City Splendor
Fairytales, fine art, and fresh ideas for New Orleans' 1,300-acre Eden
For locals who don’t have a lot of personal green space, New Orleans City Park is an extended backyard, a place to picnic and barbecue, bike and fritter away a lazy afternoon. Larger than New York’s Central Park by half, City Park is home to the world’s largest collection of mature live oak trees, many older than the city itself. The 1,300-acre Eden is known for its outdoor recreation, which includes a manmade lake with kayaks and stand-up paddleboards for rent. On lakeside walks, keep your eyes peeled for yellow-footed egrets and snoozing turtles sunning on the trunks of palms reaching over the water. There’s even a real Venetian gondola for hire, piloted by a Cajun fellow who learned the trade in Venice.
When the Louisiana Children’s Museum (LCM) decided to expand and relocate from its longtime Julia Street location, Julia Bland had no question of where she wanted the new museum to land.
“We didn’t know if the park was going to be able to raise the funds to move forward, but we had faith,” —Julia Bland
Bland, chief executive officer of LCM, remembers quite well sitting down with Bob Becker, CEO of City Park, in 2006. “We both thought it was a great idea to move to City Park, but because of Katrina, there really wasn’t much left of the park, and the future was so uncertain,” she said.
Post-Katrina, City Park was in shambles; some spots still had nearly ten feet of standing water for weeks after the storm. The Botanical Garden was a husk and more than two thousand stately live oaks and other trees were lost or damaged, with at least $43 million needed for repairs. “We didn’t know if the park was going to be able to raise the funds to move forward, but we had faith,” recalled Bland.
Thirteen years later, the sparkling new Children’s Museum will open its doors August 31 at 15 Henry Thomas Drive, not far from the park’s festival grounds. From its green design—geared to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver certification—to its community-minded, welcoming spaces, LCM is yet another jewel in City Park’s crown.
Carved out of what was the Allard Plantation in 1854, City Park has always been designed as a welcoming place for gatherings of friends and kin. LCM is just the latest wow in the urban space that is home to the city’s Museum of Art, a newly expanded world-class sculpture garden, an antique carousel, sports and festival fields, two eighteen-hole golf courses, and ponds for fishing. If you haven’t visited City Park in a while, here are a few highlights to draw you into this vortex of greenery in the heart of Orleans parish.
New Orleans Museum of Art
When the New Orleans Museum of Art opened on December 16, 1911, it had only nine works of art in its fledgling collection. Today, after multiple expansions and acquisitions, the museum founded by Isaac Delgado counts more than 40,000 works in its collection. Touring this Grecian temple of culture delivers ancient glass, European silver, and works by French and Italian masters. The museum’s collection of contemporary art and photographs is striking. Flanking the entrance is a twenty-foot tall painted aluminum sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein, called Five Brushstrokes. The museum is free to teens through the end of 2019 and free to all Louisiana residents every Wednesday.
The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the
New Orleans Museum of Art
Opened by NOMA in 2003, the original sculpture garden features sixty-plus works of art dating as far back as the 19th century. The setting is bucolic, with meandering footpaths, shimmering lagoons and scads of stately live oaks. Cross the canal link bridge, and the walkway dips along a retaining wall, delivering the disorienting sensation of walking below the lagoon. Then you’re in the $15 million expansion, with 26 pieces of contemporary art, a maze of bridges and walkways and low-lying native plants designed to let the artwork dominate the landscape. Highlights include Elyn Zimmerman’s stunning Mississippi Meanders glass bridge, a 60-foot-long mosaic wall by artist Teresita Fernández, Jeppe Hein’s refracted Mirror Labyrinth and Katharina Fritsch’s Schädel (Skull), a stark giant skull grimacing from its own island in the lagoon. Look behind that and you’ll see a 5,000-square-foot indoor sculpture pavilion with an elliptical gallery and eighteen-foot ceilings flooded with natural light. Open seven days a week, and free to the public—only pups are not allowed.
Storyland and the Carousel
First opened with a mule-driven carousel in 1897, the whimsical play area is currently closed for revitalization and set to reopen in September 2019. With play equipment, fairytale and nursery rhyme figures (including Mother Goose and the Big Bad Wolf), and a miniature train, this is one of the most popular places for kiddos. This family fun area shimmers with holiday bling during the annual Celebration in the Oaks, which each December brings more than a million twinkling lights throughout 25 acres of the Park, including the Botanical Garden, Storyland, and Carousel Gardens Amusement Park.
The New Orleans Botanical Garden
Completely replanted after it was laid low by the flood, the gardens are also free to Louisiana residents on Wednesdays. Founded as the City Park Rose Garden in 1936, the WPA-designed garden showcases the Art Deco influences of three renowned talents of the era: architect Richard Koch, landscape architect William Wiedorn, and sculptor Enrique Alférez. The son of a Mexican sculptor, Alférez studied with sculptor Lorado Taft in Chicago before moving to New Orleans in 1929. Local until his death in 1999, Alférez’s work is ever present throughout the city, and includes the familiar façade of Charity Hospital. A collection of his sculptures in the Botanical Gardens represents the largest concentration of his work.
[Read this: Six offbeat New Orleans Museums]
Tad Gormley Stadium
This 26,500-seat stadium hosts all kinds of sporting events, including track and field competitions from Tulane and UNO teams. Built as a WPA project during the Depression, the stadium has hosted World Cup and Olympic events, high school football smackdowns, and—back in the day—entertainment acts, including a 1964 Beatles concert, with a sold-out crowd of 12,000.
Louisiana Children’s Museum
Set on a lush 8.5-acre site in City Park across from the lagoon and the expanded sculpture garden, the new museum features a storytelling shelter and a labyrinth, a soon to be installed fog sculpture, open classrooms, a shop, and a restaurant called Acorn, a Dickie Brennan & Co. Café. Throughout the light-filled exhibit areas, guests can explore subjects like: literacy, health and wellness, environmental education, and arts and culture. In addition to the indoor galleries, the museum will also include a literacy center, a parent-teacher resource center, and a floating outdoor classroom moved by kids’ pedal power. Designed as a sustainable site, every detail of the museum’s outdoor environment was thoughtfully arranged, embracing the existing water features and live oaks as anchor elements of the space. And all in ode to its tiny patrons, the museum comes together with multiple gardens, kid-sized nooks with perch-able window seats (called “kindows”), graphics created by children artists, and galleries filled with plenty of fodder for imagination and play.