The corner of Rampart Street and Canal Street is now, in the spring of 2022, returning to something like normal. In the summer of 1853, at the height of a yellow fever epidemic in which 8,000 people would die, The New Orleans Courier, seeking to assuage the fears of its readers, advised them: “Above all, keep your imagination from being frightened.” The Illustrated London News, editorializing that same summer, “New Orleans has been built upon a site that only the madness of commercial lust could ever have tempted men to occupy.” It heightened my awareness of the invisible dangers of New Orleans. My awareness of the unseen threats became most acute when a neighbor sanding their old house in preparation for having it painted - an unfortunately common practice in New Orleans - gave the surroundings, including our house, a visible dusting of emulsified lead paint, predictably alarming for parents of two small children.

The city is surrounded by refineries and factories producing toxins the state legislature’s attitude toward industrial pollution could be called lax, to put it mildly. The culprits are both generic and specific. It’s a chemical smell, the source undetermined.Įveryone I’ve talked to thinks it emanates from a plant across the river, on the West Bank. Now and then, you would wake up to it and find yourself at the top of your front steps in the soft morning air, breathing it in, trying to decide if you could get used to it, or even should get used to it. I would open my front door on a midnight errand to bring the trash out to the bin, and there it would be: an invisible, airborne toxic event. There is a smell that wafts over New Orleans now and then, an aroma that is distinctly toxic even if it is faint.

But the ones that most unnerved me were the menaces unseen. The threats that get the most attention are the ones you can see: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods. To live there is to toggle between a necessary oblivion and being constantly alert to threat. New Orleans is perched at the edge of the continent, at the mouth of a great river - “the colon of America,” remarked a friend who grew up here - and yet it is small enough in scale that you can almost see and hear the gears of its municipal life turning. In an exclusive excerpt from the New Orleans issue of Stranger’s Guide, author Thomas Beller examines the 2019 collapse of the city’s Hard Rock Hotel, the subsequent cleanup, and the still-unanswered questions.

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