A funny thing about television cameras: They’re drawn to disaster. Something in their circuitry makes them swing toward the tragic, and ignore the triumphant.

So it has been, and forever will be.

Case in point: Orleans Parish, Louisiana—population 235,000. By now we know the city’s ranks are half what they were a little over a year ago, when 485,000 souls lived and loved, railed against and reveled in the City that Care Forgot.

Then, Care crashed the party. Her name was Katrina, and the gates of hell opened up, drowning 80 percent of the town in a liquid devil’s brew.

You know that part, know about the exodus to Houston, the Lower Ninth Ward and the breakdown of all that was holy.

Here’s what you may not know: The part of the city you’re used to—the part perused by outsiders such as these authors—is virtually unchanged. And from that sacrosanct center, the betting is, the Crescent City may be born again.

Public officials down in New Orleans are fond of saying that theirs is “’a tale of two cities,’” Eric Janecke, director of marketing for the Hilton New Orleans Riverside, says. “The Central Business District and French Quarter are like they were pre-Katrina—except there are fewer people.”

Joe Chandler noticed the absence of the traditional summertime crunch when he and 8,000 others attended a recent convention of the American Psychological Association. “There were far fewer people,” Chandler says. But, “Besides that, it was not at all what I expected. It was still hoppin’.”

Certainly New Orleans is beginning to hop with conventioneers once again. In addition to psychologists, since Katrina the city has hosted the American Library Association (18,000 attendees), and is gearing up for the descent of 25,000 members, guests and exhibitors for the National Association of Realtors conclave in November.

They’ll be setting up shop in the Morial Convention Center, a facility Chandler says shows no signs of the televised chaos that befell the place in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

What conventioneers, business travelers and tourists alike will discover when they come back to New Orleans is that they can now get a decent seat in a great restaurant—without the wait. “You have the best dining in the world here,” New York native Janecke says. “That hasn’t changed.” What has changed, a bit, are the prices. “The average entr?e is probably 20 percent less than in New York, D.C. or Chicago,” he says.

Jerry Amato is co-owner of one of the city’s landmark eateries, Mother’s—a place so popular that when the President of the United States came to town to commemorate the first anniversary of the storm he chose to chow down at 401 Poydras Street.

“Things have to get better,” Amato says in that distinct New Orleans accent that is part Cajun, part Brooklyn. “Once we see the convention business picking up again, once we see people rebuilding their homes, empty seats in Mother’s will fill again.” 

But, he says, “It’s going to take a little time.”

It’s taken remarkably little time to rebuild most of the city’s hotel infrastructure. The New Orleans Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau says 28,500 of the city’s 38,000 pre-Katrina rooms are up and running. The Ritz-Carlton adds to the inventory when it reopens in December, and the Hyatt when it re-emerges in the shadow of the Superdome in 2008. Plans are for the hotel to anchor the Hyatt Jazz District, an area that planners hope will transform a single-venue (sports) part of town into something sweeter.

Michelle Duffourc is hoping airlines decide to sweeten their flights to Louis Armstrong New Orleans International, the facility that was transformed into a hospital and lifeline for the city in the aftermath of the storm.

Right now, 107 of the 162 pre-Katrina flights have returned to the airport—about 65 percent. “All of the big markets have come back,” she says. “Atlanta, Houston Dallas…but we took a really heavy hit on some of the Southwest [Airlines] cities.” Among others, the once-robust Birmingham route is gone, so too is nonstop service to Toronto.

American Airlines has returned service levels to the pre-Katrina level as they had promised. All of the airline's routes to New Orleans run seven days a week and are flown with a mixture of MD 80s and Boeing 737-800s. Here is a rundown out of major U.S. airports: 

ORD - both MD80s and 737s
DFW - both MD80s and 737s
MIA - 737
LGA - MD80
STL - MD80 (plus two of the three STL flights are flown with the Embraer Regional Jets)

New Orleans airport passenger traffic, like seemingly everything else around town, is down by about 50 percent. Down perhaps, but the airplanes that pull up to the gates at MSY are fuller than ever. Pre-Katrina load factors ran 75 percent. Today, they’re 95 percent. Better book early.

You also might want to rent a car. “You can still get to the city [from the airport],” Duffourc says, “but there definitely aren’t as many cabs as there used to be.”

Fewer cabs, fewer people. But the folks who remain in this city flat out refuse to give up. They refuse to give up on their town, or the tourists and convention travelers who are its lifeblood. “They want the business back,” Janecke says. “They’re much more accommodating,” a quality Chandler and others noted when they returned from recent visits.

More evidence? “The service ratings at [the Hilton New Orleans Riverside] have gone up post-Katrina,” he says. “That’s reflected throughout the city.”

Reflected like the shimmer of the city’s lights in the Mississippi as it cuts a crescent in the center of town, reflected in the fact that the city is still here.

It is, as Chandler says, “still New Orleans.”

On a Sidenote...New Orleans' Generousity

Indeed, New Orleans' restaurant and dining scene is alive and well, and in all actuality was among the first segments of the city's thriving hospitality industry to reopen its doors.

Early on, relief workers were enjoying the fruits of many of the city's chefs' labors, including leading chefs John Besh and Paul Prudhomme who served food to relief and rescue workers right after the hurricane.

Drago's opened as fast as it could, and jumped into the chaos serving free meals to anybody who came to the restaurant. The program went on for weeks, and by the time it wound down, over 77,000 free meals were served, no questions asked. At first, these went to relief workers, but when it was clear that many people in the area had no food, Drago's filled that gap, according to Mary Beth Romig, director of communications and public relations for the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau.