Free Republic

NEW ORLEANS - The state Health Department cleared the way Monday for people to begin to return to the New Orleans neighborhood that faced Hurricane Katrina's worst fury, saying tap water in part of the Lower Ninth Ward is safe. "Our displaced residents in some of the hardest-hit areas are now able to return to their homes and begin to rebuild their lives," Mayor Ray Nagin said Monday in a statement. The area encompasses the 10 blocks or so closest to the Mississippi River, where the ground is higher. In other parts of the neighborhood, people still must boil water...

Christmas Lights in Ninth WardVolunteers working with the Common Grounds Collective,a non-profit community service and relief organization based in New Orleans,gather under generator-powered Christmas lightsstrung at the corner of North Robertson and Louisa in the Ninth Ward. Michael DeMocker / Times-Picayune

Around New Orleans, the Ninth Ward has always been the butt of jokes. "Oh, you're from the Ninth Ward. Sorry about that." If you lived in the Ninth Ward, you were considered a little less intelligent, a little less sophisticated, a little less likely to succeed. You were no match for the folks in Mid City or Uptown or Gentilly or Lakeview. Your speech lingered on the inexact and immediately gave you away. Your blue-collar family probably existed just a step or two above poverty. Well, I was born in the Ninth Ward. Raised there. Graduated from Catholic elementary and...

Race, class frame debate on rebuilding low-lying New Orleans district. NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 2 - No one here wants to say it aloud, but one day soon the bulldozers will come, shoving away big hunks of a neighborhood known for its poverty and its artists, its bad luck and its bounce-back resilience. It is likely to be the largest demolition of a community in modern U.S. history -- destruction begun by hurricanes Katrina and Rita and finished by heavy machinery. On Saturday, firefighters put red tags on hundreds of homes deemed "unsafe," the first step in a wrenching debate over...

Oct. 3, 2005 issue - In a fierce cultural storm, the future of the Lower Ninth is buffeted by race and politics. The Lower Ninth was going under, again. Floodwaters from Hurricane Rita had breached the levee along the Industrial Canal, inundating the poor New Orleans neighborhood that is, or was, home to 40,000 African-Americans. The levee had been patched after it failed in Hurricane Katrina, but not well enough. Cedric Richmond, the president of the Black Caucus in the Louisiana State Legislature, suggested that more than bad luck was at work. "For whatever reason," he told NEWSWEEK, "they didn't...