BATON ROUGE, La., Feb. 27 (UPI) -- Baton Rouge, the sleepy Louisiana capital 75 miles upriver from New Orleans, is waking up following the disaster of Hurricane Katrina in the Big Easy.
Some of the signs include Baton Rouge branches of well-known New Orleans restaurants. Galatoire's opened in Baton Rouge in November, two months before it reopened its landmark restaurant in the French Quarter.
"A lot of people said Baton Rouge couldn't support something like this, but business has been very good," Justin Galatoire Frey told the Los Angeles Times. "I think Baton Rouge is going to be bigger for a while, I really do. It's going to be a long time before New Orleans ever gets back the population it had, if it ever does."
New Orleans had actually been losing population for a long time before Katrina, while Baton Rouge had been growing. The devastation left by the hurricane is expected to accelerate the process.
About 100,000 evacuees are living in Baton Rouge, and local officials expect that at least half plan to make the city their permanent home.
In Texas, Galveston was devastated by a hurricane more than a century ago. At the time, the city was bigger than Houston but it has remained in second place ever since.
