Yahoo! News

09/04/05

In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes" and dividing up the labor. As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods — humanity. "Some people became animals," Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. "We became more civilized." .... Even without water and power, most preferred it to the squalor and death in the emergency shelters set up at the Superdome and Convention Center. But what had at first been a refuge soon became an ornate prison. Police came through commandeering drivable vehicles and siphoning gas. Officials took over a hotel and ejected the guests. An officer pumped his shotgun at a group trying to return to their hotel on Chartres Street. "This is our block," he said, pointing the gun down a side street. "Go that way'...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050904/ap_on_re_us/katrina_surviving_in_the_quarter_hk1


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp