Art and Photography Blog: Photos of New Orleans Neighborhoods Part Sixteen: City Park

Photos of New Orleans Neighborhoods Part Sixteen: City Park

As mentioned in the wikipedia, City Park is a neighborhood of the city of New Orleans. A subdistrict of the Lakeview District Area, its boundaries as defined by the City Planning Commission are: Robert E. Lee Boulevard to the north, Bayou St. John to the east, Orleans Avenue, North Carrollton Avenue and Toulouse Street to the south and City Park and Orleans Avenues to the west. The neighborhood is named after and dominated by City Park (New Orleans).

This post covers City Park, the park itself. City Park covers 1,300 acres and is the 6th-largest and 7th-most-visited urban public park in the United States. I used to go there a lot as a kid. I took Saturday morning art classes at the Delgado Museum (now known as the New Orleans Museum of Art).

I also spent second grade at the Sam Barthe School for Boys located in the area at the time but now out of business. It was housed in the mansion of Texas oil millionaire William H. McFadden. My parents sent me there when we got re-districted in the public school system while living on Short Street (see Part 12). The next year we moved across from the Lusher School (see Part 13) and I went back to public school. In the late 50s, after I left, the school was located in Jefferson Parish until Sam sold the school to École Classique. This sale is ironic to me as Sam Barthe was known for tough sports teams and École Classique was very much the opposite, at least in my time in the city.

Below are pictures from the botanical gardens in the park. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 caused nearly total destruction of the garden's plantings but they have been restored. The pictures below were taken a few months before Katrina. I had a number of post-Katrina pictures of the art museum and the park taken in 2007 but I lost them when my hard drive crashed.