Down on the Bayou

Croatian families came to Louisiana for the oysters. They settled Plaquemines Parish below New Orleans where the Mississippi meets the Gulf and built an oyster industry that still feeds the city's tables and the country's exports — Louisiana produces more oysters than any other state. Their surnames carved into the tombs at Grand Isle Cemetery match the names painted on shrimp boats working the same waters today, alongside Cajun and Filipino fishing families who've worked the island for over two centuries. Drago Cvitanovich opened a restaurant in Fat City in 1969 and invented the charbroiled oyster — butter, garlic, Parmesan, screaming hot grill — a recipe now copied across Louisiana. The Cvitanovich family still runs both locations. The barrier island floods every 2.68 years on average; the families stay anyway. It's what the work asks.

South Vietnamese refugees arrived in south Louisiana in the 1970s after the reunification of Vietnam, and the bayou recognized them — the boats, the nets, the marsh geography, the seasonal rhythms were all things they'd worked at home. Houma absorbed a significant share; Gretna and eastern New Orleans took the others. Vietnamese families built a parallel shrimping economy alongside the Cajun one already there, and their seafood markets and restaurants concentrated where the boats docked. Hong Kong Market on Behrman Highway in Gretna is now the largest produce department in Louisiana — 45,000 square feet stocking lemongrass next to filé. Generations on, the waterfront belongs to at least three cultures working the same water: Houma Nation, Cajun, Vietnamese. Same bayous. Same boats.

Eight miles long, one mile wide, and sinking. Grand Isle is the only inhabited barrier island on Louisiana's Gulf Coast, and every generation since the 1780s has had to decide whether to stay. The worst decision point came on October 1, 1893, when a hurricane pushed a sixteen-foot storm surge across the neighboring community of Chenière Caminada and killed more than 1,500 people in a single night — still one of the deadliest natural disasters in American history. Grand Isle's cemetery holds rows of graves from that storm. The island rebuilt as a summer resort, then as a fishing and oil town. Betsy hit in 1965. Katrina in 2005. Ida made landfall in 2021 with 150-mph winds and put ten feet of water through the southern end of the parish. The year-round population has dropped to roughly 600 people. But every summer the island swells to 20,000 — camp owners, charter fishermen, families who've been coming for generations. The live oak chenier forest at the island's center, the last of its kind on the Gulf Coast, is still standing. So is Grand Isle.

Jefferson Parish is forty miles long, and how a hurricane treats you depends entirely on which end you live on. Grand Isle, the barrier island at the southern tip, takes the first hit — every time. Bucktown, on the lakefront, floods when Pontchartrain surges. The interior suburbs around Metairie sit behind levees that weren't completed until after they'd already failed. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 was the turning point. It killed 76 people and became the first billion-dollar hurricane in American history. Congress responded by authorizing the Lake Pontchartrain & Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project and giving the Army Corps of Engineers sole authority over New Orleans-area flood control. The project was supposed to be finished by 2015. When Katrina hit in 2005, Jefferson Parish's portion was only 70 percent complete. The system held better here than in Orleans Parish, but the southern communities — Jean Lafitte, Crown Point, Barataria — flooded badly. Ida arrived in 2021 with 150-mph winds and pushed ten to twelve feet of water through the lower parish. The upgraded levee system held in the north. The south, as always, took the blow. The people who live at the bottom of Jefferson Parish know the math. They stay anyway.

In September 1814, the British offered Jean Lafitte $30,000 and a captain's commission in the Royal Navy to help them take New Orleans. Lafitte asked for two weeks to think about it, then wrote to Governor Claiborne offering to fight for the Americans instead — if the governor would pardon his men. It was the most consequential negotiation in Louisiana history, and it happened because a smuggler operating out of the bayous south of Jefferson Parish knew the terrain better than any military officer alive. Lafitte's Barataria operation was no ragtag camp. By 1810 it was a profitable port, its channels hidden in a maze of bayous that customs agents couldn't navigate. The main commodity was enslaved people — the U.S. had banned the international slave trade in 1808, and Lafitte bought cheap in the West Indies and sold dear in Louisiana. When the Battle of New Orleans came in January 1815, roughly fifty Baratarians manned the American guns. They were, by reputation, the best artillerists in the Caribbean. Andrew Jackson won. President Madison pardoned the pirates. Lafitte moved on to Galveston. The bayous he used are still there, threading through the Barataria Preserve, quiet now except for herons and airboats.

The first version was a ditch dug by enslaved people. Jean-Baptiste d'Estrehan de Beaupré, the French colonial royal treasurer, had his plantation workers cut a channel from the Mississippi River south toward Bayou Barataria — a shortcut between the river's commerce and the swamp's resources. In 1839, Nicholas Noel Destrehan hired Irish laborers to widen it into a real canal, and by 1844 it was open for traffic: barges and schooners hauling timber, moss, fish, and shellfish from the bayous to the city. The canal needed a way to get boats over the levee, so engineers built a “submarine railway” — a mechanical lift that dragged vessels up and over the earthen wall. That contraption served until the Army Corps of Engineers completed a proper lock in 1907, then a larger one in 1934. The town that grew around the canal took its name from Joseph Hale Harvey, who married a Destrehan descendant and renamed the settlement after himself. By the twentieth century, the Harvey Canal had become part of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, linking the Mississippi to the oil fields and fishing grounds of Barataria Bay. It is the seam between two versions of Jefferson Parish — the river side and the bayou side — and everything on the West Bank flows through it.

At its peak, Avondale Shipyard employed 26,000 people — more than the population of most Louisiana cities. For seventy-six years, the yard on the west bank of the Mississippi near Bridge City built the vessels that carried American military power across oceans: destroyers, amphibious assault ships, the USS Somerset. It started in 1938 as Avondale Marine Ways, a small barge repair operation founded by James Viavant, Harry Koch, and Perry Ellis with 200 workers. World War II changed everything. Government contracts for tugs and transport vessels turned the yard into the largest private employer in Louisiana. Generations of West Bank families — Bridge City, Westwego, Harvey — built their lives around the shipyard's shifts and the industries that fed it. When the last naval vessel departed on February 3, 2014, the closure left a hole in the regional economy that a decade hasn't filled. The Port of South Louisiana acquired the site in 2023, and redevelopment plans are underway. But the working-class identity of this stretch of river — the lunch-pail, welding-mask, overtime-check culture — was forged at Avondale, and the people who live here still carry it.