NEW ORLEANS — President Bush returned to New Orleans yesterday to mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with prayers, pancakes, and reassurances that he would not turn his back on residents of the devastated city again.

Mr. Bush, whose popularity took a battering over his failure to take immediate charge of the crisis a year ago, is still viewed with hostility by many New Orleanians, angry at the slow pace of recovery in many parts of the city.

During breakfast with Ray Nagin, the city’s outspoken mayor, Mr. Bush was asked by Joyce Labruzzo, who is a waitress at Betsy’s Pancake House in Mid-City, an area badly flooded during the storm: “Mr. President, are you going to turn you back on me?”

“No, ma’am,” he replied with a laugh. “Not again.”

The exchange served as a telling reminder of the skepticism with which residents view Mr. Bush and the work he faces rebuilding relations with the city. Mr. Bush, with his wife Laura, attended a memorial service at Saint Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square, the same place where, last September, he promised a spirited recovery effort in a speech many judged too little, too late, two weeks after the hurricane.

“I have come back to New Orleans to tell you the words I spoke in Jackson Square are just as true today as they were then,” Mr. Bush said during an address at Warren Easton School in Mid-City. “If another hurricane comes, there will be a better, more effective response. You cannot kill a city like this. New Orleans is going to rise again. She needs people coming home. She needs those saints to come marching back, is what she needs.”

The city is still struggling with the aftermath of the most expensive natural disaster in America’s history, which destroyed 200,000 homes and killed more than 1,500 people. Fewer than half the city’s citizens have returned, only 50% have electricity, violent crime has risen, and none have received the promised federal funds to help rebuild their homes.

Somber ceremonies were held, and hundreds of survivors braved hot and sticky conditions to take part in a boisterous jazz funeral procession.

Some residents found Mr. Bush’s visit unwelcome. “He lied and came too late. Now he’s coming back — for what?” Bruce Davenport, 34, said. Mr. Davenport was trapped for five days after the storm and now shares a trailer with six other people.

Meanwhile, Michael Brown, the maligned former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who lost his job because of the hurricane, said on Monday that his biggest regret was not being candid about the lack of a coherent federal response plan. “I have to confess … you want to protect the president when you’re a political appointee,” he told NBC. “So you’re torn between telling the absolute truth and relying on those talking points.”

He said he had been made the scapegoat for the government’s slow response.