02:13 PM CST on Monday, January 16, 2006

Brett Martel / Associated Press

Mayor Ray Nagin told a crowd gathered at City Hall for a Martin Luther King Day march that New Orleans will be "chocolate" again.

"We ask black people ... It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans -- the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," Nagin said Monday. "This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans."

The city was more than 60% black before Hurricane Katrina displaced about three-quarters of its population, but spared several predominantly white neighborhoods.

Along Martin Luther King Boulevard, a grassy median near a King statue and memorial was cleaned up and landscaped in advance of the parade that ended there Monday. Still, many of the buildings nearby, including a major public housing project, remained abandoned and in ruins, still bearing horizontal brown water stains left behind by flooding.

Several blocks from the end of the parade route -- an area that normally would have been immersed in music and teaming with neighbors socializing and children eating cotton candy -- old wooden shotgun homes that had been inundated with up to four feet of water for more than a week after the storm sagged on their foundations. Some had collapsed and others appeared to be on the brink, with roof shingles missing and siding partially peeled off and dangling.

A light breeze periodically brought whiffs of rot and garbage.

There were piles of debris on the sidewalk and one man in a white T-shirt, walking in the direction of the parade route, was the only sign of life for a quarter-mile.

"It used to be thousands of people hanging out on the streets, getting ready for the parade with their kids and stuff," said Charles Jones, who was selling red candy apples and blue and pink cotton candy out of an old metal shopping cart near the King statue. "Kids are all in school somewhere else now. It's not really a family event today. Just people who've been able to come back, working. It's really sad."

Charles and his wife, Darlene, lost their Ninth Ward home in Katrina's flooding. They have moved in with relatives in one of the areas that was spared. They live with three families in one, three-bedroom house, Darlene Jones said.

"It's depressing to see how slowly the city is coming back, but I believe it will," she said. "It's like trying to eat red beans and rice somewhere else. It just doesn't work."

Jones said her family lost a total of seven houses in eastern New Orleans and the Gentilly and lower Ninth Ward neighborhoods.

Yet she smiled while talking about her periodic trips to Canal Street in the heart of downtown. And she was thankful to still have her job as a florist. She had even put together an arrangement in front of King's statue.

"There are sections of the city that are alive," she said. "E ach week I go down to Canal Street and I see more and more lights, and it makes me feel like my city is going to come back."

(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)