Like a lot of things about New Orleans, the origins of the term “the Big Easy” are a tad murky. It may have been a jazz bar circa 1910; it was definitely a novel written by James Conaway in 1970 (he’d been a Times-Picayune police reporter and overheard the phrase on the street). A local gossip columnist took it up as a response of sorts to the newly minted “Big Apple,” and then there was the movie with a faux-Cajun-accented Dennis Quaid that took Conaway’s title but not his plot.

Whatever the case, it is not a discussion that has fired the local imagination (unlike, say, the recent argument in the state legislature over whether the Sazerac should be proclaimed the official cocktail of New Orleans, which took more than ten separate votes to finally pass). Nor has it gained any serious hold in the local lexicon (as opposed to its more popular corruption, “the Big Sleazy,” which was an apt description of city hall until the feds’ recent aggressive housecleaning). Most natives wouldn’t be caught dead uttering the term: They know that while New Orleans may be a scandalously easy city to fall in love with, it has never been a particularly easy place to live.

It is a decided understatement to say that Hurricane Katrina was an event of epic proportion from which the city is still recovering. But it was hardly the first time disaster has befallen us. When Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, established New Orleans in 1718 (it replaced Biloxi as the capital of the French colony of Louisiana in 1722), he chose a spot just a hundred miles north of the Gulf of Mexico between a notoriously uncontrollable river and a lake so big it is now traversed by the world’s longest overwater bridge. Barely a year later, a hurricane destroyed the handful of palmetto huts that made up the city, and two years after that, a second storm wiped out the four city blocks that had been rebuilt...