Bus tour aims to rally support for New Orleans

For months, they've watched New Orleans through the lenses of news cameras. But these visitors - from as close as Centreville, Miss., and as far away as Providence, R.I. - want to see it with their own eyes. They're gladly paying $35 each for a local guide's perspective on the catastrophe and the city's nascent recovery.

On this Sunday afternoon, a number of passengers on the new Gray Line Hurricane Katrina Tour recall growing up visiting the Crescent City. Now it's as if they need visual confirmation of the sadness they've already internalized. "New Orleans will never be the same again," says Ouida Roy of Lafayette, La., even before the bus rolls out from its riverfront base in the French Quarter.

Others are more forward-looking. Heather Foley is researching post-Katrina commemorative landscaping for her thesis at the Rhode Island School of Design. During her three-week trip, she's also volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. "I'm trying to get my bearings on the city.... I feel a little voyeuristic doing this," she confesses.

Indeed, controversy has surrounded the start-up of for-profit tours in the midst of the Gulf Coast recovery. Some residents are offended to have their personal loss on display. And there have been scattered reports of rude tourists trespassing on property or callously taking close-up pictures as people sort through the rubble of their former lives.

But many give a thumbs up to Gray Line, a company that employed 65 people here before the hurricane. Temporarily down to six employees, it's been filling its buses since it started the Katrina tours last week. They do not stop in front of homes or let passengers off to take photos. The buses also bypass the Lower 9th Ward, where the flood surge was particularly strong and the rebuilding prospects are still unknown. The primarily African-American residents waited months before being allowed in to see what little is left, and some have complained of feeling exploited and gawked at by tourists. At least one tour company was taking vans through the Lower 9th Ward until the City Council passed a law last week that prohibits for-profit tours east of the Industrial Canal.

Greg Hoffman, vice president of Gray Line of New Orleans Inc., says he initially resisted the idea of a Katrina tour. After all, he lost his own home in Lakeview, one of the neighborhoods now included on the bus route.

But "we kept hearing that congressmen from other states were not in support of our rebuilding effort unless they came and saw it with their own two eyes," he says, and they realized the tours might help rally the support of people from all over the country. "Certainly we're doing it in a very tasteful and sensitive fashion," he maintains.

Three dollars from each ticket will go to charitable groups helping New Orleans to recover.

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