BAY ST. LOUIS — Today, when Bay Town Inn owner Nikki Moon steps onto the front porch of her charming and newly remodeled downtown bed and breakfast, she sees a sandy beachfront and a dead oak tree that’s intricately carved into the likeness of angels.
Ten years ago, that beachfront was fully submerged after Hurricane Katrina’s deadly surge drowned the Hancock County coastline; and as Moon’s original bed and breakfast was destroyed before her eyes, she clung to that same oak tree that was very much alive behind her house.
“The house was built in the 1800s. It withstood everything,” Moon said, citing a rationale that’s not unusual among the Mississippi Coast residents who decided to ride out the Category 5 hurricane on Aug. 29, 2005.
But on that day, Moon and two friends, Kevin Guillory and Doug Nicolet, were nearly washed away as Katrina crashed ashore.
“We were upstairs in a side guest room when the storm surge hit; it came up the front stairway and wiped the whole first floor out,” Moon said. “That room was like a boat, the water pushed us back.”
As the waters continued to rise, the trio caught hold of the oak tree.
“I was grasping a limb with my dog under my stomach, Kevin was facing the water so he would tell us to duck when the waves would come,” Moon said. “We were up there for about four or five hours.”
When the waters receded and the three could jump from the tree, Moon, Nicolet and Guillory found clothes and food and began the long and painful process of picking up the pieces of their devastated town.
Not too many miles away from the ruins of the Bay Town Inn, Bay St. Louis city officials found themselves waking in the early morning hours from makeshift beds, air mattresses spread across the fire station floor, to begin the monumental task of removing debris and eventually rebuilding their town.
“We pretty much went ‘can’ to ‘can’t,’” said then-Mayor Eddie Favre, who served 20 years in office. “We’d get started and go until we couldn’t go anymore.”
Favre made it through the storm with just the clothes on his back — a pullover shirt, shorts, flip-flops and a rain jacket. Even when President George W. Bush came to Mississippi to meet with Coast mayors, Favre showed up wearing just what had become his uniform.
“People in the meeting were offering to send me clothes, but when you start dressing up, that kind of signifies that everything is OK, and we were a long way from being OK,” Favre said. “I told them ‘When we get to be OK, when we’re put back together, that’s when I’ll start dressing in long pants again.’”
To Favre, “OK” not only meant rebuilding structures, but also having people come back to the city.
“That was always one of the things we’ve said, ‘It’s the people that set Bay St. Louis apart,’” Favre said. “After the storm we knew that no matter how much rebuilding we did, it just wasn’t going to be Bay St. Louis unless our people came back.”
Just next door to Bay Town Inn across from the beach is one of downtown’s oldest buildings and the home of the first beachfront restaurant to open after Katrina — 200 North Beach. It is owned by a sprightly 78-year-old named Ann Tidwell, a woman well aware of how Bay St. Louis people treat each other and newcomers.
“The third day I was living (in Bay St. Louis), a lady came up to my house with some flowers she pulled from her yard to welcome me,” Tidwell said. “From then on, I knew I would like it here.”
Though Tidwell left home for the hurricane, she was back in the Bay just days after the disaster, sifting through the rubble with friends and neighbors.
“We were out there with sticks. It was like an Easter egg hunt almost, you didn’t know what you were going to find,” she said. “After the storm it was amazing, you could almost feel it in the air — the camaraderie.”
Moon moved to Bay St. Louis in 2003, and like Tidwell, she knew right away that the city had an ambiance not found in other places she had lived.
Located just 90 miles east of New Orleans and about 15 miles west of Gulfport, Bay St. Louis is nestled on the Bay of St. Louis, which empties into the Mississippi Sound. For decades, downtown’s Main Street area just off the beach has been known for its lively cultural scene, dotted with unique shops and galleries that have slowly but surely been resurfacing since Hurricane Katrina. For the past 20 years, the area, lovingly called “Old Town Bay St. Louis” has been home to a monthly art walk, where tourists and locals alike wander the streets, enjoying live music and crafts and a breeze off the Bay.
“I loved that feeling of community that you got here. I’ve never lived in a small town in my life,” said Moon, who had spent most of her career in New Orleans. “I loved the people, they just put their arms around me and took me in.”
“All we did was help ourselves and help each other. We were all trying to keep each other up emotionally,” Moon said of the days and weeks after Katrina. “You’d help yourself in the morning, and you’d help your neighbor in the afternoon.”
As the days following the storm turned into weeks, months and years, the people of Bay St. Louis trickled back into the area. Schools reopened, water and gas lines were replaced and angels were carved into the oak tree that saved the lives of Moon, Nicolet and Guillory. All the while, Eddie Favre continued to lead the people of his city while wearing shorts.
“CNN invited me to Washington, D.C., for a press dinner up there, and I told them the only way I can go is if I wear short pants,” Favre said. “So I went and rented a tuxedo and bought a pair of tuxedo pants and had them made into short pants. I wore the tuxedo top and short pants.
“Some people took it the way it was meant to be, to keep attention focused on us down here,” the former mayor said. “Some people didn’t, but even the negative people were talking, so it was accomplishing its purpose.”
Though the constant national news coverage of Katrina had begun to die down, the people of the Mississippi Coast were far from restoration.
“No one who saw it will ever forget,” said Ellis Anderson, author of Under Surge Under Siege: The Odyssey of Bay St. Louis and Katrina. “It’s what I imagined Hiroshima looked like after the atomic bomb was dropped. The scale of utter destruction was surreal, unimaginable. The debris of people’s homes, their lives, was pushed to the side of roads like giant snowdrifts for months before it began to be hauled away. So every day you’d have to drive by the ruins of lives of friends and neighbors. There was no escape from the enormity of the loss.
Bay St. Louis was “like a small town smashed to smithereens,” Anderson said. “Yet, the small-town feel made people reach out to each other, in the most horrific, stressful circumstances. I can’t imagine people behaving better under extreme duress anywhere on the planet. I feel extremely proud to be a member of this community.”
And it was nearly five and a half years after Katrina battered the Hancock County coastline when Eddie Favre finally put on long pants.
“I think we still have a ways to go,” Favre said in April 2015. “It’s one of those things where I don’t know if we’ll ever be completely finished. To some extent, yes, it’s settled. There’s a tremendous amount of rebuilding going on, but, at the same time, there’s a tremendous amount of rebuilding that hasn’t been done yet. As much as it’s been redeveloped, there’s room for more.”
At 200 North Beach, Tidwell is seeing signs of revitalization every day.
“Right now I see so much encouragement, all the new shops and new buildings, I think we’re becoming a vacation destination; we’re not some sleepy little town,” she said. “I’m not exaggerating, we’ve got at least one person come in every week who is renovating or rebuilding a house here.”
With the help of some grant money, Moon reopened the Bay Town Inn in September 2013.
“I knew (Bay St. Louis) would come back eventually. That’s why I never sold this property. I had absolute faith,” she said. “A lot of people have asked, ‘But, what if it happens again?’ I’m not going to live that way. I’m not going to live ‘what if.’ I loved having a bed and breakfast, and I love being part of this community.”
Though not every seaside shop and restaurant has returned to Old Town Bay St. Louis, numbers show the area is bouncing back. The city landed a No. 3 spot on the 2013 U.S. Census list of fastest growing Mississippi cities. From 2010 to 2013, Bay St. Louis saw a whopping 16.9 percent increase in its population, estimated at about 10,800 people. Five years before Katrina hit, census data showed about 11,500 people living in the city.
Business throughout the downtown area has been picking up, and it’s not unusual for Moon’s inn to be booked for weekends.
“It’s picking up. Every day it gets better and better,” she said. “Our strength has always been that we’re an arts community, and the artists are still as strong as they can be here. We’ve got an unbelievable selection of artists here.”
Though the giant debris piles have been cleared and new construction covers the slabs of structures washed away by Katrina, curious guests still quiz Moon and other survivors about the catastrophic hurricane.
“It’s part of our history. It will always be there,” she said. “It’s made us all really strong, and it’s hard to explain what it does to you when you go through something like that.”
>>> Read more from Mississippi Today about Bay Town Inn from Nikki Moon.
Photos by James Edward Bates for The ‘Sip Magazine ©2015
