03:41 PM MST on Monday, September 5, 2005

By DAVID DILLON / The Dallas Morning News

America's most distinctive city is on life support. Cradle of jazz, capital of gustatory delight, idiosyncratic, improvisational, perversely beautiful collage of alleys and balconies and romantic gardens, New Orleans is caught between a crumbling past and an uncertain future.

Its infrastructure – port, levees, bridges, pipelines – will certainly be rebuilt, not only to make the city habitable but also because not to do so would be disastrous for the U.S. economy. "There's a national imperative to rebuild that infrastructure," says Bernard Weinstein, director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of North Texas in Denton. "We've got half a dozen critical industries down there – shipping, refining, agriculture, aquaculture – that serve the entire country. But where and how to rebuild the rest of the city, those are politically charged questions that can only be answered down the road."

But it's the rest of New Orleans, the New Orleans of Louis Armstrong and Anne Rice, of A Streetcar Named Desire and Easy Rider, that people are worried about.

"New communities will flourish, and the great city of New Orleans will be back on its feet," President Bush predicts.

Others aren't so confident.

"New Orleans is ruined; it will never be what it was again," says Charles Harper, an expert on disaster assistance for the American Institute of Architects. "I shed tears when I think about it. It seems hopeless."

Patricia Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, is somewhat more upbeat.

"Everything that a typical visitor to New Orleans would see is intact," she says, naming the French Quarter, the Garden District and most of the central business district. "But everything else is probably gone," she adds, meaning most of the low- and moderate-income neighborhoods that contain some of the city's finest indigenous architecture.

Fire has since followed flood in parts of downtown, further damaging the historic fabric of the city.

Although it will be weeks before officials know what's salvageable and what's gone, the big problems are obvious.

The first is water: moving water, standing water, water pouring through and over levees, water saturating the walls of historic houses and filling the basements of storied bars and music halls.

Floodwaters have lifted hundreds of houses off their foundations, never to be reunited, and sent cars, trees and debris hurtling into others. (Skyscrapers and office buildings have fared better, given their superior modern construction.) New Orleans also sits in a bowl of soupy sand into which buildings can gradually sink. The longer water stands, the greater the likelihood of structural failure, and with the levee pumps inoperable, the city may not dry out for months.

Once it does, a layer of contaminated dirt, made toxic by the chemicals, human waste and decaying bodies now swirling through the floodwaters, will coat much of New Orleans. It – and many of the buildings that can't be salvaged – will have to be removed.

A related and in some ways equally serious problem is mold.

"New Orleans lives in mold," says Dallas environmental and architectural consultant Julian Adams. "It's a very serious problem. You can't just go in and push the mud out. You have to get rid of the mold, or the place won't be habitable." Or, as North Texans know well, insurable.

The Army Corps of Engineers is scrambling to plug breaches in the levees by dropping 15,000-pound sandbags into the gaps. But this is only a temporary measure, not a long-term solution.

"Instead of dirt levees, they need to build concrete levees just like those on the Upper Mississippi," Mr. Harper says. "Just takes one or two weak spots, and away it goes. New Orleans knew this was going to happen. They've been talking about repairs for 15 years. Shame on them."

New Orleans is only the latest American city to face wholesale rebuilding after a natural disaster. Chicago burned to the ground in 1871, San Francisco was flattened by an earthquake in 1906. Both re-created themselves but with an eye to the future rather than the past. The charm of New Orleans, however, is inextricably linked to its past. This is not the City of the Big Shoulders, but the Big Easy.

"In areas without a lot of water damage, there ought to be a real preservation focus," says Peter Brink, vice president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. "In other areas, you have to look to the future and avoid the quick fix."

The pressures for a quick fix are likely to be intense because of the unprecedented devastation and because, unlike Dallas or Houston, about 80 percent of New Orleans' residents were born in the city. This intersection of place and family and cultural connections is one of the things that make the city unique and imbues the idea of return with special emotional power.

"'Rebuild it now' – that's always the flashpoint," says Mr. Adams, former technical coordinator for the New York State Historic Preservation Office. "We saw it after 9-11, and we'll see it again in New Orleans. It's part political expediency and partly a psychological need to be doing something."

He and other experts say rebuilding won't mean much without tougher building codes and design guidelines.

"We have to rebuild stronger and higher off the ground," Ms. Gay says, "but we don't have to go high-rise. In the 1960s, we had 160,000 more people in the older parts of New Orleans than we have now. We have plenty of room."

How would a rebuilt New Orleans look? Historic building types, such as the shotgun house and the Creole cottage, have given the city its visual character. The challenge will be to avoid creating a vernacular theme park.

"It's understandable that people want to rebuild what was there," says Dwayne Jones, executive director of Preservation Dallas, "but it's important not to try to mimic the past."

In many ways, New Orleans is less about architecture than mood and ambience. It has few iconic buildings. Preservation Hall may be its most significant structure, and that wouldn't win any design awards. The scale, the texture, the quirky intimacy are what make New Orleans memorable, and nobody is saying that can be re-created.

Many observers believe that good results can be achieved only with the participation of the residents.

"The more they participate, the stronger the results," says architect David Downy, director of the AIA's Center for Community by Design and a participant in tsunami relief. "You can't wait for government to do it."

The cruel irony in New Orleans, of course, is that government is moving at an unprecedented scale while most of the residents have fled. For the time being at least, it has become a city of ghosts.

E-mail ddillon@dallasnews.com