Watch original video:

NEW ORLEANS

Battered by a storm-tossed barge, a levee failed and water from the wide Inner Harbor canal blasted through with the force of cannon fire, ripping houses from foundations, tossing cars into trees. In one bad night, the Lower 9th was turned into a job for the scrapers.

Yet, three years later, there she was, Gertrude LeBlanc

“I like to say this house is like a beacon,” the retired postal worker said. “It’s telling the people to come back home.”

This was a few days before Christmas, and LeBlanc had the yellow, wood-framed home fully trimmed, with artificial candy canes lining the walkway and red ribbons and garlands strung over the porch.

“I always said that, if I ever get to come back, I wanted to put up ribbons and garlands for Christmas in my new house,” she said. “That is what I wanted. And that is what I did.”

The house was built by a stranger. A Baptist minister from another part of town showed up one day at the government trailer where LeBlanc was living and said he and a crew of volunteers had come to help her rebuild; “a blessing from heaven,” she called him. She moved into the home in the spring, the first on Tennessee Street to make it back.

From her porch, LeBlanc can see a few houses that have gone up since. They tend to sit far apart, surrounded by abandoned lots covered with weeds and broken foundations and marked by driveways leading nowhere. Snakes have moved into the grass, hunting rodents. It might seem a daunting landscape, but not to Miss Gertie: “To me those houses are like flowers popping up in a garden. There’s just a few of us now. But there will soon be a beautiful garden. Oh, yes.”

Not according to plan

This wasn’t supposed to happen. The Lower 9th Ward had been written off by most of the politicians and urban-policy experts who after Katrina set out to engineer a new New Orleans. An inability to protect the low neighborhood in future storms was one reason cited. There also was talk about turning it into an industrial park or a golf resort.

Displaced residents suspected the balkiness about rebuilding might have more to do with many of them being poor and black, a perceived drag on a city trying to restore itself with tourist dollars.

The Lower 9th was one of the first New Orleans neighborhoods where blacks were allowed to own property. Many homes had been passed along by families across three or four generations, often without documentation. After Katrina, these word-of-mouth inheritances tangled up the permit process.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008579431_nawlins01.html?syndication=rss