By now, I assume everyone knows that New Orleans is dying, drowning as the levees have been breached and the city turns into a tidal arm of the Gulf of Mexico. The images are all over the television and all over the newspapers. Even the NY Times has devoted four or five full pages of coverage to the devastation in Louisiana and Mississippi. People rescued, people dead, people trapped, people dying, babies being born, looters stealing everything not nailed down. Looks like a bad science fiction novel about the world ending. But, as bad as it may be, and I have so many friends living down there who I cannot get in touch with and who I worry about, I want to focus on a different issue.

Cities can be rebuilt. New Orleans can be drained of the water, the snakes sent packing back into the swamps, the alligators captured and either eaten (trust me on this, they're pretty yummy) or relocated, and the bricks stacked back up. Indeed, the Times was forecasting in the months ahead a huge economic boom for the area fueled by federal assistance and private insurance money payouts (assuming, of course, that the damage was caused by wind and not water -- a tough argument ahead for many).

But even as the city is rebuilt and life begins again, there are some things that cannot be replaced. What will be gone will be the cultural heritage and artifacts that served to connect us with our ancestors. What am I talking about? The museums have died, the cultural repositories of our collective past and memories, and with them, the city dies.

There are some wonderful museums in New Orleans: the D-Day Museum; the Civil War Museum (in a great Richardson building just off Lee Circle); the New Orleans Museum of Art; the City of New Orleans Museum; the State of Louisiana Museum in 8 historic buildings around Jackson Square; and the Mardi Gras Museum. The flood waters will not deal kindly with these places. The waters will erase our memories just as the diaries and letters home of the young Civil War soldiers will surely perish. The paintings. I can't even begin to think about the paintings. All of the ephemera will be just that, ephemeral and evanescent.

I include in this the great libraries at Tulane University and Loyola University, two of the many colleges in New Orleans. I assume that they are gone, along with their collections of rare books and prints.

And what about the parish churches and courthouses, with their centuries of records of births, deaths, wills, land transfers, famous disputes, and all the records that make up our collective heritage? Again, I assume they are gone.

You can rebuild a city.

You cannot remake a heritage. So, while I mourn, quietly, for the city and those who have lost everything to the hurricane, I ask you to join with me and mourn the loss to us all of that which connected us to our past. We are a young nation, still, and our past is always with us and thus even more precious.

Finally, and again, I have not seen anything on this, what happened to the poor animals at Audubon Zoo?

Last night, and this is what got me thinking about all of this, I ran into an old friend on the train, someone I have not seen in 15 years. It wasn't even a train that he normally ever takes. I wasn't sure I even recognized him, but then I saw the tie -- a Southern tie. The Yacht Club. The SYC. That clinched it for me. He told me that Southern, where I had passed many happy moments, had burned to the ground. You can see it here.

U P D A T E: Sept. 1, 2005

From the New Orleans Times Picayune:

Floodwater stops short of City Park museum

By Dante Ramos and Doug MacCash
Staff Writers

The New Orleans Museum of Art survived Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath without significant damage.

But when Federal Emergency Management Agency representatives arrived in the area Wednesday, NOMA employees holed up inside the museum were left in a quandary:

FEMA wanted those evacuees to move to a safer location, but there was no way to secure the artwork inside.
Six security and maintenance employees remained on duty during the hurricane and were joined by 30 evacuees, including the families of some employees.

Harold Lyons, a security console operator who stayed on at the museum, said FEMA representatives were the first outsiders to show up at the museum in days.

They immediately tried to persuade staffers to leave the building. That would have left no one to protect the museumÂ’s contents, and no one inside the museum had the authority to give that order, Lyons said as he inspected the grounds.

Museum Director John Bullard was on vacation and assistant Director Jacquie Sullivan had taken a disabled brother to Gonzales.

“We can’t just leave and turn out the lights on the say-so of someone we don’t know,’’ Lyons said.

The phones inside the museum had failed. Lyons asked a reporter to pass a message to Sullivan as soon as possible.

Interviewed by telephone, Sullivan said she had been in close contact with emergency management officials all day Wednesday. State Police had promised to take her back to the museum at 7 a.m. Thursday, she said.

City Park was littered with fallen trees, but evacueesÂ’ cars, clustered around the museumÂ’s walls, were mostly unscathed. The museum itself was spared any wind damage, and floodwater had not reached the building.

Inside, the museumÂ’s generators whirred away, providing air conditioning to preserve the priceless artworks.

Sullivan said museum workers had taken down some pieces in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden before the storm.

But a towering modernist sculpture by Kenneth Snelson was reduced to a twisted mess in the lagoon.

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