One of the most impactful of my experiences in New Orleans took place over the course of just a few hours in the Presbytére, a Registered National Historical Landmark building built in 1794 which houses two permanent exhibits of the Louisiana State Museum. The Presbytére is one of two buildings which flank the St. Louis Cathedral and face Jackson Square in the French Quarter. On the main floor can be found Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond, while upstairs several galleries present the history and artifacts of New Orleans’ biggest celebration in Mardi Gras: It’s Carnival Time in Louisiana.

The first thing you see as you enter the lobby of the building are two starkly contrasted items: an elaborate Mardi Gras costume posed behind a Steinway baby grand oddly tilted on its side.   Turns out this piano was found in just that position in the flooded ruins of Fats Domino’s house in the Lower Ninth Ward. (We had driven by it earlier in the week.) It sets visitors up for the unique contrasts of the two exhibits which represent two of the most iconic representations of New Orleans: wild and hedonistic celebration and an almost incomprehensible disaster.

After paying the extremely reasonable admission fee of $6 per adult (seniors and students pay $5), we first explored the hurricane exhibit. While the bulk of it focuses on Katrina, one also sees a timeline of major storms the city endured since its founding and gets background into how the canals and levee system evolved over time.

One then enters a series of rooms where speakers play the sounds of hovering rescue helicopters as well as oral accounts of those who survived. News footage plays of the Superdome, the flooding, the “Cajun Navy” and other images from the days that followed Katrina’s landfall in 2005. On one wall hangs a garage door marked in spray paint by search and rescue crews with the hieroglyphs indicating what they found there; another room is covered with the “diary” of a housing complex resident, written in felt-tipped marker on the walls of his home. Here we walk through a recreation of an attic where homeowners took refuge from the rising waters, along with the actual axe they used when they were forced to chop through the roof to save themselves. There we see one of the small, low, light pirogues which rescued scores of stranded people, and then we focus on a pair of blue jeans on which the wearer wrote his i.d. and medical information in case he was injured or killed before he reached safety.

All of those artifacts and personal stories really brought home the desperation and degree of destruction the residents of this area experienced, but the exhibit concluded with stories of recovery and rebuilding and the search for solutions to some of the manmade causes of the flooding.

I’m glad we ended our tour with the Mardi Gras exhibits upstairs. They presented all the revelry and joy of the annual celebration, with floats  and elaborate costumes        and jewelry   all on show. One could follow the development of the various traditions and the different unique events sponsored by communities throughout Louisiana.

While the hurricane and Mardi Gras exhibits elicited very different emotions, combined they really brought home the characteristics that make the people of New Orleans and the city itself so special: an exuberant spirit, resilience and generosity.

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor