In Hurricane Katrina's surreal backwaters

July 23, 2007 | NEW ORLEANS -- Around the block from the corner of Forstall and Galvez in the Lower Ninth Ward, a ragtag armada of pirogues, sailboats and motorboats stripped of their engines sit on a dusty curb. Though they may have once been used in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to rescue flood victims, their next cue will be as props for "Black Water Transit," a Hollywood "post-Katrina gunrunning thriller" once slated to star Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis, now set to feature Lawrence Fishburne and Karl Urban. Production workers have also built a "wrecked" house from the ground up at this desolate corner in the city's hardest-hit neighborhood. Tilted from its foundation at a nearly 45-degree angle, the movie set sits next door to several real houses wrecked by Katrina's floodwaters and slated for demolition months ago. (Producers won a concession from the city to leave them standing, agreeing to pay for demolition if filming went past June 30.) Earlier this month the filmmakers rammed a car through the front of their fake Katrina house. Near the end of production they will blow it up with pyrotechnics.

Just across the street, on Forstall, stands a stark reminder of the real destruction that happened here nearly two years ago: The gutted shell of Mount Carmel Church, its brick façade still bearing spray-painted skulls and crossbones from the early days after the deluge, apparently indicating that dead flood victims had been found inside.

In the past year, visits to the Lower Ninth Ward by Hollywood stars, politicians, foreign dignitaries and busloads of volunteers have mostly faded into memory. But parts of New Orleans can still astonish with surreal scenes of Katrina's lasting aftermath.

Half a dozen blocks downriver from the movie set, Japanese artist Takashi Horisaki is completing latex castings of a flood-wrecked shotgun house on Caffin Avenue, which he plans to install at the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City later this summer. This house, too, would have been bulldozed months ago but for the cooperation of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is implementing the city government's tear-down list. A graduate of Loyola University in New Orleans, Horisako has gotten help from dozens of volunteers over the past two months to help make his deadline, and he hopes his art will remind New Yorkers that New Orleans and its residents are still hurting.

It's true for Johnnie Blunt, whose hurricane-damaged house nearby at Charbonnet and Dorgenoise might still be standing if he were a film producer or conceptual artist. Blunt, 63, his wife, Charlene, 34, and five of their six children, all between the ages of 4 and 10, were among the last families in the Gulf region to receive an emergency trailer, which sat next to their damaged house for four months before they received a key from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Blunts evacuated ahead of the hurricane and spent the next 20 months living outside Baton Rogue, La. They returned to their old neighborhood the last week in May to move into their one-bedroom trailer -- only to discover that their home had been demolished by the city, without warning they say, two days earlier.

A cabdriver and part-time minister, Johnnie Blunt had planned to rebuild the cinder-block-on-slab house, the front of which also served as his small community church. "We had talked to them at City Hall ever since Katrina, and they told us to gut and board up our house and they would take it off the list to knock down," says Blunt, who did the work with his wife on weekend trips back to the city to comply with post-disaster property ordinances. "We figured we were OK and didn't have anything to worry about. The only thing wrong with the house was a big tree had put a hole in the roof, but the walls outside were brick and in perfect condition."

Blunt and his children -- Wayne, Wallace, Worlonzo, Wanesheir and Wenzy (15-year-old Wille is living with her grandmother) -- stand on the front steps of their trailer on a late Sunday afternoon, looking out across a neighborhood that feels like a forgotten rural outpost. Nearly two years after 13 feet of water rolled through, the city's aggressive cleanup of the Lower Ninth has left empty fields where weeds stand 6 feet tall, wild chickens cluck after bugs, and front steps lead to houses that are no longer there.

The silence is broken by a pit bull that turns a corner and starts barking at the children, who cower and flee inside. The dog belongs to a neighbor who lives in another FEMA trailer down the street. "They're afraid of that dog and he knows it," explains Blunt, who says he will enroll his children in the nearby Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School when it reopens in August, one bright spot in the Lower Ninth's long dirge of tragedy since the storm. "We thought about trying to find some kind of summer camp for them, but we didn't know where to look and now it's probably too late."

Next page: "It seems like they're doing everything they can to keep people from moving back here"