In a terror attack’s wake, a great American city does what it knows too well: How to face down a nightmare

By Michelle Krupa, CNN

New Orleans (CNN) — Not yet 30 hours after a driver on a terror mission turned her city’s most famous street into a nightmare of indiscriminate bloodshed, a barista at a coffee house far Uptown carried an order to the counter.

“Cortado!” shouted Ciara Daigrepont from beneath a chalk-written menu touting the day’s special – café au lait – at the French-inspired Rue de la Course, some 5 miles up the St. Charles Avenue streetcar line from where the carnage unfolded.

Daigrepont had been at the riverfront casino still known here by its former name, Harrah’s, after 3 a.m. Wednesday when a security officer’s radio erupted with static, then he and others bolted for the doors, she recalled. They were headed, she later figured, toward the French Quarter, where an ISIS-inspired Army veteran from Texas had rammed a rented pickup into a New Year’s Eve crowd, killing 14 and hurting dozens before dying after a firefight with police.

Later that afternoon, “when I was walking, I didn’t hear any trumpets,” said Daigrepont, now wearing a shirt with “Louisiana” stamped across the front.

“I didn’t hear anything,” she continued. “It wasn’t New Orleans.”

By the next morning, though, Daigrepont and a colleague were back in front of the whooshing espresso machine. Crews downtown were readying for a postponed Allstate Sugar Bowl. And a street-cleaning crew was poised near the desecrated upper blocks of Bourbon Street to erase the reminders so revelers could return.

“We want our community and our visitors to continue to enjoy. There’s so much to enjoy about New Orleans, and we are going to make sure that our routes and the Superdome are safe,” city Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said soon after daylight first touched the crime scene. “We had this tragic event … But we do want you to go about the day.”

To carry on after a massacre of such magnitude might require a certain level of shock or numbness to such attacks across the globe. Or a desire to downplay questions inevitably emerging about security that night at a key party spot. Or a Hail Mary pass to avert an economic implosion in a market so dependent on tourism.

It also could be the flex of unbidden muscle memory in this 306-year-old sinking city with a mantra to “let the good times roll.”

For a generation now, New Orleanians have been tested by a bevy of high-profile scourges: Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, a major hotel collapse, a vicious early pandemic surge. And so many have internalized, perhaps too well, a hard and potent lesson that often gets celebrated here as “resilience” but really boils down to this:

How to carry on in the face of the unimaginable.

“We just roll up our sleeves and keep going,” said Will Bryant, a lifelong New Orleanian who on Thursday afternoon walked amid throngs up Poydras Street in a refusal to let the French Quarter attack thwart his yearly Sugar Bowl outing.

“We just want to hug everybody that went through this and just say, ‘It sucks. We get it. We’re praying for everybody,’” he said. “‘We understand if you decided you wanted to leave. We get that.’ I get it. But it was never a doubt in my mind. And now I’m here, and we’re gonna have a great time.”

Also palpable here on these picture-perfect days ushering in 2025 has been a resolute defiance that’s maybe made it a little easier not to linger on the horror. It echoed in chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” just before Thursday’s kickoff and in so many residents’ measured relief that this attack, in a place long-riddled by gun violence, was not undertaken by a local villain or, from any indications so far, someone with a vendetta against this city in particular.

“There is a recognition that this was an attack on America, with the humanity and diversity of New Orleans as a high-profile symbol,” said Michael Hecht, president of the economic development agency Greater New Orleans Inc.

“We’ve got our warts, like any other city. We’ve got our flaws. (This attack is) not one of them, though,” Bryant said. “That’s a random act. That’s a one-off. That guy was gonna do that no matter what. … It’s not anybody’s fault. … It just sucks. It sucks no matter where it would have happened. It sucks that it happened here, but it sucks everywhere.”

‘I can’t believe it happened’

Before Wednesday’s attack, New Orleans had been riding perhaps as high as anyone here could remember. A late-October Eras Tour stop had electrified this birthplace of jazz, with an enormous friendship bracelet draped from the Caesars Superdome – once a global symbol of the deadly 2005 flood’s pain – to welcome Taylor Swift to the City That Care Forgot.

The police chief had touted a year-over-year drop of 35% in murders, with a more modest decline in other violent crimes. And then, beyond even the city’s annual New Year’s, college football and Carnival kick-off festivities, lay the crown jewel of American sports: Super Bowl LIX, set to play out in the Superdome – and all over town, of course – in early February.

It had seemed, at least to some, like fate: A citywide resurgence just in time for the 20th anniversary of Katrina, a moment to show the world how far back New Orleans had clawed.

But on the day after the terror attack, fear had replaced at least some of that unbridled hope across the Crescent City, so named for how it’s nestled along the winding Mississippi River’s banks.

“It is crazy. It’s crazy. I can’t believe it happened between the Sugar Bowl and the Super Bowl,” said George Thornton Jr. while stocking shelves at the Carrollton neighborhood’s outpost of locally owned Conseco’s Market, which sells at least three kinds of andouille sausage, frozen crawfish tails and Café Du Monde beignet mix alongside grocery staples.

“It’s almost like it was coached up, like something is still going to happen,” he said as he walked past a rack vending the latest edition of the city’s 188-year-old daily newspaper, The Times-Picayune, with a headline screaming: “Act of Terrorism.”

For Cleo Ebanks, the attack went “deeper” than any other act of violence she’d known since her college days in New Orleans, she said Thursday as her family waited for lunch outside Li’l Dizzy’s, a local institution specializing in gumbo and fried chicken, catfish and shrimp in Tremé, among the nation’s oldest African American neighborhoods.

“What makes it heavy is because it’s now what we’re about to do, you know: Mardi Gras, the Super Bowl is here. How does that impact the city?” the mother of two young boys said, noting shootings and vehicle wrecks – but not terrorism – as familiar threats to Carnival parade-goers.

On edge after the attack, Ebanks had second-guessed a smoking truck stalled on the side of the road as her family drove in for lunch from suburban Harahan, she said. “We went on past it, but you know, you’re gonna have those little moments.”

‘You get back up and then you do it’

But like that, New Orleans yet again carries on.

“The other day, I was standing by a collapsed building in the Lower Garden District. And then obviously, you know, the following day, my phone is like, going banana (at) 4 or 5 a.m. in the morning because of this horrific terrorist attack.

“So, it is really like, oh my gosh, like a ‘what next’ type of feeling,” City Council President Helena Moreno said Thursday afternoon over the din of the crowd as the Sugar Bowl got underway.

Before Moreno got into politics, she worked in the city as a TV journalist. She recalled on Thursday breaking down while on set during a broadcast in Katrina’s immediate aftermath as the station aired a story about someone she knew. “They were going through their house and all their belongings were, like, totally done and devastated,” she said.

But like so many here, Moreno, now running in the fall’s open mayoral race, has learned across decades scarred by tragedies in her adopted hometown to “just handle the situation … and then you live in this amazing city that you just adore.”

“You have your moment,” she said, “and then you go, and then you get back up and then you do it.”

As Bourbon Street reopened Thursday, its pavement still damp from pressure-washing and yellow roses wrapped in red set against a wall near Canal Street – where the pickup driver first slammed into the French Quarter – the co-owner of The Alibi Bar and Grill, Charles Weber, was “glad we opened.”

“They’re not gonna win. They’re not gonna beat us. We’re gonna open up,” he said. “We don’t want them to win.”

Weber had heard the screaming when the attack happened, watched people run, saw a body on the ground. “I had people in my bar crying, and, you know, they were upset. This was traumatic. This wasn’t just a random shooting,” he said. Still, he knew what the coming days would bring.

“We’re gonna get through this just like we got through Covid, just like we got through Katrina 20 years ago. We’re gonna come back,” he said Thursday. “This city is here to stay.”

The New Orleans Saints’ interim head coach had said as much the prior day when he spoke of a city that had “risen before” and would “rise again.” That same day, a true hometown hero might best have described New Orleans’ ability to endure – indeed, conquer – more epic challenges than any place should ever have to face.

“Inconceivable. Indescribable,” posted Steve Gleason, the former Saints safety whose punt block against the rival Atlanta Falcons early in the team’s historic return to the Superdome after Katrina made him an instant legend long before his battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, made his daily survival its own reason for celebration.

Gleason, who can no longer move his body and types using his eyes, begins every day with those two words, which “reach key sequences that can be difficult to reach … like a pregame stretch,” he wrote.

“As I typed them this morning, I started crying,” he continued. His wife had just told him about the French Quarter attack. “Those words poignantly capture how this year has started in New Orleans.”

But then, his message took a turn, the kind so many New Orleanians have known well these past years and, especially, these past few days.

“I type a final word every morning that describes the people of our human family, specifically our community in the crescent city,” Gleason wrote:

“Invincible.”

CNN’s Omar Jimenez and Jaide Timm-Garcia contributed to this report.

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