Some tragedies take no effort at all to happen.

One moment life is perfect and normal, then everything we expect it to be.

And then it changes in an instant.

No warning, no chance to avoid it.

It just happens.

Natural disaster is one of those agents of tragedy that seems to sneak up on us and bring

ruin into our lives.

Fire, blood, tropical storms, just watching the news each night can give us a glimpse into

yet one more episode of pain and suffering that no one saw coming.

Other tragedies though only exist because we have ushered them into our world, that we

have sometimes been humanity as a collective and sometimes just one broken individual.

Genocide or patricide, school shootings or terrorism.

Regardless of the source, these are tragedies that couldn't have existed without human involvement.

Doesn't make them any less painful, mind you.

Sometimes it even makes them worse.

These moments of tragedy are, thankfully, very spread out.

We have a chance to breathe and move on, time to recoup.

But give us city enough time, and those tragedies can start to pile up.

The older the place, the deeper the pain, a murder here, a disaster there, throw in a

war or two for good measure and soon its entire history can feel like one long nightmare.

Nowhere is that more true than in the city that most would call the big easy.

Underneath its eclectic architectural mix of old Creole, French, Spanish, Victorian,

...