Down in the Big Queasy

By Richard Woodbury/New Orleans

Even by New Orleans' lusty standards for revelry, last week's finale to weeks of Mardi Gras merrymaking was an epic blowout. There were John Bobbitt mimics, a Tonya Harding on roller skates with a baseball bat, and vendors peddling condom keychains. The 10-hour parade was viewed by 1 million revelers who overflowed hotels and French Quarter restaurants. As grateful merchants totted up the $10 million infusion, swelled for the first time by a riverboat casino, tourist-commission spokeswoman Beverly Gianna pronounced it "a grand and glorious party."

But beyond earshot of the festivities were the sounds of a city falling apart. In Gert Town, a 13-square-block warren of ramshackle cottages and ! abandoned apartments, crack deals were made as children played amid broken glass and litter. As night fell, there and across the city streets emptied and residents retreated behind double-locked doors and iron grates.

The mounting fear of violence in the Big Easy is no idle perception. The murder count last year hit a record 389, a 36% jump over 1992. Other serious crime is causing alarm as it becomes more brazen and frequent: smash-and-grab assaults on motorists at stoplights, robberies of French Quarter tourists. Bob Tucker, a computer-services executive, shot an intruder who jumped him in the driveway of his fenced home as he left for work one morning. Says Tucker: "Crime is out of control and everywhere."

That worry is turning neighborhoods rich and poor into armed camps. Residents of the stately Garden District along St. Charles Avenue sometimes pack pistols when they visit neighbors' homes for parties. Others act as sentries, carrying cellular phones when they walk their dogs. Rather than allow their children to play in yards, neighbors in one Uptown area banded together to build a walled compound. "Maybe it's like this everywhere, but sometimes I go from my alarm-locked home to my alarm-locked car to my alarmed office," says Bee Fitzpatrick, who runs an import store.

New Orleans' crime problem poses a special danger because of the economy's dependence on tourism and conventions. They are the principal industries left in town. "If crime begins scaring off visitors, it could kill the golden goose," warns Loyola University political scientist Ed Renwick. An equal concern is that crime and decay are impeding the effort to attract new business, which is vitally needed to replace thousands of energy-industry jobs lost in the 1980s oil bust.

The city government is nearly broke as well, heading toward a $40 million shortfall next year. A largely white exodus to the suburbs has left blacks with a 65% majority and reduced the city's population from 557,000 in 1980 to 497,000 today. The shrinkage has intensified a rolling budget crisis that has forced severe cutbacks in social services to a growing underclass of jobless and low-income blacks: 54% of African-American families earn less than $15,000. "Agencies are all overwhelmed," says Julius Wilkerson, who runs a private outreach effort for high-risk youths. "We need a dozen programs for every one we've got if we're going to give kids an alternative to shooting dope and killing themselves."

Ten percent of the population lives in 10 housing projects, most of them squalid, low-rise slums so dangerous the police avoid them when they can. Though the wait for housing is months long, hundreds of units stand empty, many awaiting renovations. An equal eyesore is thousands of abandoned houses -- 37,000 by one estimate -- that stand boarded up or forsaken by landlords in the face of advancing crime and poverty. City services ranging from park programs and tree trimming to libraries have been cut.

Gambling's boosters, foremost among them Edwin Edwards, the state's high- rolling Governor, see salvation in plans to build the world's largest casino in the city's downtown. New Orleans officials were so desperate for revenues that before the deal was signed they penned $29 million in projected gaming revenues into their new budget. But a lawsuit threatens to delay the project.

Crime is the top issue in the March 5 mayoralty runoff that pits Donald Mintz, a lawyer and civic activist, against Marc Morial, a state senator and son of the late Dutch Morial, the city's first black mayor. The incumbent Sidney Barthelemy cannot seek a third term. Both candidates vow to put more cops on the street, but the issues have been obscured by a mudslinging barrage.

The political theater is familiar to New Orleans, but it seems only to heighten public cynicism. Observes Xavier University sociologist Silas Lee: "We've taken a Mardi Gras approach for too long, covering up all the problems with costumes. But we were dying on the inside." That can change, others say, if New Orleans draws on its inner grit and bonhomie. "It has things going for it that others don't," says Renwick. "Who would want to eat in Atlanta compared to New Orleans anyway?" In times like these, a little civic chauvinism should be forgiven.