We left Houston the next morning to spend some time with our friends, Carole and Harvey Green, at their condo in Watercolor, Florida. We took Sippi with us and we flew directly over New Orleans on our way to Florida, circling above the city several times. It was incredible. Practically the entire city seemed to be flooded. In fact, we knew that was indeed the case, and yet it seemed impossible to comprehend. We were silent for awhile as we continued toward Florida.

We were now concerned about Larry’s dad, still staying in Houston with Carolyn and David. They had attempted evacuating from Houston to Dallas about 4am,
leaving in 2 cars along with David’s parents and the Rottweiler and the Pointer. They drove about 12 miles in the first 2 hours. It was gridlock. A slowly moving
parking lot, they eventually made it about 50 miles by 10pm. Then they turned around. They arrived home exhausted and dehydrated about 11:30pm.

One evening I spoke with my friend Lisa Bialac, who lives in California. She’d volunteered for the Red Cross and they were deploying her to Baton Rouge that Tuesday. She asked me, “What are you and Larry doing to have some fun in the midst of all this? Remember, you need to have some fun.”

“Well, today we went to a funeral,” I replied.

“No, I mean, really” she said.

“You have to look at it from our point of view,” I retorted. “For the last 2 days we’ve spent the majority of the day in the midst of devastation, working and sweating in mud and muck. This morning we got up and got dressed in nice clothes, drove to Baton Rouge, stopped at a restaurant for lunch, and went to a beautiful Cathedral where there was lovely music and we saw and commiserated with people we knew.”

“Well, I guess I see what you mean,” she said.

The last time I went back into our home before it was gutted, I was on a search for some hankies. I had quite a collection of my mother’s and Larry’s grandmother’s handkerchiefs, and I’m the old-fashioned sort of girl who actually uses them. I had mentioned the loss to my friend, Julie Grant Meyer, and she said to me, “Dashka, you should go back there and get your hankies. I know you could get them. You should try again.”

That was a Sunday. The next day the house was scheduled to be gutted. I stopped by early in the morning, before the workmen came. I went into the bedroom, donned my rubber gloves, and looked through what I could get to in the wet dresser drawers, but it was hopeless. As soon as I touched anything, a flock of mosquitoes rose out of the drawer. It took me by surprise.

“Well, since I’m here”, I thought, “I might as well check the closet and see if there’s anything else I can salvage. The closet was black, there was no electricity. I stepped to the back, where my dresses were hanging, and tried to move them on the rack. So many mosquitoes flew out, that I stepped back. A lot of the clothes had fallen to the floor, and were in wet lumps. All of a sudden, one of the lumps began to move. I turned tail and ran out front, screaming. I looked embarrassedly up and down the street, but of course I was alone. “Julie”, I thought, if you really want me to have my mother’s hankies, you’re going to have to go in there and find them yourself!” Some time later, it was Julie who surprised me with a lovely package of pretty hankies she had from her own mother and grandmother, and I use them to this very day.

September was almost at an end, and along with it we would be closer to the end of hurricane season. But not yet. Hurricane Rita was bringing us rain and wind, there in Harvey, where we were staying in Rosa’s home. We heard on the radio that the Industrial Canal had overflowed again, and that the lower 9th Ward was already flooded with waist-deep water. I had expected that we would be able
to go outside that day, but it appeared that the winds were too strong, and it might be dangerous. We lost electricity for a couple of hours but then it was restored. So we stayed at home and watched the water in the canal behind Rosa’s housing development rise higher and higher.

We stayed with Rosa and Glen for a couple of weeks, then we wanted to get on with our lives. We needed more privacy, and a feeling of being on our way to working things out. So we took the things we needed to get by, and we moved into the third floor of the Chartres Street building, above my gallery. We stayed there just a few days. One evening, Larry dropped me off and went to park the car. I was unlocking the front door, when the man talking on his cell phone in front of the building turned and looked at me.

“Dashka?” he asked.

“John Young!” I replied. This was the lawyer in whose French Quarter building Larry lived when he and Diane were getting divorced. It’s where he lived when we first began dating. John came in and we chatted until Larry returned, then we went out to dinner at the only restaurant that was open in the area. John had already bought a house in Baton Rouge, and moved his family there. He offered us his place on St. Louis Street. It was kind of romantic staying there again with the sauna and the tiny winding staircase that went down from the bedroom to the kitchen. It was September, and we stayed there until November, when John evidently wanted to move on with some plans to renovate the building. We were desperate for a place close by, in order to oversea the repair work that was needed, so we overpaid to rent a third floor walk-up loft-type apartment only a few doors down from our building on Chartres Street.

Hurricane Katrina had left us with roof damage, and the water had wicked down in the plaster walls, and left them all mushy. In addition to the extensive wall repairs, we decided to fix up the third-floor studio apartment that Larry's grandparents had lived in, since the requirements for rebuilding our home were awfully fuzzy. The local government kept saying one thing, then another, and it was difficult to tell whether our re-build would be feasible.

I closed the gallery in February of 2006 to begin the work. We had had difficulty finding a contractor, and one evening as we discussed the possibilities, I said, "I can do it. I know I can do it." And so began my life as a contractor. I hired a subcontractor who was to supply the workers to do most of the demolition, carpentry work and painting. I also hired an electrician and a plumber. As it turned out, shortly after beginning, the painter stopped turning up, so I ended up painting almost the entire interior myself. Eventually I had to fire the subcontractor, I was on my 2nd plumber and my 3rd electrician. While we were working on the repairs, we discovered some structural damage in the front of the building that was not due to Katrina, but had to be addressed nonetheless. We needed to replace a 16-foot steel I-Beam that supports the entire brick front of the building. So I hired a structural engineer who made plans and drawings, and I engaged a reputable shoring company. They shored the building, and I hired a brickmason who came and banged out holes in the front of the building. Big holes. I remember sitting at my desk on the second floor, looking out into air. Our 6 months lease was up, and no work was done while we were on vacation in Maine that year. When we returned, our friends Harvey and Carole generously gave us their lovely home Uptown while they summered in Lenox. The work began again, and after the I-Beam was made to specifications, galvanized and installed, the brickmason came back to rebuild the front, then I had to find a stucco specialist to bring it back to its original look, as required by the Vieux Carre Commission, the historic society that keeps the French Quarter looking so quaint.

When Carole and Harvey returned home, we moved into the Homewood Suites, an extended-stay hotel on Poydras Street. I negotiated a good price for a three-month stay, and it included breakfast daily and dinner Monday through Friday! Sometimes I thought the work would never end. I had a finish carpenter who started the work, then decided he didn't want to come to the French Quarter, and never finished...he should have been called a beginning carpenter, not a finish carpenter! I still have a $500 wood door leaning against the wall behind one of my cases, waiting to find someone who can install it on my second floor!

We moved in on November 19th, 2006 with no sink in the kitchen or the bathroom, no countertops, and no toilet on the 2nd floor. We were washing the dishes in the bathtub. I re-opened the gallery on December 5th, and our Grand Re-Opening was the weekend of my birthday, the end of January, 2007.

Some of our friends and family help us celebrate the Grand Re-Opening in January, 2007

Do I look like a contractor?!

Before Hurricane Katrina we were part of a Jewish community of about 10,000 people. We lived in an almost suburban area, only a 12 to 15 minute drive from downtown New Orleans, if we were lucky and there was no traffic. Our house was just beyond the curve in the street, coming from the Robert E. Lee Shopping Center, a strip mall that was home to Walgreen’s Pharmacy, Baskin Robbins Ice Cream store, Blockbuster Video, Franco’s Health Club, Kenneth’s hair salon, a dry cleaners and shoe repair, a Salvation Army resale store, a Chinese restaurant, a closed-down movie theatre that the community had been trying to block from being reopened as a late night music club, Robert’s Grocery, Smoothie King, and the Coffee Café, whose owner worked out at Franco’s and then worked the rest of the day cooking and bringing meals out to the customers himself, aided by a half dozen or so student employees from Mount Carmel Academy, across the street.

Two blocks in the other direction from our house was a smaller strip mall with a gas station, hardware store, another grocery and a bank. We had everything we needed at the tip of our fingers. In the evening we’d come home from work and decide what we wanted for dinner. Perhaps we’d walk over to Franco’s and work out, stop at Blockbuster’s and rent a movie, then go and, as we say here in New Orleans, “make groceries” at Robert’s, buying just what we needed for that evening. We’d most likely walk home, jump in the pool, then barbecue some fish. We’d sit in our dining room, at the same marble-base table with the glass top that was the only piece of furniture we’d been able to save and continue to use. We’d talk about life, about our plans for the future, we’d always comment on how lucky we were to be living such a wonderful life. Sometimes we’d walk the mile or so around by the lake, look at the moon and the stars, comment on the architecture of some of the houses, and look at the progress of new ones that were still being built right by the levee.

At the benchmark of one year after Katrina, our lives were much more disorganized. We had lived in about six different places, some of our things were still stored in Rosa’s garage and in the attic at Chartres Street, as well as at Larry’s dad’s apartment. Our Jewish community was down from 10,000 to about 6,000 people and every time we heard of someone else moving away, it made us so sad. Some of the people I miss the most are people I so took for granted. I seldom worried about who would be chanting from the Torah on Saturday morning. Now the most talented chanter and Israeli folk dancer is living in Birmingham instead of New Orleans. At least a half dozen doctors we know have moved, and many, many more that we didn’t know.

The neighborhood in which we used to live is just beginning to have some activity. Two homes out of about 18 in our block have been rebuilt, the rest are either for sale or just sitting. Most of them have grass and weeds and wild
underbrush a foot high or more. Neighborhoods like ours look like they’ve been hit by a bomb.

None of the stores are open in our shopping center. They all had about seven feet of water in them, and the recovery is difficult. The hardware store has reopened, that’s about it.

Many restaurants and stores in the areas least hard-hit have reopened, but not all of them. Some have limited menus, and others have limited hours, because it’s still difficult to find employees. We try not to go out to our house too often, or to any of the areas that were hard-hit, because it’s terribly depressing. It’s hard to imagine if you haven’t seen it. House after house after house, block after block, all overgrown, with windows out and front doors hanging open. They look like they have black eyes, gaping windows and holes, no electricity, no people. That’s what it’s like in New Orleans East, out where we keep the airplane. The other day, on our way back from the airport, I saw one house that had been rebuilt. One house in that entire neighborhood, it stood out like something very unusual, so clean and pristine. I saw a man walking into the garage with a hose. I have to hand it to him. I don’t know how these rare people can live in a neighborhood without neighbors, like a small oasis in the midst of a desert. I know I couldn’t do it.

Katrina caused a lot of families to split up, some temporarily and some permanently. I personally know two couples who just couldn’t agree on whether to stay or leave, and as a result, in both cases, the husband stayed here to run a business, and the wife left to live someplace where life was easier. Our across the street neighbors from Emerald Street, the Spangenbergs, with their two daughters, Gaby and Jackie, are the sweetest, most loving family. After the hurricane, Marianne sent the girls up to New Jersey to stay with her brother so that they could go to school and live in a family environment with their Aunt and Uncle, and their two cousins. For a while, Marianne was staying in Baton Rouge for work, and Marc was staying with his sister in New Orleans for his work. A lovely family, living in three different cities! Thank goodness they’re all back together again now, but they’re still living with his sister while they work on their new home.

We and Marc and Marianne had quickly become very good friends. Marianne is a gem and a delight to all who know her, they would come over for impromptu wine tastings, and soon we added our newer neighbors next door, Julia and Lynn. We enjoyed cooking for each other, and Mark and Marianne’s daughters, Gabby and Jackie helped us to take care of Sippi. The kids had the keys to our house, and once Jackie, who was only nine at the time, came over to play with Sippi when we weren’t home, and she accidentally set off the alarm. She was so cute, she called me and told me, calling me “Miss Dashka”. I still adore those two girls, though we don’t see them as often as we did. We were in an apartment in the French Quarter from January through May, and I tried to have
them over once a month for dinner. The first time I did it, I didn’t tell Mark and Marianne that Julia and Lynn were coming, so it was a good surprise, and it was fun when the six of us would get together.

The Spangenbergs’ new home is an absolutely gorgeous place in Lake Vista, it only flooded less than a foot. Still, they’ve had a lot of work to do on it, and the work continues yet. Julia and Lynn bought a condo in Audubon Trace, they’re not certain what they’re going to do with their house on Emerald Street

Our next door neighbors on the other side, the Cusimanos, are in their eighties. They have a lot of kids, one’s a plumber, one’s a carpenter, one’s a doctor. Their children rebuilt their house for them. They moved back in several months ago. I saw them right before they moved back. Everything was done except for the
electricity. Mrs. Cusimano was complaining that they couldn’t get the electrician out to turn on the electricity. I said, “What’s the matter, Mrs. Cusimano? You don’t have a son who’s an electrician?”

“Yeah, you right”, she said. “I should’ve had one more.”

Like most of us in New Orleans, they just wanted their life back.

This is my story of how I survived Hurricane Katrina. Many did not.

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If you would like to help the New Orleans Jewish Day School to recover,, please see www.nojds.com