BILOXI, Miss. — At the eastern tip of this city there was once a bridge. Like much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, it was reduced by Hurricane Katrina to a muddle of concrete and pilings, tumbled over like a giant line of dominos.
Everyone wants it rebuilt as soon as possible. But officials on one side of the bridge — those in Biloxi — favor a large, multilane structure that can accommodate casino workers and the new horde of gamblers. On the other side, in Ocean Springs, officials want to restore the four-lane drawbridge that once spanned the bay, hoping to keep their French-colonized, tree-lined town the definition of quaint.
The debate over what should replace the Biloxi-Ocean Springs bridge in many ways illustrates the entire rebuilding effort along the Mississippi coast, where cities, drained of resources, infrastructure and people, struggle toward rebirth.
Gov. Haley Barbour's rebuilding commission and many small-town officials advocate a planning approach known as New Urbanism, which supports pedestrian friendly, historically themed developments where people of mixed incomes share the same neighborhoods and are closely linked by public transportation. Given a rare chance to redesign their landscapes, many residents and officials want to see towns designed around trolley cars, pedestrian walkways and open spaces.
"I want us to be a more walkable town," said Lou Rizzardi, an alderman from the nearby beachfront city of Pass Christian. "We don't have sidewalks, we don't have gutters, we want our downtown to be more dense. This may be a pipe dream, but it's the way we used to live."
But critics here mock New Urbanism as being impractical and ignorant of the preference of most Americans for privacy over community, and as creating towns that often look like film sets rather than real communities.
"A lot of people there are more into the arts and come from other areas," said Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi, speaking of Ocean Springs and its preference for a smaller bridge with a bicycle lane. "And I don't see people riding bikes 85 feet in the air."
Officials from Biloxi and Gulfport, robbed by the hurricane of their fishing docks and antebellum homes and emboldened by new legislation that permits gambling on land, believe their cities' futures lie in rows of casinos, high-rise condominiums and a new multilane bridge. Officials deride the idea of trolleys replacing cars on busy roadways and suggest that such ideas are preferred by people who come from, as they say here, "away."
Pass Christian, once a haven for retirees and people with second homes, is now warily weighing offers from the condominium developers it once avoided, as all the town's businesses have been swept away, leaving its coffers empty.
Other places are equally desperate; Waveland and Bay St. Louis, neighboring cities with distinct cultures and histories, are considering a merger.
And as with New Orleans, which Mississippi residents say has overshadowed the narrative of their plight, the struggle to rebuild here is also a struggle for a future identity, as the culture, physical landscape and industries of the region face inevitable change.
The historically rich, laid back, slightly tawdry Mississippi coast has always stood apart from the otherwise largely provincial state. With its French colonial history, the coast has carried few of the historical burdens wrought by cotton plantations, slaves and the civil rights movement.
The state government, which has long encouraged local control, is not poised to dictate a uniform rebuilding agenda for its coastal region, even though state planners may support the smaller approach. And so commerce seems poised to drive the decision making instead.
"The coastal communities are different, but they are linked, and that is the complexity of it," said Charles Reagan Wilson, the director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. "But it is going to be difficult for each town to preserve the character they have had before Katrina. The model for the future of the coast to me seems to be the Florida Panhandle, with condos and things like that. That is the private, economic, capitalistic future."
The devastation of the coast here remains shocking to the uninitiated eye; towns where people have clearly worked night and day just to remove debris look as though they were hit by a hurricane six days ago, rather than six months.
In Pass Christian, where nary a house is standing and bedsheets are still threaded through the trees, the order to boil water only just ended. Its municipal government, like many in the region, is housed in a doublewide trailer.
Biloxi is still a tangle of crumbling buildings, bent signs and silent streets. But all that changes in the parking lots of the three casinos that have opened on land, where drivers are lucky to find a space. Crowds appear within the casinos from seemingly nowhere, as if planted in place, with people holding cocktails and clutching room keys that double as casino entry cards in the cavernous, smoke-fogged halls.
"Biloxi is going to be high-rises and condos," said Duncan McKenzie, president of the Chamber of Commerce and a vice president of the Isle of Capri casino. "People refer to what happened here as a tragic opportunity." Even before the storm, casinos were Biloxi's second-largest industry after the military, employing 15,000 people and generating $19.2 million in taxes.
But now there are few places for the lowest-paid casino workers to live. In the western part of Biloxi, the mom-and-pop motels and low-income apartment buildings were destroyed, and developers have been buying up land for large condominiums, Mayor Holloway said.
"Low- and moderate-income housing was a problem before Katrina," Mr. Holloway said. "And it is an even bigger problem now. We are working with the casinos to see if they are interested in developing housing for their workers."
In light of these many problems, Mr. Holloway, casino executives and others believe that it is in the best interest of Biloxi to have a functioning bridge that links workers to homes, gamblers to casinos and the city to the rest of the coast as soon as possible.
The State Department of Transportation wants to build an eight-lane, 85-foot-tall bridge to replace the decimated four-lane structure, paid for with federal funds unleashed after Hurricane Katrina.
But officials in Ocean Springs deplore the notion of a large bridge dumping traffic into its tree-lined town. They prefer a bridge half the size, with a bicycle lane. The chasm between Ocean Springs and Biloxi in some ways can be accounted for by the relative damage of each. The beachfront homes in Ocean Springs — one of the oldest cities in America, founded in 1699 — took a beating. But its downtown was more or less unscathed, which has led the town to not only survive, but flourish.
Once a quiet bedroom community with a number of artists, upscale women's sportswear shops and picturesque restaurants and candy stores, the town is now dotted with new restaurants and bars that are filled with volunteers, contractors and neighbors who do not want to take the long route into Biloxi now that the bridge is out. Just as important, it has the one thing that separates the surviving towns from the sinking ones: a still-standing Wal-Mart.
"We've been a place for people to escape," said Donovan Scruggs, the planning and development director in Ocean Springs. "Pre-Katrina, there was not much of an after-7 crowd downtown. Now we have a vibrant little nightlife downtown. Our revenues increased 50 percent in November over the same period in 2004."
There is a similar chasm between Waveland and Bay St. Louis, which are considering the merger. Bay St. Louis has fewer resources than Waveland and about half its budget, and it sees a future more oriented toward tourism. Waveland, which is resisting the merger concept, wants to rebuild its downtown like a miniature French Quarter.
"I am hard-pressed to see where combining would benefit the people of Waveland," said Mayor Tommy Longo of Waveland, as he ate a barbecue sandwich recently in City Hall (yes, a trailer), trying to get through another day of negotiating insurance claim complaints, Army Corps of Engineer problems and out-of-state deliveries.
Residents say they just want their old town back, name and all.
"Waveland has always been Waveland," said Cindy Peterson, folding laundry in her government trailer. "We should go back to what it was. Nothing like Katrina will happen again in my lifetime anyway."
