NEW ORLEANS – On a recent hot day, the new phonebook landed with a thud on the stoop of a house that one year ago lay under water, a notable sign of normalcy.

The phonebook’s arrival is a mark of progress here, but it’s also a window into how much has changed. With nearly half the city’s population gone, two swollen books have shrunk to one, following a decision by the phonebook’s editors to fold the white pages into the rest of the book. Meanwhile, the yellow pages now include far larger ads for contractors, electricians, roofers and others crucial to the city’s rebuilding. Lay the old and new editions side by side and the resulting contrast is a microcosm of a transformed metropolis.

It’s one in which people need help repairing their homes, but don’t have time to fuss with their hair – the “Contractors-General” section jumped from six to 14 pages and “Roof Contractors” from 15 to 32, while listings under “Beauty Salons” declined 42 percent from 541 individual businesses to 316.

“Every single thing that people need to rebuild their lives is literally in that book,” said BellSouth Corp. District Sales Manager Gayla Meilleur, who worked on the New Orleans phonebook.

Which is exactly the point: In a city in tatters, where a majority of homes still don’t have electricity, the focus is on making whole what was destroyed. It’s businesses that help people do that which are seeing a spike in sales and are now represented with larger, splashier ads. People need to buy mattresses and couches to replace their soggy ones, but they can’t afford to do so with antiques: The “Furniture” heading leaped from three to more than four full pages, while “Antique Dealers” is thinner, having shed 26 out of 145 businesses.

Businesses that offer luxury goods, or else services that are not essential, are struggling and so scaling back their presence in the new book. So are those catering to tourists .

“Everything is housing right now. Nothing else matters,” said window installer Sam Criscione, owner of Classic Vue Exteriors Inc., who’s installing three times as many windows as he did before the storm. Windows are one of the first items to get replaced – as are roofs. Within a month of the storm, one of New Orleans’ oldest roofing businesses was fielding 10,000 calls a month, up from around 1,000 at the same time the year before.

“It was overwhelming,” said Robin Trupiano, manager of Robertson Roofing & Siding Inc.

The call volumes tracked by BellSouth offer a portrait of frantic rebuilding: Businesses under the “Roofing Contractor” heading saw, on average, an 833 percent increase in calls. Those under the “Contractors-General” were up 333 percent. “Gutters & Downspouts” leaped 483 percent.

Thousands of businesses provided goods and services that are not rebuilding-oriented, yet are still essential to the day-to-day life of the city. Because many of them flooded, those that managed to reopen are now reaping the bounty their competitors left behind.

That the white and yellow pages have been consolidated into a single phonebook is a testament to how much this once vibrant city has shrunk: To date, only 235,000 people, or around 45 percent of the city’s original population of 485,000, has returned, according to state estimates.