By GARY RIVLIN
‘Bring a map of New Orleans.’’ That was all that Alden J. McDonald Jr., president and chief executive of Liberty Bank and Trust Company, said when I first asked to meet him. It was the summer of 2005, less than two weeks after the city’s flood-protection system failed to keep out the storm surge created by Hurricane Katrina, and I was reporting in Louisiana for this newspaper. The Gulf of Mexico was sitting in the lobby of his New Orleans headquarters. The flood had destroyed Liberty’s mainframe computer; a good many of the bank’s most essential documents — deeds for houses, titles for cars — were ruined as well. Six of Liberty’s eight branches were flooded and a seventh had been battered by looters.
The bank’s central operations had to be moved to a branch office in Baton Rouge, 70 miles away.McDonald started Liberty, one of the Deep South’s first black-owned banks, 33 years earlier. He was 29 then and a college dropout, but by the time of the flooding, the bank ranked as the country’s sixth-largest black-owned bank, with more than $350 million in assets, and he was chairman of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. Yet as we sat in a windowless conference room in Baton Rouge, he said that he wasn’t certain Liberty would survive long enough to celebrate its 34th anniversary. That’s when he asked me to take out the map I had brought.
McDonald picked up a black marker and drew a line down its middle. He pointed to the western half. ‘‘That’s the New Orleans you know,’’ he told me: the French Quarter, the Superdome, the Warehouse District, the Garden District, St. Charles Avenue. Those areas had largely remained dry. Then he pointed to the eastern half of the map. ‘‘Where you saw water up to the rooftops?’’ he said. ‘‘That’s where most
