A hard grind in New Orleans
NEW YORK — It wasn’t until this past June, nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated his New Orleans coffeehouse, that Robert Thompson was really back in business. It took that long to clean up and rebuild after the flood waters had receded.
“It’s hard to express the experience to people,” Thompson said. “There’s not one picture or sound bite that describes it.”
Robert Myer’s staffing company took less time to recover after Katrina swept through Gulfport, Miss. But, like Thompson, he sacrificed and labored to keep his company going.
“I was working 20-hour days; I slept in the car,” he recalled.
Their stories will sound familiar to thousands of other small-business owners who had to rebound from Katrina, or from Hurricanes Rita and Wilma weeks later.
Thompson’s Fair Grinds coffeehouse was three years old when Katrina struck. The business, located in a two-story house in the Fauborg-St. John neighborhood of New Orleans, took in about three feet of water. The floodwaters ruined the kitchen, leaving it covered with mold and mildew and literally stinking, and damaged the front part of the business as well.
The kitchen needed to be torn out and rebuilt, but there was hardly anyone around to do it.
“Trying to find workers, that’s the toughest thing,” Thompson recalled. “The people we dealt with — craftsmen, carpenters, electricians, roofers — weren’t home and if they were, they were decimated themselves.”
Help did come in the first few weeks and months, in the form of workers from Honduras and Mexico who arrived in New Orleans to work in the rebuilding.
“Thank God for them, they were the work force for many, many months,” Thompson said. He recalled that a group of students from Allegheny College — “they were bright-eyed and full of generosity” — also came to help.
The first thing to be done was kill the mold, a process that took weeks. Then the kitchen had to be gutted, a job done in November, and the walls left open for two more months to be sure they were completely mold-free.
But Thompson noted there was no general contractor around and so many tasks of rebuilding had to wait because “we could only get one thing done at a time.”
Still, the Thompsons got the coffeehouse going again despite the lack of a kitchen.
In January 2006, they started serving free coffee on the patio, and also let people without water take showers on the undamaged top floor of the building. The Fair Grinds became a community center where people would gather, bring food, exchange items like clothing, books and furniture, and see what help they could give to or receive from others. And, with no mail or regular newspaper delivery, it was a place to get information.
All around the Fair Grinds, the rebuilding was very slow as well. “It was very primitive, like Robinson Crusoe — we really were kind of scabbing together our existence at that point,” Thompson said.
By this past June, the coffeehouse was finally ready to reopen as a business. Thompson was able to find workers, because working in a coffeehouse appeals to people. There are still many other loose ends before the rebuilding is complete, but “we’ll work them through,” Thompson said. On the plus side, he’s made improvements to the coffeehouse from what it was before Katrina
New Orleans itself, of course, is still far from recovered.