Dreams are emerging of a 'new' New Orleans

[Moloch]

Three days after the New Orleans flood walls broke on Aug. 29, a visit to his hometown left Harry Connick Jr. feeling desperate.

"It is hard to sit in silence, to watch one's youth wash away," the singer and piano player wrote on his Web site. "I can only dream that one day she will recapture her glory."

On a follow-up visit a week later, Connick saw things that raised his hopes. Floodwaters were receding, violence was being contained, and at least one bar had reopened on Bourbon Street, where the 37-year-old Connick cut his musical teeth. "Man," Connick wrote, "if this isn't a sign of New Orleans coming back to its former state!"

Maybe. As the shock of one of America's worst natural disaster wears off and floodwaters are pumped out of New Orleans, public figures from local performers to
President Bush are beginning to speak of reviving the 287-year-old city as if such a thing is inevitable.

They are contemplating what urban planner Robert Lang of Virginia Tech says has "never been done before in America": Using what could be hundreds of billions of public and private dollars to rebuild a modern city on a scale far beyond what happened in San Francisco after its 1906 earthquake, or in Chicago after its 1871 fire.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20050914/ts_usatoday/dreamsareemergingofanewneworleans