A street of lost dreams, new hopes

First in a series on the residents of South Telemachus Street.

NEW ORLEANS -- The future of New Orleans may hinge on homes like this one: a cute, little yellow house in the heart of Mid-City.

There is nothing striking about it from the outside. If it stands out to neighbors, it is only because it sold in June for $225,000 -- a sign that this once crumbling neighborhood was coming back.

But now flood-damaged and crawling with mold, the home at 316 South Telemachus St. is a sign of something else. Its occupants -- Thor Young, 30, and Lucia Blacksher, 32 -- are split about whether to return to New Orleans. Blacksher, an attorney, said she wants to return, but her boyfriend, Young, does not. He is in Virginia. She is back in Louisiana. And their two-year relationship is over.

''I lost my house," she said last week on South Telemachus Street. ''All my stuff . . . and now Thor."

Across New Orleans, similar stories are playing out. Some people are leaving, some are staying, some are undecided. How their decisions will change the city is unknown. But focus on one block, and a snapshot of the transformation begins to emerge. That is what this story is about: one block, 19 structures, and 31 abodes. It is about 48 lives -- at least 48 people who called the 300 block of South Telemachus Street home.

The block is reflective of the city. It is neither the richest nor the poorest; the nicest nor the worst. It is Mid-City: black and white, straight and gay, home to both immigrants and native New Orleanians. Different, but the same. Every house on the block was flooded.

Eight feet of water once filled the street, pushing 2 to 6 feet into the homes of French teachers and Bourbon Street musicians, a high school senior applying to college and a 3-year-old girl getting ready to start preschool. There the water sat for nearly two weeks, eating away at the walls and swallowing memories as the residents scattered to California and Connecticut, Nevada and Virginia, a dozen states in all.

Now weeks later, many have returned to New Orleans -- not to stay, but to salvage what they can. And as they have done so, they began to ponder the future. Some are making decisions.

Residents dividedAbout a third of the people on the block say they are committed to rebuilding in New Orleans. They are primarily white and middle-class, homeowners by and large. It includes the owners of Finn McCool's, the Irish pub on the corner; two landlords; and Blacksher, who said she hopes to buy the yellow house from her former boyfriend.

Another third of the people on the block are just as committed to leaving. This group includes renters, people who lost everything in the flood, and two black families. A couple of residents -- Anthony Castanedo , a laborer who sets up conventions, and Nina Lecesne, a bus driver -- said they are not even going back to gather belongings. ''I don't have time to put my life on hold," said Lecesne, whose 20-year-old daughter gave birth to a boy two days before the storm. ''Therefore, I have to walk away."

She is planning to live in Dallas, Castanedo in Las Vegas. Their minds are made up while others -- the last third of the residents -- are undecided. These are young families and elderly folks, people who love New Orleans and want to stay but do not know whether it is possible. People like David and Fernanda Gonzalez.

Last Wednesday, nearly seven weeks after they left home with their two children, ages 3 and 18 months, the Gonzalez family returned to South Telemachus. The street was almost empty. The neighborhood quiet. They left the children outside in their minivan and prepared to survey the damage.

''There you go," Fernanda assured their daughter, Gabby, 3, as she left her in the van. ''Just look out the window. Don't get out." Fernanda walked up to her front door, put on a mask, and took a deep breath.

''OK," she said. ''I'm going in."

Decades of connectionFor four generations, the Gonzalez family has lived in the shotgun double at 337-339 South Telemachus. It was built, the family said, by their Chinese ancestors who came to New Orleans more than a century ago, opened a laundry downtown, and set out to make a living in the new world.

They succeeded and the house was a symbol of that. For as long as David Gonzalez can remember, someone from his family was living there, tending to the Japanese magnolia planted long ago in their front yard.

These days, it was owned by an uncle who lives in Metairie, but it was David Gonzalez, 38, living with his family on one side and Iggy Gonzalez, David's father, and stepmother on the other. Times had grown hard for Iggy, a bar owner until a stroke laid him flat 11 years ago. His mind is still sharp, said his wife, Sally Gonzalez, a waitress. But Iggy, 70, can hardly speak or walk, a source of much frustration. The house, his son said, was almost all he had left to control.

David, on the other hand, had relative control of his life. He was self-employed. He worked nights as a disc jockey. And in the last year, with the children growing up, he started a carpet and air duct cleaning business. It was a chance, he said, to make more money and maybe one day own their own house.

The neighborhood had changed over time. Crime had increased, residents said. From time to time, someone might get mugged on the street. But the changes, for the most part, were good. Finn McCool's, which opened three years ago, replaced The 19th Hole, a seedy bar generally disliked by neighbors. The 19th Hole's clientele had been rough. The new clientele was different: young and old, hip and retired. Finn McCool's anchored the neighborhood. Young people moved in.

Friendly neighborsThere was Gabriel Ocean Clark, the artist across the street, and Kevin Adams, the nurse living next door to David Gonzalez. Adams, 43, rented the other side of his shotgun to his friend, Thom Dufreche, an employee of the state teacher's union who liked to keep his yard just so. Julia Reagin, a French teacher who moved there in the 1980s, loved how they all got along.

''It's a neighborhood where people were around a lot. People knew you. They've been chatting with you for 17 years, even if they've never been inside your house," she said. ''I always thought there was a perfect balance between people leaving you alone -- everybody minding their own business -- but also genuine concern for each other."

Liz and Carey Corson planned to raise their 4-year-old daughter, Maggie, there. Delores Jefferson, 76, planned on living the rest of her days there, and Gladys Gatto, also 76, did as well. Like the Gonzalez family, Gatto's ancestors had owned her house since around 1900. She was not leaving for Hurricane Katrina, and she was not alone.

As the block emptied out the weekend before the storm, a few residents stayed: Rick Leniek, an electrician; his tenant Castanedo; their neighbor Claude Joshua, a retired bus driver; and Gatto's next-door neighbor, Judy Scheurer. Scheurer had 20 cats -- fine Persians and Himalayans -- inside her house. She never planned on leaving. These houses had never flooded before.

But as the water came up in the hours after the storm, lapping at doorsteps and then slipping inside, everyone got out, most of them in boats. Scheurer swam down city streets, past bodies, and finally arrived at an overpass where desperate people used spray paint to scrawl messages on the pavement.

''HELP US," the messages said.

''NEED WATER."

''NE . . ."

Families separateResidents scattered like Mardi Gras beads off a parade float. The Corsons found shelter in Media, Pa., and enrolled Maggie in school. Reagin, 51, went to stay with her brother in Roanoke, Va., while her son, Patrick, 17, found a high school that would take him in Connecticut. They are still living apart and probably will be until Patrick can return for his senior year in New Orleans, hopefully in January.

Separation is often the norm. The residents of Jefferson's house, for example, ended up in three states: she in Georgia, her son in Louisiana, and her daughter in Texas. Some found ways to contact each other. Others did not. Dianne Bowens, Jefferson's neighbor, does not know the whereabouts of her brother and housemate, Charlie Haynes. Alvin Helton, Jefferson's son, has yet to find his daughter.

Helton, 49, believes Alexis, 4, is with her mother, but he has no way of reaching them. Nearly seven weeks removed from the storm, communication remains a problem. Manmohan Anand, who lives in and owns the four-unit apartment building at the corner of Telemachus and Palmyra streets, has yet to hear from one of his tenants. He worries how he will pay his house note without renters. The two other tenants he had in the building have said they are leaving New Orleans.

''This is the beginning of the struggle," he said. ''Who knows how long it will take, how many people will come back to the city? That is the big question. If not a lot of people come back to the city, there will be problems. There will be foreclosures. You have to pay the mortgage."

Anand, 55, is staying. He has invested in the city, he said, and has no other choice. Others would not consider leaving, even if they could. Adams and Dufreche were among the first to return, sneaking into the city three weeks after the storm to clean out their homes. They caught the mold early and are on the road to rebuilding. Work is about to begin at Finn McCool's as well. Stephen Patterson, one of the owners, hopes to have a small portion of the bar open soon. But as Patterson begins to gut the bar he loves, others are looking to leave or at least considering it.

''It's memories of the flood. It's just so traumatic," said Scheurer, 50, the third generation of her family to live at 328 Telemachus. ''I was there, seeing all my belongings turned upside down in the water, swimming to safety. I swam past corpses, dead bodies. I wasn't sure I was going to get out of there."

She may sell and move to the suburbs, she said, and that is no easy decision to make. The house, she said, meant everything to her grandmother, who lived there for decades. ''She would have died for that house," Scheurer said.

But these are different times. The block is changing, some hope for the best, some say for the worst. No one knows for sure and it is the not knowing that has the Gonzalez family troubled.

All of them -- Iggy and Sally, David and Fernanda, and the two children -- evacuated before the storm to Mississippi. When they wore out their welcome at a relative's house there, they split up: Iggy and Sally to Arkansas, David and Fernanda to Virginia. Weeks passed. Sally tried to remain optimistic for Iggy, and Fernanda tried to comfort little Gabby when her 8-year-old cousin told her: ''New Orleans is gone."

Then last week, with Iggy and Sally still living in Arkansas, David, Fernanda and the children returned, driving south for almost three days. They wanted to see their house. David Gonzalez wanted to see if the Japanese magnolia was still standing. Just thinking of it made him emotional. To him, it is a symbol of his life and his family, and he was happy to see it was still there as he parked the minivan on the block.

But the tree alone will probably not be enough to keep them in New Orleans. Their house is full of mold, their furniture ruined. They do not have flood insurance and David Gonzalez said his carpet-cleaning equipment was not insured, either.

Not that he could find jobs now, even if the equipment worked.

His customers are gone, the service he provided unnecessary. Who needs to have their carpets cleaned, Gonzalez said, when their carpets are ruined? And so, despite his four-generation-deep ties to his home and his city, he has been thinking lately that maybe his wife is right. Maybe they should move away.

They talked about it as they drove to New Orleans last week. They even checked out a couple of towns along the way and came up with a list of places they might soon call home

Maybe Spartanburg, S.C. Maybe the suburbs of Atlanta. Maybe Orlando, Fla.

Florida, they think, might be nice.