NEW ORLEANS — Gail Henke could think of no better way to celebrate the French Quarter's survival of Hurricane Katrina than to belly up to a bar on Bourbon Street with a vodka and cranberry juice. Call it a libation to the storm gods.

"You know what? There's a reason why we're called the Saints," the 53-year-old tour booker said yesterday as she communed with 20 or so other survivors. "Because no matter what religion you are, whether you're a Catholic, whether you're voodoo, whether you're Baptist or so on, so on, and so on — we all pray. We all pray.

"I'm not a religious fanatic. But God has saved us."

Neighborhoods outside the Vieux Carré were inundated with up to 15 feet of water. But the old city, built on the highest ground around, weathered the glancing blow from the Category 4 storm in grand style.

Among the damage: Some chimneys collapsed, and the famed rues were littered with roof slates and Spanish tile. On Burgundy Street, a two-story brick outbuilding that once had been slave quarters collapsed. Like much of the year, Mardi Gras beads were strewn everywhere, caught up in twisted pieces of balconies that fell, and tangled in the debris from fallen tree limbs. Winds wrested the cooper roof from the Old U.S. Mint and tossed the twisted metal across several nearby streets.

Arnold Steinbrenner, 47, was riding out the storm in his second-floor apartment next door when bricks began falling into his building. He said a woman who was in the collapsed structure emerged unscathed.

"They were in the process of renovating it," he said. "It was coming along. It just didn't get there fast enough."

In the courtyard behind the 278-year-old St. Louis Cathedral, two massive trees toppled, their roots pulling up a 30-foot section of iron fence. Carrie Hanselman marveled at how the branches straddled a marble statue of Jesus Christ but, miraculously, knocked off only the thumb and forefinger on its outstretched left hand.

"He was right in the middle of it," the pastry chef said. "Jesus and his mother were watching out for us. I had that candle burning all night."

Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for New Orleans, said the French Quarter appeared to survive Katrina better than any of the city's neighborhoods.

After the storm passed, police circled the quarter with bullhorns shouting: "The French Quarter is closed. This is state of emergency. Please, please get off the streets or you will be detained."

But that couldn't shut down one of the nation's most famous — and infamous — neighborhoods. And this storm wasn't enough to deter its residents. The French Quarter is used to sweeping up the leftovers of its nightly bacchanals and has no trouble using a fresh coat of paint to spruce up a rundown, termite-ridden facade.

"It's not as bad as Mardi Gras bad," said Ken McCorkle, 43, a French Quarter resident walking to Johnny White's, a bar that remained open around the clock before, during and after the storm. Dozens of people spilled out onto Bourbon Street with a cold plastic cup of keg beer from the bar, one of a handful open in the neighborhood yesterday afternoon.

"I guess we did such a good job of getting everyone so drunk last night they didn't realize there was a hurricane going on," said Cliff Burnham, who manages Snooks, another Bourbon Street bar that opened yesterday soon after Katrina's winds slowed.