humanity

Bartender Joe Bellomy talks with customers in Johnny White's bar in the French Quarter, famous for staying open even through Hurricane Katrina.

‘Tribes’ find way to survive in French Quarter
‘We became more civilized,’ one man says
from the AP
Updated: 10:05 p.m. ET Sept. 4, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - 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.” While hundreds of thousands fled the below-sea-level city before the storm, many refused to leave the Vieux Carre, or old quarter. Built on some of the highest ground around and equipped with underground power lines, residents considered it about the safest place to be.................