City Park

In this project about City Park, my goal is to give a brief history of the Park, as well as to inform readers of how the Park has changed over time. My primary goal is to compare and contrast two sections of the Park: the section of the Park that contains the museum and lagoons, and the west and east gulf courses that were damaged and left unrepaired after hurricane Katrina.

            To begin, let’s focus on what most people think of as “City Park”, the area that contains the New Orleans Museum of Art and sculpture garden. Before development, the land was first occupied by the Accolapissa and Biloxi tribes.  Eventually, the main area of the Park was first developed from swamp land to farm land in the mid-1800’s. It was originally a sugar plantation owned by the Allard family. In time, the land was foreclosed on and willed to the city of New Orleans in1854. In 1891, Victor Ansmen created the CIOA or City Park Improvement Association. This marked the beginning of the true development of what we now know as City Park.  Throughout the park, you can still see remnants from Roosevelt’s WPA crews that created many of the historical bridges and dug the eleven miles of lagoons in the Park. The New Orleans Museum of Art was built in 1911. It is easy to forget, when walking around this urban area, that this part of the Park, along with all the land around it, was once swamp land. While it was inevitable that, with time and increasing population, the environment would change. In my opinion, it is important to balance this shift toward urbanization that can be seen in this part of the Park, with those areas that represent, to some extent, the original form of the environment and have shifted in the opposite direction of urbanization.  In this post, I have attached some past and present pictures of City Park to give a sense of the history of the Park.  In my next post, I will discuss the de-urbanized sections of City Park to give an idea of contrast.