Biloxi
"Katrina took the whole coast apart. What grew back was different — tougher, stranger, more honest about what it is."
The first thing you notice driving into Biloxi on US-90 is the lighthouse standing in the median strip of a six-lane highway, which seems impossible and yet is completely real. The Biloxi Lighthouse has been there since 1848, and the highway was built around it, and the highway has been rebuilt three times since Katrina, and the lighthouse is still there in the middle of the road. This seems to me like a useful piece of information about the character of the place.
Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi coast on August 29, 2005, with a storm surge that ran thirty feet high and fifteen miles inland and erased most of what had existed along the beach. I arrived fifteen years after, and what had been rebuilt was not quite the same thing. The casinos — massive floating barges converted into land-based resorts after Mississippi law changed — occupy the beachfront in a row that gives the drive along the coast a certain Las Vegas aspiration. But behind them, in the old residential neighborhoods, the Biloxi of the shrimpers and the oystermen and the Vietnamese fishing families persists in a more subdued register.
The Vietnamese community here is one of the most compelling aspects of the Gulf Coast that most visitors miss entirely. After 1975, Vietnamese refugees settled along the bayous and bays of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, drawn by the fishing culture and the Catholic church infrastructure that felt familiar. In Biloxi they became part of the shrimping industry, and today the docks have as many Vietnamese names on the boats as any other. Mary Mahoney’s Old French House restaurant is the city’s famous dining institution, and it is excellent, but I ate better at a Vietnamese place on the east side of town run by a woman whose mother had arrived from Saigon in 1979 — the pho made with Gulf shrimp, the spring rolls packed with local crabmeat.
The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, designed by Frank Gehry, arrived in 2010 and gave the city a campus of curving silver buildings that sit in curious dialogue with the old brick and the casino hotels. George Ohr himself — the “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” who made his eccentric ceramics here in the early twentieth century — is a good enough reason to visit the museum on his own terms: the pots are strange and alive and look like nothing else made in their era.
When to go: October through April offers mild weather and the pleasure of a Gulf resort town out of season — the casinos are always open but the beach crowds thin dramatically. The Biloxi Seafood Festival in September is a local institution worth catching. Avoid summer unless you are specifically interested in casino resorts, which are climate-controlled regardless.