NEW ORLEANS — When Carol Stauder started giving Hurricane Katrina tours, she couldn't get through them without crying. Seeing the devastation caused by the flooding four months earlier — friends' homes destroyed and neighborhood after neighborhood abandoned — was too painful.

Almost three years later, most of those homes are still broken and deserted, but what saddens Stauder even more are the empty lots sprinkled among them. The houses have been razed, the debris removed, and all that's left are rectangular patches of grass or weeds.

Chris Granger/NNS (ENLARGE)

Bourbon Street remains ever-popular among New Orleans' tourist destinations, even after Katrina.

• List of New Orleans attractions Louisiana travel stories Delta, AirTran, waive fees for flight changes  One weekend, three price points: New Orleans  A taste of the Big Easy  Streets of New Orleans fill with music and visitors as city's recovery from Katrina continues  Freedom, and a Creole love story in Louisiana's Natchitoches  Photos: Travel / Southeast Galleries Latest deals! Back to: Travel | Southeast destinations

"They're not coming back," Stauder says somberly of the families who have left for good.

The 63-year-old guide wants her city and its neighborhoods back. And she wants the 10.1 million tourists who visited the year before Katrina to return, too, because they're as much a part of the city's festive scene as the cool jazz and Creole cuisine.

The truth is that tourism in the Big Easy — its No. 1 industry — is bouncing back, big time. This year's Mardi Gras Carnival season drew about 850,000 revelers, approaching the 1.1 million who partied months before Katrina. The 39th Jazz & Heritage Festival "went marvelously well," in spite of torrential rains, organizer Quint Davis says, as about 400,000 people flocked to see the Neville Brothers, Sheryl Crow, Jimmy Buffett and 570 bands perform.

When the seven-day festival wrapped up at 7 each night, all those people needed food, entertainment and lodging. About 130 restaurants have opened since Katrina, joining such icons as Antoine's, Brennan's and Arnaud's, to restore the city as a culinary destination.

Davis says he counts at least 103 clubs in the French Quarter and in clusters around the city, showing that the musicians are back. It was front-page news when favorite son Aaron Neville decided to return, and on a rainy Friday night, I couldn't get a ticket to see jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis — father of Wynton and Branford — play at Snug Harbor on Frenchmen Street.

And hotels are up to 33,498 rooms — 87.6 percent of the pre-Katrina number.

Last year, tourism was at 70 percent of the pre-Katrina level that generated $5 billion a year. But the city began this year with four major events — college football's Sugar Bowl and national championship game, Mardi Gras, and the NBA All-Star Game Weekend — plus major conventions. The momentum continued with the French Quarter and Jazz festivals, and more than 16 festivals are scheduled through the end of the year, including the new Prospect 1 — "the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States," planners say — scheduled to start Nov. 1.

There's also a new attraction, the Audubon Insectarium, which opened recently on Canal Street, near the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas and an Imax theater.

Still, some would-be tourists are staying away out of a sense of respect for everything the city's been through, says Sandra Shilstone, head of the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. Those people should remember the city's unofficial motto, the Jazz Festival's Quint Davis says: "We dance when we die."

This year's official slogan is "Come out and play," and that's what people were doing the weekend I was there. Bourbon Street was a little sleepy on Thursday and Friday afternoons, but it sprang to life on Friday and Saturday nights. A continuous stream of visitors of all ages strolled along the pedestrian-only street, many toting plastic "go cups," since open containers of alcohol are permitted.

High school students in gowns and tuxedos dined at some of the fancier restaurants, bachelor and bachelorette parties club-hopped, and families rode horse-drawn carriages through the Quarter and along Jackson Square.

Around midnight, Lucky Dog vendors were busy at the red-and-white stands perched every few blocks, and the Famous Door's famous band, Rockbox, was rocking the house nonstop. The band — and Bourbon Street — would party on till 4 in the morning. Or so I was told.

Most bars never close, which is why some, such as Lafitte's in Exile, didn't have working doors or locks before Katrina, forcing them to board up before they evacuated.

Since the disaster, there have been some surprises in the city's regrowth, Shilstone says.

"There's been a cultural renaissance. Neighborhoods putting on arts festivals and cultural events," she says. "People lost art and are buying again."

And applications are up at Tulane and the other universities and colleges, bolstered by young people who discovered the city as Katrina volunteers, Shilstone says.

There is no official count of the volunteers who have come here, but they're still coming, and they're welcome and appreciated. Some volunteers have objected to the Katrina tours, Gray Line guide Stauder says, "because they thought people were making money from other people's misery. But some of the tour-takers were here to help."

As she shows us the sections of the city hit hardest by the flooding — West End, Lakeview, Gentilly, New Orleans East, St. Bernard, and the Ninth Ward — Stauder stresses that she doesn't care why people come, just that they come.

"People have two impressions: that we're still underwater, or that everything's fine and back to normal," she says. "The tours have done a lot of good."

Our driver, Kevin Dandridge, who is pushing to get out of his FEMA trailer soon, adds, "I just love people seeing our city."

That spirit fills this city of 327,000 — 72 percent of pre-Katrina. Tour guides, bus drivers, waiters, bartenders, artists, musicians all talk about New Orleans with pride and passion.

James O'Byrne, who spent his life savings — including his children's college funds — and went into debt to rebuild his home, channeled his civic pride into helping produce the city's newspaper, the Times-Picayune, in the midst of and since the disaster. He knows better than most how much work remains and how much help New Orleans needs.

And as the third anniversary approaches, he worries about "Katrina fatigue" — Americans tiring of the news stories and the appeals.

"We need to find a way to love a city back to life."