Featured Attraction: Biloxi (post-Katrina)

Casinos Rebuild this City

Casinos, once shackled to moorings to maintain the illusion of tethered boats, are now liberated and jumping across U.S. 90. But Beau Rivage decided to stay on the Gulf side, reopening on Aug. 29, 2006 one year after Hurricane Katrina flooded and then flattened this 300-year-old city. Its south-side neighbor, Casino Magic, didn’t fare so well and sits vacant, looking like a gutted prop from Battlestar Galactica. The recent shakeup at Harrah’s puts a question mark on Biloxi’s casino-fueled recovery.

A Poisonous Bean Rises

As the casinos return, so does the strange flora. Where once-stately mansions stood, now weeds and exotics push up. In one vacant lot, behind a FEMA trailer, a Carmencita Castor Bean plant shows its blood-red stock and bushy pink flowers. The extremely toxic plant — the source of ricin — made the news recently as a possible culprit in the poisoning of a Russian spy. In 1978, it silenced a Bulgarian dissident, Georgy Markov, after an umbrella tipped with the lethal extract entered his thigh.

The Train Rolls On

For years, Carla Beauguez Taconi and her husband, August, led tours of this city on their cheery boat-shaped Biloxi Tour Train. Undaunted by Katrina, a new trolley rolls on, taking visitors down backs streets and along the Gulf, as a pre-Katrina soundtrack eerily describes notable landmarks erased by the storm.

They let us hop on a tour on Katrina’s anniversary. We absorbed the heartbreaking and courageous stories of those who survived, while starring dumbly at the passing expunged landscape.

The site of the former Tullis-Toledano Manor, now a churned mound specked with broken brick, splintered wood and small chunks of powdery blue insulation, captures the loss.

Between stops, Taconi honks and waves at Biloxians old and new, figuring if they don’t know her already, it’s about time they do. Contact them at biloxitourtrain.com or 866-411-8687.

The other flash in Biloxi is the so-called “Extreme Makeover Memorial,” a post-Katrina artifact collage assembled by Aaron Kramer and erected by Ty Pennington and friends.

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