In October 2005, six weeks after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, I met Allison and John Anderson for the first time, at the Mississippi Renewal Forum. Organized by New Urbanism's leading light, Andres Duany, this mega-charrette had brought some 200 planners, engineers, and architects to the ballroom of the Isle of Capri, a Biloxi, Miss., hotel-casino that had weathered the storm. The plan was to re-imagine the historic towns that Katrina had destroyed. Unlike most of the participants, the Andersons were locals: They had come from a mere 30 miles up the coast, from the hard-hit town of Bay St. Louis, Miss. I started a conversation with John because he was sketching a streetscape of oversized, modern-looking sheds -standouts in a ballroom littered with fanciful drawings of Cajun cottages and antebellum Walmarts. He told me that before the storm, Bay St. Louis "was almost okay." He explained: "Downtown there was a quaintness, a realness. It was a real historic place, not a manufactured one." He was speaking in the past tense because all that was gone. Waterfront restaurants, banks and churches, and antebellum mansions and ordinary homes had been crushed by a 20-foot-high wall of water.
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