NEW ORLEANS − Anxious and grieving residents and workers began cautiously reopening the Bourbon Street area on Thursday, a day after a terror attack that killed 14 amid New Year’s celebrations at the famously raucous party destination.
“New Year started with a bang, but it was the wrong kind of bang,” said 42-year French Quarter resident James Grose, 62. “Welcome to the nightmare.”
Around 3:15 a.m. on Wednesday, authorities say Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar of Houston swerved a rented pickup around a police barricade and careened down Bourbon Street. In addition to killing 14 people, he injured dozens more before crashing the truck and dying in a gunfight with police, the FBI said. Jabbar posted pro-ISIS videos on social media before the attack, the FBI said Thursday.
“It’s just too … close to home,” said Grose, a freelance cartographer. “It’s one thing to hear about terrorist attacks in the Middle East. It’s a whole other thing to have it happen in your own neighborhood on the street where you’ve walked.”
Like many French Quarter residents, Grose and neighbor Sherry Powell, 68, avoided Bourbon Street on New Year’s Eve, ceding the narrow road for the night to the thousands of tourists who flooded in. Many were visiting in anticipating of the Sugar Bowl, which was delayed a day and was set to draw 70,000 fans to the nearby Superdome.
“I think we’re still trying to process it all,” said Powell, a retired camera-store owner from Indianapolis who bought a house on Dumaine Street in 2007. “It boggles the mind. I’m gobsmacked.”
Federal officials blocked off access to Bourbon Street for the investigation and turned it back to local control Thursday morning.
After Jabbar swerved past the roadblock, he raced about 900 feet down Bourbon Street, past the Hustler Hollywood strip club, the Hard Rock Café, the world-famous Galatoire’s steakhouse and the Big Easy daiquiri bar.
“They’ve taken a place that’s festive and turned it into a killing field,” former New Orleans Mayor Marc Haydel Morial said. “It will never be the same. It will never be the same.”
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‘It’s eerie to see it so quiet. It’s always so vibrant’
University of Georgia fan Allison Floyd, 55, of South Carolina was asleep at the Four Points by Sheraton on Bourbon Street when the attacker’s Ford F-150 Lightning pickup crashed down the street below. Floyd, who has visited Bourbon Street before and usually stays somewhere quieter, chose the hotel so her adult sons could experience the revelry.
“It was packed, it was fun to see. Street performers and musicians and everybody just having a great time,” she said. “It’s eerie to see it so quiet. It’s always so vibrant. You just pray for the victims.”
She was wearing earplugs when she went to sleep and was woken about 4 a.m., she said, by hotel workers evacuating guests.
“We sat right there in that step from 4 to 6,” she said, gesturing at a nearby doorway on Toulouse Street. “Lot of people in their pajamas and sweatshirts.”
Floyd said hotel workers told them police were investigating some sort of bomb threat, which prompted the evacuation. She didn’t learn until later, she said, about the attack. Worried about the possibility of another attack, the family stayed close to the hotel for the rest of the day but checked out Thursday to head to the Superdome.
She said they’ve been watching news coverage of stadium security plans and are reasonably confident they’ll be safe. After initially saying that Jabbar might have had accomplices, federal officials now say it appears he was a “lone wolf” attacker.
“You just pray you’re making the right decision,” Floyd said.
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‘We just fell in love with the ambience and the people’
A block off Bourbon Street, Powell sat in the sun on her steps with three of her dogs − Moselle, Daisy and Cleo − and chatted with neighbors as they walked by, catching up on the latest news on the attack and worrying about the future of the city they love.
Powell said living so close to Bourbon Street comes with its challenges, from tourists urinating in the nearby alley to the circling traffic on weekends. But every city has its drawbacks, she said, as a horse-drawn carriage clopped its way past, its driver narrating history to a handful of tourists.
“Why not live where you can live where you can walk to get world-class food, to get groceries?” said Powell, who has lived full time on Dumaine for two years. “We just fell in love with the ambiance and the people. It’s a free show 24/7.”
Powell and Grose worried aloud at how the attack will affect tourists, who pay nearly half of the city’s sales taxes. They also worried about whether new security measures might make life harder for residents and businesses alike when they’re still struggling with the impacts of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
“The atmosphere is just ugh,” Grose said.
‘We open! We open!’
Bourbon Street reopened for business around 1 p.m. local time on Thursday, and tourists immediately began flooding in amid a heavy police presence.“We open! We open!” called security guard Harry Walker, 32, as he swung back the doors to one of the street’s multiple Slush Daiquiris bars.Walker said the street’s closure has hurt bartenders and other servers who depend heavily on tourist tips. Louisiana’s minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour.“The bartenders have been hurting, and this is good to see,” Walker said, pinning back a security shutter.Among the first visitors was Ashleigh Armstrong, who came to the city with family from west Tennessee to celebrate her 40th birthday.They had begun their trip to New Orleans on Wednesday before they knew about the terror attack.“It’s somber. It’s surreal,” Armstrong said. “Without the crowds you see stuff you’ve never seen before.”
Morial, the former mayor, said he’s confident the city will recover, even as it changes. Founded in 1718, New Orleans has survived fires and floods, hurricanes and the transition from French to Spanish and then American ownership.
“It’s been knocked down and always gotten back up. New Orleans will stand up. It has to,” Morial said. “It will bounce back. It has to bounce back. The French Quarter is the economic engine of the entire region.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘New Orleans will stand up’: A shaken French Quarter vows to rebound
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