A tale of two cities, their fates now intertwined
BATON ROUGE -- The two cities are separated by just 80 miles, a straight shot up Interstate 10. But Baton Rouge, Louisiana's capital, and New Orleans, the state's largest city, could not be more different, and the contrasts have never been more stark as hundreds of thousands of displaced New Orleanians fill this bursting city.
Baton Rouge is a conservative stronghold, almost half its residents white. New Orleans is politically liberal, more than two-thirds of its residents black. Baton Rouge is a sleepy government center, filled with sprawling strip malls. New Orleans is a party town, known for Mardi Gras and Bourbon Street, jazz musicians and bars that do not close.
Historically, these differences have led to grousing and tongue-clicking. Some residents from each look down upon those who live in the other. The distance, in many ways, is more philosophical than it is geographical.
Now, the two cities are closer than residents ever would have imagined.
In under a week, Baton Rouge has become an accidental boomtown, the largest city in Louisiana. Its mayor, Kip Holden, estimates that the population of the parish, once 412,477, may now be double that, or even larger. And while Baton Rouge residents have been generous to the victims of Hurricane Katrina -- offering everything from clothes to food to beds in their own homes -- there is also tension that was present from the get-go.
Many locals, watching the televised chaos in New Orleans, began to fear that ''New Orleans thugs," as officials put it last week, were bound for their town, too. There were rumors of riots, reports of evacuees carrying knives. And by last Thursday-- three days after Katrina made landfall -- the hysteria prompted one local reporter to ask Army Lieutenant General Russel Honore who was protecting Baton Rouge residents.
''Protecting them from what?" Honore replied.
Residents of both cities are now wondering: Will their hometowns ever be the same?
''Who knows at this point?" said Monica Edelstein, a New Orleans woman, who fled to Baton Rouge before the hurricane more than a week ago with her husband, Kenneth Hoffman, and their 2-year-old daughter, Molly. ''At this point, we're not planning on remaining here. But we don't know what's waiting for us back in New Orleans. Life -- our train -- has kind of derailed, and we're on a different track."
While the initial fears of many Baton Rouge officials has abated, challenges loom.
Traffic, once bad here only during rush hour, now clogs roads day and night. Drives that once took 10 minutes now take an hour. There are lines for gasoline. No water on some supermarket shelves. No places to rent, few left to buy, and no end in sight.
Evacuees, realizing that they will not be going home anytime soon, are bombarding schools, public and private, with requests to take in their children. More than 3,000 have applied to attend East Baton Rouge parish public schools -- roughly 6 percent of the current student body -- leaving officials scrambling for teachers, cafeteria workers, buses, and bus drivers.
Catholic schools have a similar issue, looking to find room for some 2,000 students among the 16,000 they already teach, said superintendent Sister Mary Michaeline. At least one school, Catholic High, is getting creative. Come next week, Michaeline said, Catholic High will hold classes in the morning, then move out to make room for Brother Martin, a displaced New Orleans school, that will hold classes into the evening.
But like everyone here, they are short on room. Hotels went first, then rental units, then homes for sale. People are buying them sight unseen, said Dagmar Hebert, of RE/MAX Real Estate Group in Baton Rouge. Or with cash.
''It's been crazy," said Edelstein, who found a house to buy for her family this week through a connection at her parents' synagogue. ''Did you ever think you'd see a house, put an offer on it, and start signing paperwork on it within a day?"
Such overnight booms, however, are not unprecedented. Galveston, a thriving city of 38,000 people at the turn of the 20th century, was all but washed away by a deadly hurricane in 1900, allowing its rival, Houston, just 50 miles inland and then about the same size, to rise up. Galveston was never the same. Houston became the largest city in Texas. And the story, once old, is now new again, rolled out this week by Baton Rouge officials as an apt analogy for what is happening now.
It has not sat well with some evacuees, worried about their homes and believing that, despite everything, New Orleans will one day be New Orleans again. They are grateful for the help they have received. Stories of kindness abound. Stephen Peychaud, one New Orleans evacuee, said yesterday he was happy to have a place to live in Baton Rouge. But Peychaud, and others, are also restless to get out of here.
These are uncertain times. Edelstein, an adjunct professor of anthropology at University of New Orleans, has lost her job and put on hold any plans to have a second child. Shelter residents are in limbo, not knowing their next destination. One evacuee in a Baton Rouge shelter, John Belmorris, of Metairie, said yesterday he has overheard locals making snippy comments about the ''dumb" people who lived below sea level. Tongue-clicking and grousing continue. Peychaud, 35, said he just wants to go home.
''New Orleans is like a living being," he said. ''Always moving. Something always happening in different parts of town. There's not a place you can go in the city where you won't run into someone you know. Whereas, Baton Rouge doesn't have that heartbeat. It doesn't have that living thing. It's blah. Flat."
Flat or not, however, it is growing. By the time it is over, New Orleans's neighbor may also be the temporary home of its NFL franchise, the New Orleans Saints, another exile gone north.
But then, these two cities have always overlapped, sometimes in strange ways. Take television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, for example.
He founded his bible college in Baton Rouge in the mid-1980s. Thousands of people enrolled and signs for it went up on the interstate. But Swaggart's most infamous moment came, not here, but on the outskirts of New Orleans a few years later, when he was photographed with a prostitute outside a motel. 