Requiem for the Crescent City

By Eugene Robinson

Friday, January 13, 2006; Page A21

NEW ORLEANS -- Assemble the brass band and let the funeral march begin, because the old New Orleans is dead.

The passing of our most distinctive city, so prominent in American imagination and lore, became official Wednesday when a blue-ribbon commission presented its plan to rebuild on the mud-caked ruins. One way or another -- through a proposed moratorium on rebuilding in the areas flooded when the levees failed, or through protracted argument over whether to have a moratorium -- the plan all but guarantees additional months of delay and rot. Every day, meanwhile, more evacuees will decide to make new lives for themselves elsewhere.