11:11 AM CDT on Saturday, September 17, 2005

By BRETT MARTEL
Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS — Some business owners were being allowed back into the city Saturday to get a head start on opening the rollicking bars, stores and restaurants that keep the good times rolling in New Orleans.

Paul Sancya / AP Under the gaze of a Mardi Gras mask, a little bit of normalcy appears on the sidewalk at Patout's Restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans on Friday.

But many residents, from the cast-iron balconies of the French Quarter to the white-columned mansions of the Garden District, said it will be weeks, if not months, before they are ready again for partying till dawn.

"We don't want a bunch of tourists in here while we're trying to get our homes together, get our businesses together," said Sandra Cimini, whose family owns a bar on Chartres Street. "It's not going to be walking down the street with a hurricane glass in your hand until we can get everything together."

Mayor Ray Nagin has announced that the city's Algiers section, the Garden District and the French Quarter would reopen over the next week and a half, bringing back more than one-third of the city's half-million inhabitants.

But the mayor's homeland security director, Terry Ebbert, backed away from that promise on Friday, saying only that the city would assess the situation in the French Quarter from "day to day." Asked repeatedly whether that meant it could open sooner or later than Sept. 26, he declined to elaborate.

A spokeswoman for Nagin did not immediately return a call for comment on Friday.

Ebbert said the city's recovery depends on getting businesses reopened, but he said the repopulation of the city was being done "in a progressive manner" to ensure the safety and health of residents. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was planned.

Traffic was already heavy at checkpoints leading into Orleans Parish, where many were turned away if they had not managed to acquire the special business permits the city was issuing by fax in recent days.

The city was relaxing requirements over the weekend so that anyone with documentation showing they had businesses in specified ZIP codes could enter. Those areas, for now, are limited to Algiers, the French Quarter, the central business district and Uptown, which includes the Garden District.

Residents who return Monday to Algiers on the west bank of the Mississippi River will return to relative normalcy. While debris from trees and roofs still litters many neighborhoods, the area never flooded, the water is clean and electricity has been restored to most places.

But on the east side, home to the sections most tourists know best, it is unclear when the water will be safe for drinking or bathing.

Until then, the bars and restaurants from Uptown to the French Quarter will have to have ice delivered. That is, if they decide to open during daylight hours.

"We stay open until 4 o'clock in the morning, so it would be a little bit weird" having to close at dusk, said Steve Bartley, who works at the Tropical Isle bar on Bourbon Street. "We'll have to adjust the hours to how business is."

These neighborhoods were the lucky ones. They never flooded. Still, nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina, about 40 percent of the Big Easy was under water.

But that is down from 80 percent after the storm, and engineers say water is dropping rapidly. While water in some low-lying areas had been as deep as 20 feet, the deepest water in the city Friday was 5 feet, exposing still more of the dead.

The death toll along the Gulf Coast rose to 816, including 579 in Louisiana.

Security will be tight in the reopened neighborhoods, with Nagin and others vowing never again to let New Orleans slip into the lawlessness that gripped the city in the days after the storm. This week, he warned potential looters that soldiers carry M-16 rifles "and they might have a few bazookas we're saving for special people."