For all of his 55 years, Gary Catoir has lived in the same cozy neighborhood off Airline Drive in Old Metairie, and he has never wanted to move away -- not after routine floods, not even after Hurricane Katrina. He and his relatives own a combined nine houses in the Maple Ridge subdivision, prompting neighbors to joke that it should be renamed for them.

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Sure it is a low-lying spot, but Maple Ridge, built in the 1940s with modest cottages along three streets and a single entrance on Airline, is also a serene enclave insulated from the city and suburbs around it. Neighbors help one another with repairs, and they spend summer evenings chatting from their front porches.

Catoir remembers a carefree childhood playing baseball on the middle street with drains as bases, clomping footpaths through the tall weeds of a nearby field and swimming in a motel pool on Airline. Before some of the motels developed sketchy reputations, the owner invited neighborhood children over to make it appear as though his inn was always bustling with cheerful families.

Now Maple Ridge is undergoing perhaps the most vivid transformation of any East Jefferson neighborhood flooded by Katrina, showing how the disaster continues -- two-and-a-half years later -- to remake the places it scarred. Dozens of the original wood-frame cottages have been demolished. Rising in their place are three-story fortresses against future floods and other sharply contrasting housing styles. One family is finishing a log cabin. Another is building in the style of a raised beach house.

This is more change in less time than the neighborhood has seen since Catoir's family moved there in the late 1940s. But Catoir and many of his neighbors are hopeful that the new Maple Ridge is emerging as a better place, while preserving its secluded charm.

"It's a closed-in neighborhood, bigger than a cul-de-sac. Neighbors were always over," Catoir said. "To me, Maple Ridge is a front porch. In Old Metairie and New Orleans, really, you want a front porch to sit and yell at your neighbors. It's all just in fun."

Katrina floods subdivision

Maple Ridge suffered some of Metairie's worst flooding in Katrina, with every house getting water, some less than 4 feet, others more. The same floodwater flowed through the larger South Beverly Knoll subdivision to the west, into the gated Metairie Club Estates subdivision and across Wally Pontiff Jr. Playground and Metairie Country Club.

But the Maple Ridge Improvement Association recently counted 54 families living in repaired or newly built houses and 31 houses in the process of being constructed or restored. Fifty-six lots are empty, but only 13 damaged houses show little progress.

The original cottages came in two- and three-bedroom models facing different directions on their lots. Many have been expanded and remodeled during the years, though not replaced in the numbers seen recently.

Under other circumstances, such a rapidly shifting landscape might cause some to lament the loss of Maple Ridge's classic character, said East Jefferson civic activist Jackie Madden. But considering what brought on the transformation, she said, the rebuilding affords cause for hope.

"A lot of neighborhoods that are older like to try to keep their ambiance," Madden said. "However, when an area, in my book, goes through the devastation that this area went through, I applaud anybody who wants to give it another go."

The changes in Maple Ridge echo similar trends that have unfolded in the rest of Old Metairie for two decades, said Ivan Miestchovich, director of the Institute for Economic Development and Real Estate Research at the University of New Orleans. Katrina simply accelerated the redevelopment of this pocket, which had mostly retained its original feel until Aug. 29, 2005.

"As hard as it is to deal with that sometimes, because a lot of the past is gone, it's done," Miestchovich said. "Anywhere that got significant flooding, the visual character of the neighborhood is going to change. That's the way it's going to be. There's no way of getting around that."

The neighborhood's location has some advantages that encourage rebuilding, such as being a short drive into New Orleans down Airline but surrounded by Metairie's sturdier infrastructure and more robust shopping, Miestchovich said. He said the main impediment to growth is an excess of properties on the market throughout the region, which could slow sales.

Fear of more flooding is another hurdle. Public officials and neighborhood activists are pushing for a drainage pipeline that would benefit Maple Ridge by diverting storm-water runoff to the Mississippi River instead of Lake Pontchartrain. In the uncertainty that reigns in the meantime, Miestchovich said, it makes sense for Maple Ridge residents to build higher.

Homes going up

Pam and John Christenberry are among the couples doing just that.

The Christenberrys lived in one of the original cottages, with 1,500 square feet. In addition to ruining everything inside, Katrina's flood knocked their home off its foundation and shifted its walls. Afterward, the couple tore it down.

"This was just a time to start over," said Pam, 47, who moved to the neighborhood in 1992. John, 56, has lived there for almost three decades.

They are now finishing a three-story house patterned after a dream design they spotted years ago in a magazine's plan book. The first floor is a garage with cinder-block walls, meant to elevate the living space above another flood. The kitchen faces the living room on the second floor, where a high ceiling opens to a balcony outside the master bedroom on the third floor.

The house has about 2,300 square feet of living space, not including the garage.

"It's the exact house we've had in mind for several years," Pam Christenberry said. "This was the chance to do it."

But rebuilding has been harrowing for the Christenberrys, who are renting a cottage across the street while awaiting completion of their house. They have postponed their move-in date several times amid struggles with insurance, government rebuilding assistance and contractors.

"We can't take two steps forward without taking 12 backward," Pam Christenberry said. "There are so many pieces to this puzzle that have to go together. I've tried to keep my sense of humor throughout this."

Down the street, Alana Reuter, 44, and her husband Mark, 52, have reached the bright place at the end of the rebuilding ordeal. They are settling into their three-story, almost 4,000-square-foot house, after demolishing their 900-square-foot cottage and living in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer for two years.

The Reuters went as far as installing an elevator in the new house to make it easier for elderly relatives to visit. They built high, again with the garage on the ground floor, out of caution.

"You can't depend on the government to do the right thing," Alana Reuter said, "so we figured we need to do all we can to protect ourselves."

The Reuters, who have lived in the neighborhood since 1991, say the new construction is raising property values and improving the neighborhood.

"It's good that it's coming back alive, nicer," Reuter said.

Christenberry said it is no longer a practical investment to build small houses like the first ones that lined the streets of Maple Ridge. Still, she grows wistful when considering the Mayberry atmosphere and some of the older residents who have left.

"I miss seeing the neighborhood like it was: little houses, the cars parked on the street," Christenberry said. "A lot of that's going to be gone, I'm afraid."

Among the longtime residents who decided against returning are Phil and Charline Montecino, who moved to Maple Ridge in 1961 and raised two daughters there.

Phil, 70, and Charline, 69, had their flood-twisted house demolished and did not want the hassle of rebuilding. They sold their lot to the state's Road Home recovery program and bought a low-maintenance condominium off Veterans Memorial Boulevard in Metairie. They remain in touch with their old neighbors.

"I love the people," Phil Montecino said. "It's a great neighborhood. I think when it's finished, it's going to be better than ever.

"We're melancholy about the way it was. But that's just it. That's the way it was."

The neighborhood's perhaps most senior resident, however, is back in the cottage that she and her husband bought in 1947 and that her children restored after Katrina.

Neighbors both old, new

Eunice Zimmerman, 82, raised eight children in the crowded house with her husband, Charles, who died in December 2006. As it was for so many others, the decision whether to return after the storm was agonizing. Zimmerman could not fathom how the wrecked house would ever be habitable.

"I saw it when it was a mess, with the refrigerator lying in the kitchen," she said. "I just couldn't picture that it was going to be OK."

But as they stayed, month after month, with one of their sons on Cleary Avenue in Metairie, Charles Zimmerman longed for his own place, and to return his wife to a permanent home.

"He figured I'd be better off here" instead of meandering among relatives, Zimmerman said.

Also, the children wanted to keep the Maple Ridge house in the family. They fondly remember sharing bedrooms and bath times there without complaint.

The house originally had two bedrooms and one bathroom, a "doll house" as Zimmerman called it, with woods in the back yard where the country club's golf course spreads out today. The family later added a third bedroom and second bathroom.

"It went back and forth for months, maybe six months, about what they were going to do," said Trudy Ali, 48, one of Zimmerman's daughters. "So many emotions were going on."

The couple finally returned home on their 60th wedding anniversary, giving Charles Zimmerman a chance to see the restored house shortly before he died at age 80.

Zimmerman said she is happy back in familiar Maple Ridge. It is still friendly, despite the construction and new people everywhere. It was the ideal place to raise children, she said. And many of the families raised a lot of them. Ali joked that her father, a Navy cook during World War II, had to have so many children because he only knew how to prepare mass amounts of food.

"They had one family down the street with nine," Zimmerman said. "One family down the middle street was 10."

During the years, as families aged and people moved, the children came in waves. Halloween nights clamored some years, and quieted in others.

Now there are signs of a new generation rising, a development that excites and encourages the longtime Maple Ridgers.

New generation coming

Emilie Corass, 31, grew up in Maple Ridge, the daughter of Gary Catoir and his wife, Stephanie. As an adult she moved away, but after Katrina she and her husband, Daryl Corass, 33, bought a gutted house in the neighborhood and began restoring it with help from her nearby relatives.

In turn, the Corasses pitched in on the relatives' houses, including the home where the Catoirs raised Emilie and her two brothers. Eager to return, her parents decided to restore their house, a modified cottage, instead of building new. A few doors away, they plan to eventually tear down a rental cottage they own and to replace it with their retirement home.

The Catoirs, like other Maple Ridge residents, said they cheer new construction, even if it sometimes induces pangs of nostalgia.

"It's changing the look of the neighborhood for the good," said Stephanie Catoir, 55, who is president of the civic association. "But it's taking away some of the charm of what the neighborhood used to look like."

The Corasses' house is one of the original two-bedroom cottages, a manageable size at the moment, Emilie Corass said, although someday she, too, might add to it or rebuild. She is pregnant with a boy who will represent the fourth generation of her family in the subdivision.

They are not the only couple starting a family. Three others around the Corasses have welcomed or are expecting babies.

Emilie Corass said it takes time to get used to the changing scenery in the neighborhood where she grew up, but she plans to stay in Maple Ridge for the long term. It still has its charms.

"Everybody waves to everybody when they go down the street," she said. "It's not as many houses. There are a lot more new faces.

"But it's the same atmosphere. It's still a nice little, quiet, content neighborhood."

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Mark Waller can be reached at mwaller@timespicayune.com or (504) 883-7056.