Mention you’re going to New Orleans to most anybody these days and immediately you get the look.

It’s not quite sadness. More like sympathy mixed with nostalgia and a hint of regret. It’s like you’re talking about a favorite relative — irreverent and sassy Aunt Maybelle, who’s been going through chemo. There are rumors she’s not fully recovered even though doctors say they got the tumor and she’s in remission.

And so it is with New Orleans, a city that will forever be linked to one of the worst disasters in U.S. history — though some swear the worst of it came after the extensive flooding caused by the Category 5 hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Three years later, the clean-up continues, and there are still plenty of groans, jokes and head shakes when you hear stories about government dysfunction, poor planning, strained budgets and that bureaucratic concoction of red tape soaked in the liquor of racism and corruption. Church groups, movie stars, famous musicians, native residents and volunteers are still picking up the pieces and restoring civic pride in the neighborhoods once condemned by floods, fires and trash.

On a recent trip to the Big Easy, I wanted to see for myself just what was going on in this city known as much for its debauchery and Mardi Gras mayhem as its landscape of live oaks and swamp marshes, savory foods and jazz clubs, and the gumbo culture of creole, cajun, Caribbean, Spanish, French and Native American.

This Delta ecosystem where the mighty Mississippi meets the Gulf of Mexico is home to more than 170 bird species and more than 100 species of fish and shellfish — about a third of the total U.S. seafood harvest. But the land and the water are always shifting, an impermanence that lends itself to the kind of spontaneity and dynamic energy found in jazz. With rising seas and climate change, some scientists predict New Orleans and much of the low-lying areas of Louisiana will be gone within the next 50 years — all the more reason to go and see it while you still can.

Certainly New Orleans won’t be built back up just like it was, but many don’t want the rebuilding of New Orleans to include the box stores and standard brand names that make it Anytown, America. As a city struggles to heal itself, as perhaps the very identity of American culture tries to endure, the scars are bound to show.

Like the cheap feather and sequin masks sold at souvenir shops in the French Quarter, there will always be a flash and flare to the Big Easy, but with only about 60 percent of the city’s inhabitants back from its pre-Katrina population of a half million, there is still a palpable emptiness. Something is missing from behind that party mask.

Charity Hospital, Louisiana State University’s Interim Hospital and one of the two teaching hospitals in New Orleans, endured extensive flooding damage during Hurricane Katrina and had to close. The lack of schools and hospitals remains one of the big reasons people can’t move back.

In the meantime, the enduring tourist remains the city’s biggest cash crop.

I’m happy to report — after a serious fact-finding mission fraught with barley, hops and a couple tall hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s — Bourbon Street is alive and well. As is Cafe du Monde, where you can still get your yearly dose of transfat and sugar in a couple of beignets. The blackened drum with sautéed veggies at K-Paul’s on Chartres Street is still worth the airfare to get there. As for a lunch respite, I recommend a muffuletta and a fried apple pie at Johnny’s Po-Boys.

July in New Orleans’ French Quarter is still a steamy stroll through the touristy section of town. Knots of businessmen and vacationing families gather along the souvenir shops on Decatur Street as you head toward the French Market, Jackson Square and the Cabildo building where the French signed away the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

Louisiana is named after King Louis XIV. The French explorer La Salle sailed down the Mississippi River and claimed the land in honor of the king in 1682. Three of the streets in the French Quarter — Conti, Toulouse and Dumaine — are named after the Sun King’s illegitimate sons. Bourbon Street gets its title from the king’s family name rather than the choice drink of bead-wearing lushes known to stumble through America’s most famous avenue of lust and liquor.

New Orleans, meanwhile, got its name from Philippe II, the duke of Orleans, who served as a regent, or head of state, over France after Louis XIV’s death. The king’s heir, Louis XV, was too young to rule at the time.

After the French took the highest ground, which is today called the French Quarter, a military engineer named Adrien de Pauger designed the Vieux Carré, or “old square” to feature 100 blocks of equal size. The French Quarter sustained wind damage and lost power during the 2005 hurricanes, but it didn’t get flooded because of its relative elevation as compared to the rest of the city.

Early on in its history, New Orleans served as a key port for cotton, sugar and lumber industries. After the Civil War, rock candies and chocolates made with locally grown sugar became all the rage. Then came oil and now it’s tourism.

Further along the riverfront heading west, the Garden District maintains its status as the neighborhood with high-priced homes and gardens, where multi-storied residences sell for $3 to $5 million. Novelist Anne Rice and the parents of NFL Quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning live along these streets. For $1.50, you can still ride the St. Charles Street streetcar to sightsee that part of the city.

The Garden District earned its name from the vegetable gardens grown by early residents. Wrought iron fences kept out livestock. Later, cast iron balcony and stair railings were fashioned with unique designs. The artist would destroy the mold after it was used once to preserve its individuality — thus the expression, “breaking the mold.”

Oddly enough, the Spanish moss I thought I saw dangling from the live oaks was actually Mardi Gras beads. Dozens of krewes dress up floats and parade up and down the streets of New Orleans in celebrating the Bacchanalia marking Fat Tuesday and the start of Lent.

For the past few years, New Orleans’ residents started a new tradition to go along with their Spanish past — the running of the bulls. But instead of a head of beef tearing through narrow streets, there are lovely ladies sporting horned helmets, roller blades and plastic bats eager to smack grinning men who don’t seem to mind if they are “gored.”

New Orleans still knows how to laugh at itself, to party at every chance it gets and play those soulful melodies, to strike up the band, bury the dead above ground, and share a joyful hymn of praise on the way home from the cemetery.

Katrina has given rise to a litany of artwork. Photographs show scenes of terrible beauty — a family Bible caked in mud, fishing boats stacked atop each other like toys, chewed up houses in an early morning fog. But there’s a spirit of endurance that pervades the city after centuries of living precariously on drained swampland that seems to defy logic. It’s the city’s irrationality that gives it its charm, makes it a haunting setting for movies, TV shows and best-selling novels and plays.

And, of course, there’s always some great music to be had in the Big Easy, whether it’s a street corner singer crooning covers of old favorites or nightclubs blasting away brassy solos. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival — known to its fans as Jazzfest — is still a standard tradition where you skip work and then meet your boss among the throngs who come hear the masters, many of whom also happen to be native sons like the Marsalis family and Harry Connick Jr. This past year’s Jazzfest in late April and early May drew some 400,000 fans — more than any year since Katrina.

A tour through New Orleans now includes — to some folks’ dismay — a ride through the Upper and Lower Ninth Ward districts, where some of the city’s worst flooding took place. Like a tour past Ground Zero in Manhattan, it provides a mixed brew of emotions from empathy and sadness to guilt and anger.

Imagine bending over to tie your shoe and by the time you’re done, the water is up to your knees. That’s how fast it came in, and health workers and stranded residents who had to wade through it later ended up with sores and infections since the water included toxic chemicals from flooded cars, sewers, businesses — you name it.

Katrina made landfall at 6:10 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, with 125 mile-per-hour winds. Sure, plenty of people left town, but not everybody had cars to leave. Hospital patients, the elderly, and the poor were stranded. Emergency shelters were set up at the Convention Center and the Superdome, but that was still too far for some residents to go since the water trapped them in their homes, in their attics, on their roofs. Lake Ponchartrain to the north of the city swelled from heavy rains and poured through weakened levees. By nightfall, the city had lost power. In the darkness, neighbors could hear screams of people drowning in their attics or floating on their houses that were torn off their foundations.

By the time it was all over, more than 1,800 people had lost their lives in seven states from Louisiana and Mississippi up to Kentucky and Ohio. Gulf coast damages were estimated at $81 billion, by far the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Nearly, a month later, Rita struck New Orleans yet again as the worst tropical cyclone in Atlantic hurricane history, inflicting more flooding and yet another $11.3 billion in damages on the Gulf Coast.

Katrina’s legacy is apparent in paintings, sculptures and photographs that line the walls of various art galleries. A dark humor finds its way onto T-shirts and assorted souvenirs. “Hurricane Katrina Beignet Rescue Team 2005,” one shirt reads at the Cafe du Monde gift shop. Other slogans aren’t so kind to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which was widely criticized for its bungling of rescue efforts and emergency planning after Katrina struck. One T-shirt refigures the FEMA acronym as “Federal Excuse Making Agency.” Another reads, “Sorry I’m late. I work for FEMA.” Still another shows a cartoon picture of George Bush sitting on the roof of a flooded home and declaring his now infamous approval of former FEMA director Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”

Passing by homes and businesses today, you find that some still have that notorious red “X” on their fronts. The top of the “X” denotes the date when it was searched for bodies. The bottom quadrant of the “X” tells how many dead people were found inside the home. The left side of the “X” is the military designation of who searched the residence.

Some keep the “X” on their homes as a reminder of what happened.

“Do Not Demo,” one home’s sign reads.

“Yes, we are back,” another business sign declares.

Some have returned. Others won’t be back.

A marquee on a closed school in the Upper Ninth Ward still reads “Classes Begin 2005.”

On one side of the Industrial Canal — the levee protecting the Lower Ninth Ward (lower because it’s on lower ground in relation to the water level) has been rebuilt to withstand a Category 5 hurricane — that’s a 13-foot high wall. However, on the side protecting the Upper Ninth Ward, the new levee is only 10 feet tall, able to sustain a Category 3 hurricane. Meanwhile, FEMA trailers — nicknamed “toxic tin cans” for their high levels of cancer-causing formaldehyde — are all that some residents had over the past two or three years since their homes were destroyed.

On a bus tour through the Ninth Ward districts, I saw these ubiquitous trailers as well as various construction teams hard at work building new homes. Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation is set up in the Lower Ninth Ward, where the flooding was as high as 13 feet and much of the neighborhood is overgrown grassland.

One house at a time, one business at a time, one party at a time, the city of Satchmo and Saints, dirty rice and hot sauce, voodoo and gris-gris somehow finds a way to endure.