Beyond the facade, hard times in The Big Easy

NEW ORLEANS -- The arched spine of high ground along the Mississippi River here pulses again, three months after Hurricane Katrina. The $19 appetizer has returned to the French Quarter restaurant scene, guys in suits ride office-tower elevators, hipsters linger over chicory coffee on Magazine Street, and the jazzy eighth notes pop and sizzle in the Faubourg Marigny.

But the beguiling bustle of New Orleans can be deceptive.

Nighttime tells the truth. Nighttime tells that the city is not whole. Then, the great expanse of the city's center and much of its lanky eastern edge lie dark and silent and creepy. Block after block of homes, mile after mile, rot. Streets in the Treme neighborhood, home to so many musicians, echo in their emptiness, and fancy pads out by Lake Pontchartrain are hollow. Mid-City's little camelbacks and side-hall shotguns, archetypes of New Orleans architecture, are vacant, their doors smashed open by men in protective masks -- the houses' innards hacked apart and stacked on the sidewalk.

This city of feathery Mardi Gras masks and chilling vampire yarns grapples with its new realities. More than 100,000 homes and businesses remain uninhabitable. More than three out of four residents live elsewhere. More than 5 million tons of storm debris remain. The power company is bankrupt. Workers are in short supply. New Orleans's pro football team is playing in Baton Rouge, its pro basketball team in Oklahoma City, its thoroughbreds in Bossier City, La. Its first -- and so far only -- public school just recently reopened. The police force is in disarray. Scientists are recording alarming mold levels. Suburban suicide rates are spiking. Local doctors are operating out of tents. The Catholic Archdiocese is $40 million in the red.

The concern for many is simple, which makes it even more terrifying: Will New Orleans ever be itself again? Its storied but impoverished Lower Ninth Ward may never be rebuilt. Mayor C. Ray Nagin has said the city will probably shrink to half of its pre-Katrina population of about half a million. It will be far more difficult for a city that size to support the same amenities -- including professional sports franchises and cultural attractions -- let alone supply the jobs it once did.

What's more, there is a creeping fear here that the nation has moved on. Nagin fretted about ''Katrina fatigue" after a visit to Capitol Hill.

The Times-Picayune worried in a front-page editorial that Washington power brokers now consider the city a burden: ''They act as if we wore our skirts too short and invited trouble."

Financial aid from Washington, once expected to reach $200 billion, has stalled out at about $70 billion. President Bush's proposal to offer breaks to businesses investing in the Gulf Coast region, broadcast on national television from here, has passed the Senate. But a similar House bill failed to come up for an expected vote last month, in part because some Republicans are demanding that Gulf Coast casinos be exempt from the tax benefits.

And bipartisan Senate efforts to temporarily expand Medicaid eligibility for evacuees have been stymied by vociferous White House opposition.

''There is a perception the rest of the country is uninterested," New Orleans psychiatrist Candace Cutrone said. ''People are angry, disillusioned, indignant, insulted."

New Orleans meanders across more than 11 miles of low-dipping land between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, and none of it has completely returned to pre-hurricane normalcy.

Far from the tourist havens, on the scruffy streets of New Orleans East, Bobby Rideau's post-Katrina reality takes shape around a camping stove. Like almost half the city, Rideau's street has no residential gas service, and it has no power.

For this retired liquor store clerk, that means winter with no lights, no heat, and no stove, unless he gets creative.

Rideau, 66, whose car was destroyed by Katrina, hitches rides now to a hardware store that sells the propane tanks he needs for his rigged heater and camping stove. ''You gotta learn to improvise," he said. ''This propane is worth its weight in gold on a cold night."

The highway that leads out of Rideau's neighborhood and over the Industrial Canal flows above a graveyard of waterlogged cars stashed beneath overpasses. Each displays thick, ugly lines of brown that illustrate how high the floodwaters rose. The storm ruined more than 350,000 vehicles, and most remain.

Farther west, Hezzie McCaleb -- transformed by the storm into a refuse vulture in a red pickup truck -- can be found picking through the piles of debris. His city has become a scavenger's refuge, a smorgasbord of junk for the desperate or the foolish or the tinkerers -- all of whom have no trouble beating cleanup crews to the street-side booty.

''With God's help, we'll get our lives back," McCaleb, 53, declared to his friend Berkeley Wong as they struggled with another load.

This time, McCaleb said, God provided him with a side-by-side refrigerator, one of a million appliances ruined by Katrina. Countless refrigerators, enveloped in eye-searing stench, line the streets. Almost all, it seems, carry messages of frustration: ''Do not open. Michael Brown and Pres. Bush inside. . . . Send to White House, Pennsylvania Avenue."

''Now Hiring" signs on nearly every street corner tell how severe the worker crisis has become. Burger King offers $6,000 bonuses, paid in installments over one year, to new workers. Busloads of Latino workers flow in for the wretched task of gutting houses.

And still employers cannot find enough workers, even in the upscale parts of town. William Hines, managing partner of Jones Walker, one of the city's biggest law firms, waits three weeks to get his suits dry-cleaned. JoAnn Clevenger, who owns the Upperline cafe, serves her signature Tom Cowman's roast duck and fried green tomatoes, with only eight employees, down from 28.

Deeper into the city's center, Karen Porche spends her days trying to make sense of the carnage in the Fontainebleau neighborhood, where she and her husband live and own rental properties. Porche, an OB-GYN nurse, showers outside now because her handy husband connected a hot-water line in their backyard.

''We are survivors," said Porche, whose husband is a born-and-bred, won't-ever-leave New Orleanian. She has put him on notice: ''If it floods again," she said, ''I'm ready to call it quits."

North of her, Thania ''Aunt Mae" Elliott dips her wedding china in bleach, hoping to salvage something from her abominable Lakeview home.

Elliott and her husband are weekenders now, and they are joining a procession of tens of thousands who plod in miserable traffic jams every Saturday morning leading into the city from points west and north.

It took the Federal Emergency Management Agency a month to send an inspector to their house, and the insurance adjuster didn't show up for more than two months. ''It is so depressing," Elliott said. Her life has taken on a rhythm: ''Laugh, cry, have a drink."