New Orleans bars were a weird, vital flicker of life post Katrina. Here's what it was like

The Banks Street Bar was pretty ragged, but as I approached it looked like an oasis, and one as improbable as a mirage.

It was a night in November 2005, when we were still counting the weeks since Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures. I'd walked the half mile from my own Mid-City house without seeing another person, a lighted window or a set of headlights on the dark streets. Everything around was in dank ruin and eerily quiet.

Inside this old corner bar, however, by the glow of a few candles and the clank of a few bottles, a tiny piece of the neighborhood’s old life was flickering again.

The pool table had been pressed into service as a makeshift bar, closer to the blown out windows that afforded some breeze. Cash was exchanged for beer bottles, fished at random from an ice chest