On this day in 2005, Hurricane Katrina was striking its final blows on the ravaged body of New Orleans, after causing 53 breaches in the city’s levees and submerging 80% of the city. This was the day the beleaguered residents poked their heads out and took in the vast destruction visited upon that ancient and great drinking city. And it should surprise no one that the first centers of positive action and civilization were New Orleans’s bars. It was there that neighbors gathered and organized and, yes, laid into some booze so as to beat back the general terror and horror crowding in around them. The bars were the first businesses to reopen after the great flood, even if they had to serve drinks under candlelight and without the benefit of ice. A few of them, notably Johnny White’s Sports Bar, never closed. That bar should have been consecrated as a national landmark to grit and courage in the face of overwhelming odds. A shrine to that golden maxim: “Where there’s hooch, there’s hope.”
