As the old year ticked off its last minutes, New Orleans seemed ready for the new one.
The city had gone through a rough stretch, but things were looking up. The gun violence that surged to harrowing levels during the pandemic had fallen off dramatically. The Super Bowl, returning to New Orleans in February after a dozen years, promised an influx of visitors and excitement. And the city’s best season, the exuberant weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, was on its way.
But less than four hours into the new year, a heavily armed man slammed a truck into the celebrating crowds, leaving dozens wounded or dead on the city’s most carefree street.
In the news conferences that followed, the mayor of New Orleans and other leaders in Louisiana praised the city’s residents for their resilience amid disaster. It’s a message they had heard before.
“The word ‘resilient’ has become synonymous with the city of New Orleans,” Lesli Harris, a city councilwoman, said in an interview, acknowledging that the quality was a source of both pride and exasperation. “We are resilient because we have to be.”
Many people in New Orleans have expressed a certain comfort and satisfaction at the strength of the community’s bonds and its collective ability to navigate disaster and hardship. Yet they also wouldn’t mind being able to get by without having to draw on a reservoir of grit and good humor.
“You’ve got to suck it up and figure it out,” said Rachel Zachry Dutcher, who works at an oyster bar on Bourbon Street, where she saw the scale of the carnage the morning after the attack. “But at what point,” she said with an expletive, “do we stop sucking up the stuff we shouldn’t have to suck up?”
The attack in New Orleans could have happened anywhere that a New Year’s Eve crowd had gathered. But it happened in a city that has had to endure far more than its share of heartache and dislocation.
Twenty years ago this summer, New Orleans was four-fifths underwater after the levee system designed to protect it collapsed under the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. There was talk of abandoning parts of the city altogether. But people returned and rebuilt homes, started businesses and nonprofits, and worked not just to keep the city alive but to make it better than it had been before.
There was a sense of promise at the time, punctuated by the Saints, the beloved but long-cursed football franchise, winning its first Super Bowl in 2010. Surveys taken by the University of New Orleans over that decade showed a city that, for all of its many challenges, was optimistic about the future.
But that optimism curdled.
To some degree, this was fate: New Orleans’s disproportionate share of calamity is in part a function of where it was built, a location that, in an age of climate change, has turned out to be especially precarious. Since 2020, the average U.S. county has experienced between one and two federally declared disasters. In that same time span, every part of the state of Louisiana has experienced at least a dozen.
In recent years, New Orleans streets have flooded when the city’s archaic drainage system could not keep pace with the increasingly torrential rainstorms. Hurricane Ida battered the Louisiana coast in 2021, leaving the city without power for weeks and with thousands of tons of uncollected trash.
Covid ravaged New Orleans in the earliest stages of the pandemic, infecting and killing residents in those first few months at higher rates than most other U.S. cities and upending the livelihoods of thousands of residents who relied on the mostly low-wage tourism economy. The number of murders and carjackings soared, making New Orleans in 2022, once again, a so-called murder capital.
Living in New Orleans had always required some kind of cost-benefit analysis, but it was reaching a point where affection for New Orleans and its way of life was being overshadowed by the litany of complications that came with it. Home and auto insurance premiums soared to unaffordable levels. Residents said they were becoming less and less surprised to find their car windows smashed.
When the University of New Orleans conducted its biannual quality of life survey in 2022, the results were bleak. “We saw numbers we hadn’t seen since the 1990s, when we had a murder epidemic in the city,” said Edward Chervenak, the director of the university’s Survey Research Center.
Residents who had the resources to leave were increasingly opting to do so. Those who did not have the resources to leave often felt stuck in a precarious position. For them, affordable housing was scarce, as were well-paying jobs, much less the prospect of long-term financial security, residents said.
Ms. Zachry Dutcher’s husband, Timothy, said he makes $17 an hour at his restaurant job — and he considered himself lucky. Some restaurant workers were making half of that. (The minimum wage in Louisiana is $7.25.) The only recourse: pick up more hours. “You can’t stop moving,” Mr. Dutcher, 36, said.
And yet, Mr. Dutcher is a fairly recent arrival, moving from Colorado over the summer. New Orleans is a culinary destination, he said, that also offers an atmosphere and a possibility for forging a community that he could not find elsewhere.
When the citywide survey was conducted again late last year, it showed a curious change. “People were dissatisfied about the city of the last five years,” Professor Chervenak said, “but seemed to be optimistic about the future.”
The violence that bedeviled New Orleans in the first years of the pandemic has receded substantially, with major drops in the number of homicides, carjackings and armed robberies. Ms. Harris also pointed out that it is a local election year, spurring an exchange of ideas about the city’s direction and representing a moment for New Orleans to start a new chapter.
“I think there was anticipation that we could be on the upswing,” said Ms. Harris, who represents a district adjacent to the French Quarter. “And here comes this attack.”
The attack did not just rattle the city, leaving people anguished over the lost lives, wary about what else could happen and suspicious, once again, about whether the authorities might have been able to do something to prevent it. It also interrupted a hopeful moment that the city had been awaiting for years, and left it back in the familiar position of relying on its storied grit.
“I’m sick and tired of being resilient, too,” said Calvin Johnson, 78, a retired Orleans Parish judge. But, he said, “you go back over our illustrious history” — 300 years, he said, of disease, hurricanes, violence and inequality — “and this is the place that can withstand all of that and still be something.”
On Thursday, Eric Moore, 29, was sitting on a folding chair in a parking lot on Canal Street, waiting along with dozens of other volunteers to give blood. He works at a cafe on Bourbon Street, though he wasn’t there at the time of the attack and doesn’t have much desire to go back soon. “I don’t want to see Bourbon Street right now, at all,” he said.
Mr. Moore said he understood that bad things happened on Bourbon Street — shootings have broken out all too often there in recent years — but he emphasized that the attack early Wednesday morning was a very different kind of bad thing.
Still, he said, the city would band together and make it through. Again.
“We came back from Katrina,” Mr. Moore said. “We got some work to do, some healing to do. But we’re going to be all right.”
Isabelle Taft contributed reporting from New Orleans.
