets and coffee with hand-ground chicory where newcomers are more local than the locals. Nola is a tritone without the third sound, a shadow of the real thing, a half-life built on the shiny side of traditions that has been gutted of the gritty struggle and veracity that bore them.” There is a difference, in other words, between Nola and the real New Orleans (whatever that means now).

Some caveats are in order here. First, the City That Care Forgot had a grumpy streak well before Katrina — not least on the subject of outsiders who just don’t get it.

True locals secretly enjoy my predetermined failure: If I have to ask, I’ve made their day.

Second, if the Nolafication of New Orleans is a problem, I am surely part of it. No need to belabor this. For the record, I consider myself a sort of advanced outsider: I’ve long since accepted that there are things here I’ll never “get,” or at least not to the satisfaction of a true local. But I also suspect that true locals secretly enjoy my predetermined failure: If I have to ask, I’ve made their day.

And third: All of this can be characterized, in part, as just one more example of larger gentrification-via-hipsters story that stretches from Brooklyn to Austin to San Francisco to any city near you.

That said, Nola makes me wary. I wish I could come up with a more nuanced way of saying this, but New Orleans has never been hipper. When we moved here the first time, I joked about the contrast to the late 1990s Manhattan we’d just abandoned — a place obsessed with the new. I wrote about this, in early 2000: “I can remember when Balthazar was the new Bowery Bar, when Moomba was the new Spy Bar, and when Orchard Street became the new Ludlow Street and Thursday was the new Friday. … Certainly I remember Avenue B becoming the new Avenue A, and I think by now Avenue C is the new Avenue B.

“The idea is to have spotted the It Idea five minutes before whoever you’re talking to. I’m not really criticizing this game. It was sort of fun. Is Pastis the new Balthazar and the meatpacking district the new SoHo? Well: Maybe New Orleans is the new Avenue C!”

Apologies for quoting myself, but somebody reminded me about this riff the other day, and it ended up bothering me so much I had to look it up. “New Orleans is not the new Avenue C,” I wrote back then, and in fact it is “not the new anything; it is still New Orleans.” This, for me at that time, was crucial to this place’s appeal. So what in the world might it mean if Nola really is the new Avenue C?

The conclusion of this series is here.