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.
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