In 1853, when the Jefferson & Pontchartrain Railroad drove a 2,170-foot wooden pier into Lake Pontchartrain, a cluster of stilt houses grew around it. Bucktown — named, depending on who you ask, for the deer hunted in the surrounding marsh or the young bucks who came out on weekends — became a fishing village that supplied New Orleans with crabs, shrimp, and lake fish for over a century. Hurricanes leveled it in 1915 and again in 1947. Katrina nearly finished the job. But Bucktown kept rebuilding. The families here built their own boats, wove their own nets, trapped crabs year-round, and ran the seafood processing plants that fed the restaurants on the lakefront — Deanie's since 1961, R&O's since 1980. Every other lakeside fishing settlement in metro New Orleans was demolished for flood protection or development. Bucktown survived because the people who lived there refused to leave. Today the harbor still holds a working fleet, the marsh boardwalk extends into the wetlands, and the smell of boiling crawfish drifts across the levee on spring evenings.