The Big Blank Canvas

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But the rethinking of city schools goes beyond that. The state is examining whether schools in every neighborhood of New Orleans should be brought back as part of what's called a community nexus. Each school would be part of a fabric of facilities that could include a library, recreation center, health clinic, performing-arts space and even a community catering kitchen. All of them would serve students and other people from the surrounding neighborhood. That would avoid the duplication of costs when cities build, say, public libraries and school libraries. Other cities, including Chicago and Providence, R.I., have adopted the approach in individual neighborhoods, but no other city has thought about attempting it across the board. "It will be a quantum leap," says Steven Bingler, head of Concordia LLC, a New Orleans--based architecture and planning firm that has been spearheading the effort. "And it will be one of those things that it took a hurricane to get there."

Something else the hurricane may produce is what Nagin predicts will be "the biggest construction boom this country has ever had." While the poorer districts may be languishing, in some areas there are signs the boom may be happening. Deals are popping up around downtown and along the Mississippi riverfront. KB Home, one of the nation's largest home builders, is racing to start up to 10,000 Orleans-style houses just across the parish line, as well as 58 lots downtown. Bruce Karatz, CEO of California-based KB Home, promises that the houses "will have the New Orleans feel. New Orleans has a certain charm, a unique style and colors."

Talk like that makes some of the locals crazy. What they fear is that the city will come back as a Disneyfied version of itself, full of national-brand replicas of its homebred culture--a giant House of Blues. The city's delicate cultural ecosystems may be the thing hardest for government intervention to preserve. There are plans all the same, so far mostly unfunded, to help get artists and musicians back to work in a city where the arts were both a spiritual lifeblood and a significant source of revenue. Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, a New Orleans native who co-chairs the BNOB cultural committee, has put forward a proposal recommending, among other things, a public-works program that would subsidize musical performance and public art. "Let's get them working because they will stimulate the economy," Marsalis says. "They'll give people something to come back and see."

Among architectural preservationists, the greatest fear six months ago was that developers eager for large tracts of open land would push the city to bulldoze whole neighborhoods of traditional housing, like the long, narrow "shotgun" houses that produce the intricate streetscape rhythms around large parts of the city. Because replacing them with cookie-cutter suburban development would destroy the heart of the city, the National Trust for Historic Preservation teamed with the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans to help finance the restoration of a number of flood-damaged older homes. The point was to show that it was entirely possible to bring them back to life. "I don't worry about wholesale demolition anymore," says National Trust president Richard Moe. "The biggest problem right now is just the lack of rebuilding funds hitting the street."