Katrina Update #23Katrina Update #23Tomorrow we are off to Louisville for the Hurricane Katrina Relief Fundraiser at Lou Lou's. We will be renunited with Barry there. I don't know when I will be online next, but when I am, I will provide pictures of both the Juicy Peanut and Cafe Lou Lou's.
Here's a picture taken at the Arch on Saturday of all of us. Sorry about the flash, but I don't have access to a scanner here, so this is a picture of a picture.
Janis, Chuck, Andrea, Cary, Megan, Jarret, and Adam
I got the following emails from Julie Buzzard, Travis' mother:
My son is Travis Buzzard -- he really loved New Orleans and working at Coop's Place. I was planning on coming to visit him in January/February as he was very proud of the life he had there and wanted to show me what a success he had become. My brother and I were very happy that he seemed to have found a place he liked well enough to call home. I really wanted to thank you for everything you did for him.
thank you,
jlb
I noticed that you didn't have a picture of Travis -- just to irritate the boy, attached is a picture of him that a friend of mine took when she visited New Orleans in May. Right now he says he isn't going to move back but...I know his gene-pool...I am betting he will return if you re-open and he has a place to live (I am told Lucky's had some wind damage but was more damaged by the looters than anything else). I believe that New Orleans will return in even brighter living color than before...then again, I literally wore rose-colored glasses through most of the 80s so take that for what it is worth. I am hoping Travis is allowed out of Georgia by Thursday, he is crawling the walls right now.
jlb
I spoke with Sean Green for a bit. He and Juli are in Detroit, and will be heading to Chicago next week. They are also looking forward to getting back to the city.
Janis also spoke with her boss, Jim Wilkinson. He and his wife Sarah, and Sarah's brother John are all doing fine in Texas. They are staying at the house of a cousin's house and expect to be back in the city on or before November 1st.
Gone.
Hopedale and Shell Beach are gone. Obliterated off the map. I am so glad I was able to go fishing all the times I did. I am sure we will get back out there, but it could be a year or more. Here are some pictures:
Breton Sound Marina, looking East towards the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO).
The area in the red circle is what's left of the shed where my boat was kept.
Shell Beach, looking towards the MRGO and Lake Bourne.
The small structure with the curved roof is what is left of Campo's Marina. That was his hoist.
Shell Beach, looking towards Ysclosky.
The eye of the hurricane passed over this area. This looks like the type of damage inflicted by a Category 5 storm, not a 4. All of Shell Beach is gone. Ft. Beauregard housing development (essentially, fishing camps for rich people) - gone. Shell Beach Literary Society (the fishing club which Coop and Doc belonged to) - gone. Only the ruins of the never-finished Fort Beauregard from the Civil War era stands in the distance on the shore of Lake Bourne.
The bottom picture is particularly disturbing because where the road curves towards the top of the picture were houses and trees all along the roadway. It just looks like it has been scraped clean.
Another sad sign of Katrina's wrath is the following that Cary found on the nola.com site:
The West End, for decades a New Orleans dining and drinking playground, might now be the worst end.
Bruning’s historic bar, where generations downed raw oysters, and the porch at Jaeger’s, where crawfish and cold beer accompanied sunsets over Lake Pontchartrain, exist now only as rotting wood piled 20 feet high on the opposite side of the 17th Street Canal near the site of Sid-Mar’s of Bucktown, also laid to waste by Hurricane Katrina. Pilings that once supported restaurants and bars serve as nothing more than seagull perches.
“The old Bruning’s house had been there for a hundred years, and now it’s gone,” said Louis Cochran, 72, who bicycled over to Bucktown with friend Mark Adolph, 49, to check on their boats in the nearby marinas.
The only way into West End for civilians these days is by foot or by bike, across the pedestrian bridge over the canal. Even that can be precarious, for Katrina’s wind and storm surge peeled away some of the bridge’s hand railings.
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