Shine on: A refreshed
Morial Center successfully
hosted 18,000 ALA
attendees in June.
The story of New
Orleans one year after Hurricane Katrina is sometimes
referred to as a tale of two cities. On the one hand, the historic
heart of the Big Easy so familiar to tourists and business
travelers survived the storm wonderfully intact. Today, the streets
of the French Quarter, Faubourg Marigny, Garden District, Warehouse
Arts District and Central Business District are safe and clean; the
stores and world-famous restaurants are open; and, crucially, 90
downtown hotels are back online. Within the city’s core, so full of
music, architectural charms and vibrant street life, it is possible
to forget that last summer’s awful hurricane ever occurred. This
New Orleans is the same as it ever was.
On the other hand, tracts of the
metropolitan area outside the “sliver by the river” still lay in
sad ruins. This is the other city: Block after block of moldy,
decimated homes continue to lack services, schools or nearby
stores. With comprehensive insurance or rebuilding plans still
lacking, and rebuilt levees distrusted by some, residents in such
heavily damaged neighborhoods as the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview
have been unable to return to rebuild in large numbers, giving
these districts and others a haunting mood of abandonment.
It was into this city of dueling
realities that 18,000 members of the American Library Association
came in late June for what would be the first citywide convention
since Hurricane Katrina, complete with headliner speakers like
former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and first lady Laura
Bush. The event, expected to generate $24 million in badly needed
revenue for the city, would be a critical test of New Orleans’
rebirth as a convention destination. And by the end of the
conference, one thing was clear: The Big Easy passed with ease.
Damage control
Marketing a city that one year ago
experienced a hurricane, disastrous flooding and a widely televised
humanitarian crisis brings interesting challenges. For Stephen
Perry, president and CEO of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention
and Visitors Bureau, the job in June involved steadying the nerves
of the librarians.
Just days before the start of the ALA
conference, the governor had called out the Louisiana National
Guard to patrol outlying parts of the city. But with images of
Humvees and armed troops in the news, more than a few ALA attendees
had become apprehensive about their impending visit, and the NOMCVB
went into damage control mode.
“We jumped into action immediately,”
says Perry. “The national press conveyed an impression that there
was crime all over the city, when that wasn’t the case. We were in
favor of the National Guard coming to patrol desolate, heavily
flooded areas that did not have electricity and were dark at night.
But the National Guard was not coming to the New Orleans
that tourists experience.”
For Deidre Ross, the ALA’s director of
conference services, the deployment of troops initially threatened
to diminish attendance numbers, cut revenue and panic attendees. “I
thought, ‘Thank you very much.’ What were they thinking?” says
Ross. “I started to get so many comments. It reminded me of Toronto
during SARS. When they had the second outbreak there, we had to
give people money back. I thought, ‘Here we go again, the other
shoe is dropping.’ ”
But the NOMCVB quickly assembled the
facts and sent that information directly to the ALA’s membership:
There would be no troops with M-16s and Humvees anywhere near the
convention.
“The bureau has been phenomenal,” says
Ross, sitting in her temporary office at the renovated Morial
Convention Center. “When I started getting e-mail, I went to the
bureau and they explained what was happening -- that the National
Guard was not going to be here around the center, they were going
to devastated areas so the police could be around here. We sent it
out to our membership, and it stopped the panic in its tracks. The
truth of the matter is that in this district, before Katrina, they
had 85 patrolmen. While we’re here it’s going to be 130, but that’s
police, not National Guard.”
In the end, the ALA’s attendance was
unaffected by the deployment. “People in New Orleans are
accommodating and great,” says Kevin Pendleton, a librarian from
Ogden, Utah. “In a few years the city will be back to its old
glory. We have no concerns about safety.”
The French Quarter
escaped major damage
from Katrina.
Bouncing back
Perhaps the quick response of the NOCVB
was the product of a year’s worth of hands-on crisis management
experience. From the moment the storm struck on Aug. 29, 2005, the
bureau has been in a whirlwind, moving from the Lt. Governor’s
offices in Baton Rouge to a stint operating from Dicky Brennan’s
Bourbon House Restaurant in the French Quarter, and finally
reoccupying its headquarters on St. Charles Avenue. Meantime, the
bureau estimates 80 percent of its staff members were coping with
damage to their own homes.
All the while, they were charged with a
vital mission: resuscitating the stricken city’s main economic
engine -- tourism and conventions -- which employed about 14,600
hotel workers in 2004, according to HVS Convention, Sports &
Entertainment Facilities Consulting.
For Perry, despite his city’s long
emergency, the past year has been marked by increasingly
encouraging signs that New Orleans could reemerge from the disaster
as a major destination for business travelers and vacationers. “The
first was the realization that the historic core, the French
Quarter, and our great architecture all survived intact,” he says.
“That was the first big breath moment, and it was early. Next was
how quickly the hotels were getting back open to host recovery
workers. Then, in December, many of the famous restaurants began to
reopen. But the ultimate moment, when we knew it would all be OK,
was Mardi Gras. We had 700,000 people filling the street for the
most emotional and wonderful Mardi Gras anybody had witnessed --
and we had planners here with great reactions.”
The Morial
makeover
Refreshing the 1.1 million-square-foot
Ernest N. Morial Center was a primary goal. In the wake of the
storm, the center was used as a shelter-of-last-resort. But in the
chaos that followed the levee failures, thousands of survivors
there endured miserable conditions that were broadcast
internationally.
“What you saw and how you interpreted
it -- that has been one of the factors in having to correct the
image of this city,” acknowledges Jimmie Fore, president and
general manager of the facility. “If our customers came here today,
they would be perfectly satisfied that we are able to accommodate
any event. “
The Morial’s interior has been
transformed, with diamond-polished floors that transition into
freshly milled blue carpeting designed to evoke the natural
landscape of Louisiana’s coasts and bayous. A new Starbucks
competes with a food court that quickly proved popular with the
ALA’s lunch crowd. Although renovation continues along roughly a
third of the mile-long Morial Center, it was agreed by all that the
new facility is a vast improvement on the pre-Katrina building.
“It’s excellent,” says the ALA’s Ross.
“Everyone is trying extremely hard to please everybody, and it is
working. Oh my gosh, it looks beautiful. There’s no more orange
carpet! It’s tasteful, understated, very lovely. Like a whole new
center.”
Nola’s eateries
have reopened.
The living city
Conventions are coming back to New
Orleans in droves. The spanking new Morial will host 31 groups in
2006 besides the ALA, including 25,000 members of the Full Gospel
Baptist Church International; 16,000 members of the American
Psychological Association; and 25,000 members of the National
Association of Realtors. And many more groups have booked the
facility for the coming years.
“I think with the passage of time, and
with every event like ALA that goes to the city and experiences a
successful outcome, the lion’s share of anxiety about the city as a
future destination begins to wane, and the rest will take care of
itself,” says Steven Hacker, president of the International
Association for Exhibition Management. “We’ve committed our 2009
meeting to New Orleans as a signal to our industry, a leadership
initiative, that we’re taking our most important event there, and
you ought to do the same.”
Other key venues and attractions in the
city have reopened or are planning to get back in business soon.
For instance, the New Orleans Arena hosted its first event in
March. The Superdome -- also used as a post-storm shelter with
mixed results during Katrina -- at press time had repairmen
restoring its roof. The facility was set to reopen this month, when
the NFL’s Saints come marching in to their home city for a game to
be televised on Monday Night Football.
Meantime, Harrah’s Casino, the Audubon
Zoo, the Audubon Aquarium and mainstays such as Cafe du Monde, the
Riverwalk, Jax Brewery and a plethora of fantastic restaurants are
in operation. Also, jazz and music haunts from Preservation Hall to
Tipitina’s to the cozy clubs along Frenchman Street are packing in
fans of the city’s sound.
“We went to the French Quarter, and
quite a few people from the convention were out,” says Makenzie
Lobby, a marketing and sales coordinator with Mankato, Minn.-based
Stone Arch Books, an exhibitor at the ALA’s conference. “I’ve had
time to look around, and people are really happy that we’re
here.”
Doing right
For the ALA’s meeting planners and
attendees, the conference also was a chance to help resuscitate the
more damaged parts of the city through volunteerism and
donations.
“A lot of associations and corporations
are realizing that they have great opportunities for branding and
community participation that are very good for their
organizations,” says bureau head Stephen Perry. “We’re moving
something from a negative to a positive, and it’s great for groups
to partake in that.”
In the case of the American Library
Association, the appropriate causes were the badly damaged local
public and school library systems. “For us, what’s so sad is losing
libraries,” says Shirley Cobble, a librarian with the Idaho School
for the Deaf. “They have 13 branches here, and eight were washed
out in the storm.”
More than 900 people volunteered to
work at local libraries, schools, colleges and universities during
the conference. Moreover, a group of 250 convention-goers took part
in an “extreme makeover” of the historic Carnegie branch of the New
Orleans Public Library.
“We’re right on schedule with that
project,” says ALA planner Ross. “We got the damaged books out,
took down shelving, took down paintings. The pros are putting in
carpet, shelving and furniture. When our librarians come back in,
we will have the actual ribbon-cutting.”
Other charitable initiatives by the
librarians included $800,000 in grants for school libraries damaged
in the hurricane as well as projects with Habitat for Humanity.
Two to one
Those who live and visit here look
forward to the day when the two cities that constitute New Orleans
a year after Hurricane Katrina will become one again. But the
second city, the one of shredded neighborhoods and empty homes, can
only be healed by the success of the first, the one offering “bon
temps” on an unscathed Bourbon Street that lures tourists and
business travelers, like the ALA’s conventioneers who spent money
and gave time and labor to the city.
The meetings industry can help revive a
great American destination, one that canceled $2 billion in
meetings business since last fall. (The tourism business, as a
whole, formerly provided 35 percent of the city’s operating budget,
says the NOMCVB.) And the benefits go both ways: Groups coming to
New Orleans are receiving accolades and attention nationally, as
the ALA found out in June.
“It has raised consciousness of
libraries, and we didn’t expect that,” says Ross. “It’s been all
over the news. We could not buy this. Our theme is, ‘Libraries
rebuild communities.’ ”
In New Orleans, the same could be said
of meetings and conventions.