• Home1ab
  • about
  • contact
  • maps
  • meet
  • minutes
  • history
  • membership

Round and Round at Stallings Playground on Gentilly

October 23, 2017 by Charlie London

Ms. Thibodeaux demonstrates the fun you can have hula hooping

You and your family are invited to join in on Tuesdays from 5:00pm-6:00pm at Stallings Gentilly for an hour of hula hooping

This super-casual class is perfect for hoop beginners!

It’s a low-impact, total body work-out.

It’s fun, and easier than you think!

We’ll practice basic on-body and off-body hoop moves. Handmade, adult-sized hula-hoops are provided. No registration needed, just come! Kids are welcome. We’ll be by the swings and playground equipment.

We look forward to seeing you!

For more information, contact:  Gabrielle Lewis, Fit NOLA Programming Assistant, New Orleans Recreational Development Commission 504-658-3083 (direct) 504-658-3052 (main) gklewis@nola.gov

***

Filed Under: More Great Posts! Tagged With: bayou st john, best neighborhood in New Orleans, faubourg st john, fun exercise, hula, hula hoop, New Orleans, NORDC, recreation, stallings gentilly

THE CRAVING FOR PUBLIC SQUARES

August 27, 2016 by Charlie London

sent in by Keith Hardie

Here is an essay by Michael Kimmelman about the importance of public squares from the April, 2016 issue of the New York Review of Books. A good read, and something urban planners should keep in mind: every neighborhood should have a public square, now more than ever. Building a great city “requires not just making attractive buildings but providing citizens with generous, creative, open, inviting public spaces.”

The Craving for Public Squares

Michael Kimmelman

public squares, Berlin, 1997
Joachim Schulz/ullstein bild/Getty Images

Ludwigkirchplatz, Berlin, 1997

The twenty-first century is the first urban century in human history, the first time more people on the planet live in cities than don’t. Experts project that some 75 percent of the booming global population will be city dwellers by 2050. Dozens of new cities are springing up in Asia, their growth hastened by political unrest, climate change, and mass relocation programs that have cleared vast swaths of the Chinese countryside. Much of the growth in countries like India and Bangladesh is chaotic and badly planned. In many growing cities across the Global South there are serious shortages of water, sanitation, and housing, along with increasing air pollution. The United States has some of the same problems on a smaller scale, while here urban development is also being stimulated by growing numbers of university graduates and empty-nesters who are rejuvenating downtowns and rejecting suburbia, the culture of commuting, sprawl, and the automobile.

Not that suburbs have stopped growing, but since the late 1990s, the share of automobiles driven by people in their twenties in America has fallen from 20.8 percent to 13.7 percent. The number of nineteen-year-olds opting out of driver’s licenses has tripled since the 1970s from 8 to 23 percent. Electric, self-driving vehicles may soon revolutionize transportation and urban land use. Meanwhile, deindustrialization, plummeting crime rates, and increasing populations of singles and complex, nontraditional families have reshaped many formerly desolate urban neighborhoods.

People are moving downtown for jobs, but also for the pleasures and benefits of cultural exchange, walkable streets, parks, and public squares. Squares have defined urban living since the dawn of democracy, from which they are inseparable. The public square has always been synonymous with a society that acknowledges public life and a life in public, which is to say a society distinguishing the individual from the state. There were, strictly speaking, no public squares in ancient Egypt or India or Mesopotamia. There were courts outside temples and royal houses, and some wide processional streets.

By the sixth century BC, the agora in Athens was a civic center, and with the rise of democracy, became a center for democracy’s institutions, the heart of public life. In ancient Greek, the word “agora” is hard to translate. In Homer it could imply a “gathering” or “assembly”; by the time of Thucydides it had come to connote the public center of a city, the place around which the rest of the city was arranged, where business and politics were conducted in public—the place without which Greeks did not really regard a town or city as a town or city at all. Rather, such a place was, as the second-century writer Pausanias roughly put it, just a sorry assortment of houses and ancient shrines.

The agora announced the town as a polis. Agoras grew in significance during the Classical and Hellenistic years, physical expressions of civic order and life, with their temples and fishmongers and bankers at money-changing tables and merchants selling oil and wine and pottery. Stoas, or colonnades, surrounded the typical agora, and sometimes trees provided shade. People who didn’t like cities, and disliked democracy in its messiness, complained that agoras mixed religious and sacrilegious life, commerce, politics, and theater. But of course that was also their attraction and significance. The agora symbolized civil justice; it was organic, changeable, urbane. Even as government moved indoors and the agora evolved over time into the Roman forum, a grander, more formal place, the notion of the public square as the soul of urban life remained, for thousands of years, critical to the self-identity of the state.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that early in 2011 the Egyptian revolution centered around Tahrir Square, or that the Occupy Movement later that same year, partly inspired by the Arab Spring, expressed itself by taking over squares like Taksim in Istanbul, the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, and Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. And I don’t think it’s coincidental that the strangers who came together at places like Zuccotti and Taksim all formed pop-up towns on these sites, producing in miniature form (at least temporarily) what they imagined to be the outlines of a city, with distinct spaces designated for legal services, libraries, medical stations, media centers, kitchens serving free food, and general stores handing out free clothing.

Aristotle talked about an ideal polis that extended the distance of a herald’s cry, a civic space not so large that people could no longer communicate face-to-face. In Zuccotti Park, a contained space only a block long and wide, the police allowed protesters, who were prevented from using loudspeakers, to communicate by repeating phrase by phrase, like a mass game of telephone, what public speakers said, so that everyone, as it were, spoke in one voice. As in any healthy city or town, the occupants did not in fact all agree about goals and dreams or about how to bring about political and social change, even while they shared the same space; and without a sustained and organized structure of governance, their spontaneous occupation inevitably came apart, even before it was invaded and dispersed by the police. That said, for a time Zuccotti became a physical manifestation of democratic impulses and hopes embedded, since the days of the agora, in the very notion of a public square.

I grew up in Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs’s old neighborhood, where Washington Square Park was a place I met friends, cooled off in the fountain, played catch with my dad, and people-watched. It was the heart of what was then a scruffier but more diverse and venturesome neighborhood than today’s Village. The city’s urban-planning czar Robert Moses notoriously wanted to drive an avenue straight through the middle of Washington Square. That the Village has become one of the most desirable and expensive places in the world is in no small measure due to Moses’s failure and the park’s survival. The good life, wrote another great New York urbanist of Jacobs’s era, Lewis Mumford, involves more than shared prosperity; it entails what Mumford described as an almost religious refashioning of values based on an ecological view of the city.

Seen whole, in all its variety and interconnectedness, urban health is expressed physically in a natural configuration of built forms across the city. The art of architecture requires not just making attractive buildings but providing citizens with generous, creative, open, inviting public spaces. And one of the basic truths of urban life turns out to be that there’s a nearly insatiable demand for such places. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, New York City inaugurated a program to convert streets across the five boroughs into plazas and squares.

Making Times Square into a pedestrian mall was the program’s main event. But the mayor’s office invited communities everywhere to suggest disused traffic triangles, parking lots, and other forlorn sites in far-flung areas that might also be reimagined. Dozens of new public spaces were proposed. The city carted in potted trees, benches, chairs, and tables, and voilà, new squares were created. Since then, they have not all been well maintained or supported by City Hall. But some of them made an immediate difference in reducing crime, boosting local commerce, and improving street life.

The big news was just how much people craved public squares. Madison Square Park, lately renovated and one of the loveliest parks in New York City, faces the Flatiron Building, where Fifth Avenue and Broadway cross. The two avenues created for years what was the widest and most unmanageable street crossing in Manhattan. The Bloomberg administration’s idea was to turn the middle of that street into a new public plaza. One day I ran across Michael Bierut, whose design firm, Pentagram, faces the site, and he told me he had thought the plaza was a crazy plan when he first heard about it. Who in the world would sit in the middle of the street, he wondered, when you had one of the most beautiful parks in the city right there?

“Was I wrong,” Michael recalled after the plaza was completed when I spoke with him for a column in The New York Times. Today, the place is full of people on nice days, its café tables and umbrellas scattered where trucks had rumbled down Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The new square instantly became one of the most successful public spaces in the city, with people toting prosciutto sandwiches out of Eataly, the nearby Italian food market, and Shake Shack burgers out of the park just to sit in the middle of traffic—because from there you can see the Flatiron Building one way and the Empire State Building the other, but also for the reason people gravitate to Trafalgar Square in London or the Piazza della Signoria in Florence as opposed to Hampstead Heath or the Boboli Gardens: to be in the middle of things.

As retreats, parks give us room to breathe and feel alone. Squares reaffirm our commonality, our shared sense of place, and our desire to be included. “It’s why we congregate near the kitchen at a dinner party instead of in the living room,” is how Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who directed the plaza program during the Bloomberg administration, described to me the attraction of the square. “That’s where you see people coming and going to the fridge to grab a beer and watch stuff happen.”

A new public square in the Fawwar refugee camp in the West Bank, June 2014
Adam Ferguson/The New York Times/Redux

A new public square in the Fawwar refugee camp in the West Bank, June 2014

This impulse to watch stuff happen is universal. On another Times assignment, I visited a refugee camp in the southern West Bank called Fawwar. There, a Palestinian architect, Sandi Hilal, worked with residents of the camp to create a public square, something virtually unheard of in such places. For Palestinian refugees, the creation of any urban amenity, by implying normalcy and permanence, undermines their fundamental self-image, even after several generations have passed, as temporary occupants of the camps who preserve the right of return to Israel.

Moreover, in refugee camps, public and private do not really exist as they do elsewhere. There is, strictly speaking, no private property in the camps. Refugees do not own their homes. Streets are not municipal properties, as they are in cities, because refugees are not citizens of their host countries, and the camp is not really a city. The legal notion of a refugee camp, according to the United Nations, is a temporary site for displaced, stateless individuals, not a civic body.

So there is no municipality in Fawwar, just a UN relief agency whose focus is on emergency services. That’s what residents turn to when the lights go out or the garbage isn’t picked up, unless they want to deal with the problem themselves. Concepts like inside and outside are blurred in a place where there is no private property. A mother doesn’t always wear the veil in Fawwar, whether she’s at home or out on the street, because the whole place is, in a sense, her home; but she will put it on when she leaves the camp, because that is outside.

In other words, there is a powerful sense of community. And some years ago, Hilal—who then headed the Camp Improvement Unit in the West Bank for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, along with her husband, Alessandro Petti, an Italian architect—began to talk with Fawwar residents about creating a public square. The residents, especially the men, were immediately suspicious, not just about normalizing the camp but about creating any space where men and women might come together in public. Fawwar was established in 1950. It’s under a quarter of a square mile, just south of Hebron, crammed with nearly seven thousand people, many the descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948. “I feel at home here,” said one middle-aged resident who was born and reared in the camp. “I want the right of return so I can decide for myself if I want to live here. It’s a matter of freedom, choosing where you live.”

Of course, this entire question is complicated by the refusal of many Arab states to take in Palestinian refugees, a refusal partly based on the claim of right of return. And I’ve heard that a survey taken decades ago suggested that some Palestinians would trade this right if they received substantial compensation. But in Fawwar the issue of the right of return clearly binds residents to the camp as a site of shared sacrifice and resistance. “It’s an architectural issue, in one respect,” is how Hilal put it. What she meant about it being an architectural issue was that identity in the West Bank (although not only there) is invariably tied up with notions of belonging and place and expressed through architecture, including public spaces like squares.

Hilal showed me around the square she’d designed. She said that pushback was initially fierce. “When we merely mentioned the word ‘plaza,’ people in the camp freaked out,” she remembered. But a counterargument gradually took hold, which entailed abandoning what Hilal called “the strategy of convincing the whole world of the refugees’ misery through their architectural misery.” Hilal focused on women, young and old. At first they didn’t want to oppose the men who were against it. But they feared, in such a conservative enclave, that if the square were built, men would simply take it over, and that if women did try to use it, they would feel too exposed in an open space. They longed for someplace to gather outdoors with a screen or enclosure.

So the challenge became: How could a space be made open—so that men, women, and children might be able to gather together—while also allowing the women some privacy? It was decided that a wall of varying height should surround the square, which was about 7,500 square feet. Three disused shelters from the 1950s were torn down. The wall created a kind of house without a roof, a space at once open and contained. The architects interviewed residents whose homes faced the site, and negotiated with each one separately about the appearance of the wall in front of their houses. What resulted is a dusty, L-shaped place, made of limestone and concrete, with several entrances, which has stirred debate in the camp about the position of women.

The square has given children a place to play other than crowded streets. Mothers who rarely felt free to leave their homes to socialize in public now meet there to talk and weave, selling what they make in the square, an enterprise that is entirely new in the community and that one of the mothers told me “gives us self-esteem and a sense of worth, like the men have.”

“For me,” another mother said, “the radical change is that men here now look at women in a public square as a normal phenomenon. I can bring my kids. I can meet my friends here. We are in our homes all the time. We need to get out. We want to be free. Here, in the public square, we feel free.”

Her remark put me in mind of a square that seemed to me just about perfect. Some years ago, I moved to Berlin with my wife and our two sons in order to start a newspaper column on cultural and social affairs across Europe and elsewhere. We settled into an apartment on a quiet street in the west and soon discovered Ludwigkirchplatz, a square, two blocks away. It unfolded at the rear of a neo-Gothic redbrick church from the 1890s, St. Ludwig’s, one of the few freestanding churches in Berlin. Several streets converged from different angles onto the square, which used to be the center of Wilmersdorf, a leafy cobblestoned quarter whose roots go back at least to the thirteenth century. George Grosz and Heinrich Mann lived nearby. Not long ago, Wilmersdorf was subsumed by Berlin administrators into a larger borough, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, which includes the Ku’Damm—the Kurfürstendamm—West Berlin’s faded but undaunted version of Broadway or Paris’s Champs-Élysées, with its glossy auto dealerships and sprawling department stores.

Ludwigkirchplatz is off the beaten path. If several roads lead to it straight from the Ku’damm, they’re quiet, and you can still come upon the square as if upon a clearing in the woods. These are slumbering streets of stucco, stone, and concrete apartment blocks with funny little shops selling belly-dancing supplies, gay sex toys, Cuban cigars, and German wine. The square announces itself gradually, from a distance, with the sound of children playing and church bells.

It’s not quite an hourglass shape, paved in patterned bricks and shaded by rows of linden trees, with café tables spilling from bars facing the square. A sandy playground squats below the bellowing apse of the church. A raised semicircle of benches looks back toward the café tables and onto a pair of slightly tilted concrete ping-pong tables, which do a brisk business in warm weather. A plaza between the café tables and the ping-pong tables is the square’s main stage, where skateboarders vie with toddlers, dog walkers, young mothers pushing high-priced strollers, and Wilmersdorf widows, the last generation of war survivors, not unlike the Italian matrons whom I recall from my childhood in the Village, and similarly disapproving.

Someday we will lose all this and return home, I told myself whenever I arrived in that beautiful square under the towering church steeple and settled onto the benches beside the playground, where our children loved to play. The square was a home, drawing us daily as it did our neighbors. With the usual mix of sadness and pride, I watched our older son, just eight when we moved, grow up game by game, learning to play ping-pong on the lopsided tables; I watched our younger boy learn to walk in the sandbox near the swings. In December, when the square was silent and briefly taken over by Turkish immigrants selling Christmas trees, we lugged our tree to our apartment after a heavy German lunch in an old corner bar that had an especially lovely view of the slumbering playground and barren branches through steamfogged windows.

We declared spring’s arrival as soon as we could clear the snow from the ping-pong tables. Wilmersdorfers desperate for winter to end were there, too, wrapped in blankets, shivering at the outdoor café tables facing the square. If a polis is measured by the length of a herald’s cry, a parish extends the distance of a church bell’s ring, and the bells of St. Ludwig’s, while deafening in the square, filtered through the surrounding streets, binding the neighborhood together.

On our final day before moving back to New York, one of those cruelly perfect, sun-kissed summer Sundays in Berlin, my older son and I returned to the square for a few last games. The square was packed with newly arrived Russian émigrés and children carrying ice cream cones from the Italian gelateria facing the playground. “Everything is as it should be,” Nabokov once wrote. “Nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.” The smell of fresh bread wafted from an organic bakery, just off the square, mixing with the perfume of lindens in bloom. Skateboards rattled over the stone plaza. The bells tolled for what seemed like an hour that afternoon. We played game after game, vainly hoping to slow time.

The perfect square, it turns out, is also a state of mind.

The Craving for Public Squares

Filed Under: BlightStat Meetings, Featured, HISTORY, Living Well Tagged With: faubourg st john, fortier park, keith hardie, New Orleans, parks, public spaces, recreation

WHEN WILL THE PUBLIC DEMAND THAT OPEN SPACE BE LEFT OPEN?

July 29, 2016 by Charlie London

DEMAND THAT OPEN SPACE BE LEFT OPEN

by Keith Hardie, Jr.

70% of those who use public parks use them for passive purposes. But municipalities too often look at parks as vacant unused land that needs to be developed and programmed. Our own master plan warns against this kind of thinking:

City Park in New Orleans
City Park in New Orleans

“Cities that give up park land end up regretting it. A robust network of green space and parks is a critical asset for quality of life and urban success. It helps retain existing residents and attracts new ones.  When cities looking for “free land” establish other public facilities on park land, they are chipping away at the community’s overall inventory of park land.  Often, it is more costly or otherwise more difficult to acquire new park land. For this reason, it is important to make sure that, at a minimum, the city maintain a commitment to keeping the same overall amount of park land that it has at present.”     Master Plan, Vol 2, Chap 7. p 15.

But, despite this language, our parks continue to be threatened by development and overprogramming. That’s why we need to amend the Master Plan to put language in Chapter 14 (the one that everyone agrees has the force of law) to stop commercialization and development in our parks.  We need parks for residents, not parking lots and “attractions” for tourists.”

article below by Charles A. Birnbaum President & CEO, The Cultural Landscape Foundation

 Has the time come to refine how we measure the value of historic parks like  Audubon and City Parks in New Orleans?

What about the irreplaceable historic and cultural values that are embedded in these places?

The Trust for Public Land’s annual ParkScore® Index ranks land owned by regional, state, and federal agencies within the 100 most populous U.S. cities—including school playgrounds formally open to the public and greenways that function as parks. The ranking criteria includes acreage (park acreage as a percent of city area), facilities and investment (spending per resident), and access (the number of residents within a ten-minute walk). However, the measure of acreage doesn’t take into account parkland and open space lost to new construction within a park. Consequently, the measure of overall acreage may not be affected by new construction within a park, but the amount of actual open space is.

2016-07-28-1469742382-6535805-map1973.jpg 2016-07-28-1469742413-7806175-Map2000.png

Audubon Park, New Orleans, LA, showing loss of public open space.

In New Orleans,  open space in Audubon Park today only accounts for about one third of the park; it’s a sliver around the park’s periphery, along with some other limited interstitial space. City Park could soon lose eight acres to the Children’s Museum expansion. That’s a quantitative and qualitative difference that needs to be measured, particularly as it affects many residents’ quality of life.

City Park in New Orleans
City Park in New Orleans

With the renaissance of cities, and more and more users taking advantage of our municipal parks, when will the public demand that open space be left open? Will we draw a line in the grass that says municipalities can no longer repurpose meadows for museums and trade pastoral parkland for parking? Will we declare that parks held in public trust—especially masterworks designed by great landscape architects—are not free for the taking?

The majority of our park users—more than 70%—use public parks for passive enjoyment. These vulnerable spaces are living, connective tissue composed of soil, rock, trees and lawn; but more than that, they tell our stories as a community and a nation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-a-birnbaum/the-obama-library-is-goin_b_11248112.html

Filed Under: CRIME, Featured, HISTORY, Living Well Tagged With: audubon park, bayou st john, city park, faubourg st john, New Orleans, open space, preservation, quality of life, recreation

Lafitte Greenway Update

March 2, 2015 by Charlie London

The Final Stretch: Greenway Construction News

Tree-planting began on the Lafitte Greenway this month. The City’s construction contractor has started work on the final stretch of the Greenway from N Alexander Street to Carrollton Avenue. Construction is approximately 80 percent complete and on track to open this spring. Read the full DPW update.

Carrollton.jpg

Lafitte Greenway at Carrollton Avenue


Great American Clean-Up: Lafitte Corridor

Friends of Lafitte Corridor and NOLA Trash Mob are hosting a Great American Cleanup of the neighborhoods surrounding the Lafitte Greenway. Join us for coffee and pastries, and a great cleanup of the Corridor.

Over the past two years, NOLA Trash Mob, an all-volunteer litter-fighting group, has picked up over 9 tons of trash from New Orleans streets on weekly mobs.

When: Sunday, March 8th
(Sunday date chosen to accommodate 30 University of Georgia students that are generously spending their spring break volunteering in New Orleans)

9:30 AM – 10:00 AM – Coffee & Pastries provided by Mid-City Market

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM – Trash Mob: Head out in groups to clean up the Corridor

Where: Jeff Davis Parkway & Lafitte Street (501 N Jefferson Davis Pkwy)

RSVP for the Facebook event, and invite your friends!

Greenway Art: Water Challenge Civic Design Pitch Competition
ArtsLocation.jpg

Help select the first public art installation on the Lafitte Greenway by attending the Water Challenge Art Pitch. In January, Arts Council New Orleans and Propeller: A Force for Social Innovation issued a call to artists to propose designs for a $25,000 art installation for the Lafitte Greenway at Jefferson Davis Parkway on the theme of living with water.

The three finalists–Jennifer Blanchard (Contraflow), Michel Varisco (Turning), and Amy Stelly & Darryl Reeves (Drop in the Bowl)—will pitch their pieces to the public during the 2015 Water Challenge. The winner will be selected by audience vote. Attend the live arts pitch on March 23rd to help select the Greenway’s first public art installation!

What: Public Art Pitch for Water-Themed Lafitte Greenway Art Installation

When: Monday, March 23, 10:15AM – 12:00PM

Where: The Chicory (610 S Peters St)

For more information, visit Arts Council New Orleans.

Jefferson Davis Bike Trail Sees Improvements

Biking the Jefferson Davis bike path just got better! This February, the City spent $110,000 on improvements and repairs to the Jefferson Davis Bike Path including replacing broken concrete panels, installing Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant curb ramps, and re-leveling uneven ground adjacent to the path.

JeffDav.jpg


Line58_2.pngLine 58 Gives Back

Every year, Line 58, a local branding and web design firm gives away a year’s supply of branding, strategy, and design to one lucky nonprofit in the New Orleans region. FOLC is grateful to have been selected as the 2015 recipient. Thank you Line58!


Spurring Development

As the Lafitte Greenway nears completion, it is spurring investment in the surrounding neighborhoods. Here are a sampling of development projects underway or proposed for the Lafitte Corridor.

Movie.jpg
Broad Street Movie Theater Building

Broad Street Movie Theatre to Open this Summer

Get ready movie lovers. A new four-screen movie theatre is opening in the Lafitte Corridor this summer. In January, City Council unanimously approved plans for a movie theater at 636 N Broad one short block from the Lafitte Greenway. This 12,400 square foot, 90-year old building was formerly a charitable bingo hall, a plumbing supply store, and an auto shop. The movie theatre will focus on art house and local films.

The Broad Street Theatre joins a list of theaters that call the Lafitte Corridor home, including the Carver, Mid-City, and Mahalia Jackson. It adds to the growing revitalization of the Broad St. and the Greenway intersection, spurred by the new ReFresh and Whole Foods.

Tulane Laundry Building

Green Coast Enterprises hopes to renovate the Tulane Laundry building, located at 2606 St. Louis Street into a local brewery, tap room, restaurant, and office space. This 32,000 square foot historic building has sat vacant across the street from the Lafitte Greenway at N. Dorgenois since 2005. Urban South Brewery would serve as the building’s anchor and the newest addition to Louisiana’s blossoming craft beer industry. For more information, see the NOLA.com article.

Faubourg Lafitte Senior Building

On February 25, the Housing Authority of New Orleans and partners Providence Community Housing and Enterprise Community Partners broke ground on a new 100-unit senior-only apartment building, the latest addition to the Faubourg Lafitte community. This 96,000 square foot building is located one block from the Lafitte Greenway at N Galvez Street and Orleans Avenue. It is a $22 million project that will provide affordable housing to New Orleans seniors.

Better + Boulder

Local company Better + Boulder, LLC, has a vision to transform 8 acres of former industrial property along the Lafitte Greenway between Jefferson Davis Parkway and N Scott Street into a $100 million mixed-use complex. They have created an ambitious development plan for the property, which they currently have under contract. The 374,000 square foot complex would feature a fitness center with squash courts and a climbing gym, a 120-room boutique hotel, 300 residential units, office space, a spa, restaurants and cafés, demonstration kitchens, active lifestyle boutiques, a theater, and a business and startup incubation center. For more on this proposal, see the Biz article.

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: lafitte greenway, linear park, New Orleans, park, recreation

Play Volleyball Saturday

September 1, 2014 by Charlie London

bayou-volleyball

First Frenzy tomorrow

Being the first Saturday of the month, tomorrow MCVG will run its First Frenzy tournament.  That means we’ll separate into skill divisions then randomly select teams within each division for a quads “speed” tournament.  Everyone will be on a men’s height net, but there may be one or two all-female teams if that’s how the cards fall.  After the tournament, we usually stick around for pick-up games.  If the Wuttke family lemonade stand isn’t sufficient to cool you off, I offer my backyard swimming pool as a place to chill (literally) and relax afterwards… I love an impromptu cookout!

Meritorious Service Award

I don’t like to toot my own horn, but on August 3 the Bayou Regional Volleyball Association honored me (Peter Hickman) with a Meritorious Service Award.  Stew Sheng was honored posthumously for his contributions toward the development of boys volleyball in our region.  The award reads “for contributing outstanding participation, motivation and other services in the promotion of volleyball.”  This is my fifteenth year of organizing leagues and tournaments in New Orleans, and I must admit I do it because of the joy it gives me to bring people together to play volleyball.  Many of you have become great friends, and if I may speak for Stew, we not only couldn’t have done it without you, we wouldn’t have done it without you.  Thanks to your diversity and unity both.

MCYV Early Fall Junior League starts this Sat

Children will once again be playing in the morning (9:30am-11:30am) before adults arrive tomorrow.  Mid-City Youth Volleyball will be starting up its first of two six-week fall leagues this Saturday.  So far we have just ten kids registered for the Sept 6 – Oct 11 session, so please help us spread the word.  Details of the league and on-line registration are available at www.midcityyouthvolleyball.org.  Please refrain from bringing alcohol to the bayou until all the children have left.  Thanks.

Indoor V-ball

High school and college indoor volleyball is underway.  Remember to check the www.midcityvolleyball.org website for the combined schedules of six New Orleans colleges.  You can find schedules for your favorite local high school by checking out the links in the Gulf Coast Volleyball yahoo group that Lenny Vasbinder and I created back in 2002, https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/GulfCoastVolleyball/info.  This weekend Dillard, Loyola, UNO and Xavier have home matches, and later in the week both SUNO and Tulane will play in town including Tulane’s home opener on September 11.  I personally will be at Xavier’s match this evening helping to keep statistics for the visiting team.  You can learn a lot by watching high-level athletes play this game!

 follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend

Filed Under: More Great Posts! Tagged With: bayou st john, faubourg st john, New Orleans, recreation, volleyball

Lafitte Greenway Gazette

November 27, 2013 by Charlie London

 

carondelet-basin-mapA Contractor for Christmas: Lafitte Greenway Timeline 

By Sophie Harris, FOLC Program Director, sharris@folc-nola.org

The city posted the Lafitte Greenway bid documents on November 7th. Contractors are preparing their bids for the December 10th bid opening date. If all goes well, the contractor will be selected in mid-December and start construction the last week of January, 2014. The public will have an opportunity to discuss the construction process with the contractor at a public meeting in January; this meeting is not yet scheduled. We expect to be out walking, biking, and riding the Greenway in February, 2015!

 

 
Source: Bike Easy
New Orleans’ Burgeoning Bicycle NetworkBy Sam Spencer, Friends of Lafitte Corridor Chair, chair@folc-nola.org
For the growing number of us who ride bikes in New Orleans, there is an extra item on our list of things to be thankful for this season: a dramatic expansion of the city’s network of bike lanes. For a city that had virtually no modern bike accommodations ten years ago, the fact that New Orleans will approach 80 miles of bikeways by the end of 2013 is a spectacular achievement, and one that bodes well for the long term sustainability and public health of our city.Upon completion of its initial buildout in 2015, the Lafitte greenway will become a critical piece of New Orleans’ burgeoning bicycle network, the backbone of our cycling skeleton. Read more.
 
 
Source: Austin Shea
 

2013 Urban Heroes: Greening New Orleans

By Dana Eness, Urban Conservancy Executive Director

The Urban Conservancy honored its 2013 Urban Heroes at the Propeller Incubator on Friday, November 22nd for their visionary leadership in developing innovative strategies to address New Orleans’ enviromental and economic challenges.  The evening included great local food and drinks, and live music provided by the Cajun-English indie band Sweet Crude.  

David Waggonner of Waggonner & Ball Architects was recognized for helping New Orleanians to rethink their relationship with water, which has led to the development of the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan. Katrina Brees was recognized for her campaign to create a network of local vendors and manufacturers to provide locally made throws to carnival Krewes.  And Emelda Paul of the Faubourg Lafitte Tenants Assocation and Lafitte Greenway Steering Advisory Committee was recognized for her advocacy for the Lafitte Greenway and Corridor Revitalization plan.  In keeping with the “greening of New Orleans” theme, honorees each received a Where Ya Rack bicycle rack with a commemorative plaque to be installed at a location of their choosing.

 
 
 

Play Streets: New Orleans’ First Cyclovia!

By Annalisa Kelly, FOLC Community Engagement Chair, communications@folc-nola.org
 
On Saturday, Oct 26th, Friends of Lafitte Corridor joined local organizations for New Orleans’ first cyclovia, a pedestrian- and cycling-focused event in which streets are closed to cars, and neighborhoods reclaim the streets for traffic-less fun and games. The event, dubbed “Play Streets,” was organized by Bike Easy and brought together families, neighbors, cyclists, and pedestrians to engage in activities in the streets of Esplanade and Bayou Road between Claiborne and Broad.

Friends of Lafitte Corridor was one of several local organizations to join in on the fun. FOLC hosted “Greenway trivia,” quizzing participants on questions about green transportation, local New Orleans history, and the Greenway itself for free FOLC t-shirts, and partnered with local artist Ashlee Arceneaux, who drew a beautiful rendition of the Lafitte Greenway and invited participants to draw what they wanted to see on the Greenway. 
 

 
We were most of all thrilled to share the upcoming news of construction and overall excitement about the Greenway with the neighborhood and participants. Thanks to all who came out!  
 
Source: Rails-to-Trails Conservancy
Rails-With-Trails: A Safe Option for New OrleansBy Sophie Harris, Friends of Lafitte Corridor Program Director, sharris@folc-nola.org​The portion of the Lafitte Greenway that will be constructed next year—Basin Street to North Alexander—is a rails-to-trails project, a conversion of a former rail corridor into a multi-use path. Ultimately, FOLC envisions a Greenway that extends past North Alexander to Canal Boulevard. The challenge is that the Canal Boulevard-North Alexander segment remains privately-owned active rail corridor.The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy recently released the America’s Rails-with-Trails Report. Rails-with trails projects are shared-use paths located on or directly adjacent to an active railroad or light-rail corridor. Surveying 88 trails in 33 states, the report finds that rails-with-trails are “safe, common, and growing.” There are 161 rails-with-trails in America, a 260% increase since 2000, and an additional 60 rail-with-trail projects are currently in development across the country. Out of the tens of thousands of fatalities on railroad corridors in recent decades, only one involved a trail user on a rail-with-trail. Read more.
 

 
 

All Things Local

By Sophie Harris, Friends of Lafitte Corridor Program Director, sharris@folc-nola.org

On Saturday November 9th, FOLC was pleased to appear with host Kevin Fitzwilliam on WGSO 990 AM’s All Things Local, a weekly radio hour focusing on New Orleans’ local economy, food system, artisans, and craftsmen.
 
The theme of the November 9th broadcast was sustainability. FOLC Chair Sam Spencer spent the entire hour with Kevin discussing the latest Lafitte Corridor news–the ongoing bid process and future groundbreaking, the potential of the Greenway to help restore the city’s tree canopy (along with Hike for KaTREEna President John Carriere), and the opportunity to retain stormwater on the Greenway. In case you missed this lively conversation, not to worry, you can still stream the podcast.
 
All Things Local airs every Saturday from 8-10AM on WGSO 990AM in New Orleans. For information about each week’s show, click the links above, visit their Facebook page, or email info@AllThingsLocalNOLA.info.
 


 
Keep in touch with the Urban Conservancy via
Facebook: UrbanConservancy
Twitter:  @UrbanConserv
Web:  urbanconservancy.org
Keep in touch with FOLC via
Facebook:  folc.nola
Twitter:  @folcnola
Web:  folc-nola.org
Email:  info@folc-nola.org  
Friends of Lafitte Corridor | P.O. Box 791727 | New Orleans, LA 70179

 

Filed Under: More Great Posts! Tagged With: bayou, bayou st john, corridor, faubourg st john, greenway, lafitte, New Orleans, play, recreation, walk

Go Ride the Streetcar

June 1, 2013 by Charlie London


Riding the St. Charles streetcar down its historic line is a great opportunity to see different areas of New Orleans, including the mansion lined Garden District and oak tree canopied university area of Uptown. A single ride is $1.25, or purchase a day pass for $3for unlimited rides.

GoNOLA TV is a regular video segment on New Orleans food, music, shopping and nightlife. Visit http://www.gonola.com for all the best places to eat, drink, shop and play in New Orleans or head on over to http://www.neworleansonline.com and plan your vacation today!
***
photos below by Charlie London (originally posted at FSJNAdotORG on May 24, 2012)

Upon returning from the May 10th BlightStat meeting, I had the opportunity to, once again, ride New Orleans’ fine public transportation.

Click on the map for a larger view

If you haven’t taken a ride on a New Orleans streetcar or bus lately you really are missing out.

The streetcar operator told me each one of these refurbished streetcars cost 1 million dollars!

Get a great view of New Orleans’ architecture. Take the bus or the streetcar!

Architectural Vignettes
New Orleans, with its richly mottled old buildings, its sly, sophisticated – sometimes almost disreputable – air, and its Hispanic-Gallic traditions, has more the flavor of an old European capital than an American city. Townhouses in the French Quarter, with their courtyards and carriageways, are thought by some scholars to be related on a small scale to certain Parisian “hotels” – princely urban residences of the 17th and 18th centuries. Visitors particularly remember the decorative cast-iron balconies that cover many of these townhouses like ornamental filigree cages.

European influence is also seen in the city’s famous above-ground cemeteries. The practice of interring people in large, richly adorned aboveground tombs dates from the period when New Orleans was under Spanish rule. These hugely popular “cities of the dead” have been and continue to be an item of great interest to visitors. Mark Twain, noting that New Orleanians did not have conventional below-ground burials, quipped that “few of the living complain and none of the other.”

One of the truly amazing aspects of New Orleans architecture is the sheer number of historic homes and buildings per square mile. Orleanians never seem to replace anything. Consider this: Uptown, the City’s largest historic district, has almost 11,000 buildings, 82 percent of which were built before 1935 – truly a “time warp.”

The spine of Uptown, and much of New Orleans, is the city’s grand residential showcase, St. Charles Avenue, which the novel A Confederacy of Dunces aptly describes: “The ancient oaks of St. Charles Avenue arched over the avenue like a canopy…St. Charles Avenue must be the loveliest place in the world. From time to time…passed the slowing rocking streetcars that seemed to be leisurely moving toward no special designations, following their route through the old mansions on either side…everything looked so calm, so prosperous.”

The streetcars in question, the St. Charles Avenue line, represent the nation’s only surviving historic streetcar system. All of its electric cars were manufactured by the Perley Thomas Company between 1922 and 1924 and are still in use. Hurricane Katrina flood waters caused severe damage to the steel tracks along the entire uptown and Carrollton route and had to be totally replaced and re-electrified. The cars themselves survived and are included in the National Register of Historic Places. New Orleanians revere them as a national treasure.

Creole cottages and shotgun houses dominate the scene in many New Orleans neighborhoods. Both have a murky ancestry. The Creole cottage, two rooms wide and two or more deep under a generous pitched roof with a front overhang or gallery, is thought to have evolved from various European and Caribbean forms.

The shotgun house is one room wide and two, three or four rooms deep, under a continuous gable roof. As legend has it, the name was suggested by the fact that because the rooms and doors line up, one can fire a shotgun through the house without hitting anything.

Some scholars have suggested that shotguns evolved from ancient African “long-houses,” built here by refugees from the Haitian Revolution, but no one really knows.

It is true that shotguns represent a distinctively Southern house type. They are also found in the form of plantation quarters houses. Unlike shotgun houses in much of the South, which are fairly plain, New Orleans shotguns fairly bristle with Victorian jigsaw ornament, especially prominent, florid brackets. Indeed, in many ways, New Orleans shotguns are as much a signature of the city as the French Quarter.

New Orleans’ architectural character is unlike that of any other American city. A delight to both natives and visitors, it presents such a variety that even after many years of study, one can still find things unique and undiscovered.

This material may be reproduced for editorial purposes of promoting New Orleans. Please attribute stories to New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. 2020 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70130 504-566-5019. http://www.neworleanscvb.com/.

Filed Under: HISTORY, More Great Posts! Tagged With: bayou, bayou st john, best neighborhood in New Orleans, desoto, esplanade, faubourg st john, fleurty girl, fortier, fortin, grand route, historic, history, lopez, moss, New Orleans, new orleans best neighborhood, new orleans streetcar, park, parks, ponce de leon, preservation, recreation, rolling history, streetcars, trolley, Ursulines

Movies in the Park

August 27, 2011 by Charlie London

photo by Charlie London. Fortier Park has held movie nights numerous times over the years. Now, NORDC will have movies in the park at various NORDC sites throughout New Orleans.

New Orleans launches ‘Movies in the Park’ series

article by Frank Donze
New Orleans city officials have launched a series of free, outdoor film viewings at neighborhood playgrounds.

The 13-week “Movies in the Park” program kicked off Friday night with a showing of “The Princess and the Frog” at Annunciation Square on Race Street. The program continues today when the animated feature will be shown at Digby Playground, 6600 Virgilian St., in eastern New Orleans.

Weather permitting, movies will begin at 7:45 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays through Nov. 26.

The New Orleans Recreation Development Commission, the public-private partnership approved by voters last year, is sponsoring the events. The commission will provide a portable outdoor movie screen, security, trash receptacles and satellite restrooms.

Community organizations and neighborhood associations will serve as hosts by choosing movies and overseeing concessions, a volunteer clean-up crew and a table showcasing upcoming neighborhood events.

“We encourage families to bring their lawn chairs and blankets, and relax while watching a movie,” Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a written statement.

Participants under the age of 16 must be accompanied by an adult, and no pets, alcoholic beverages, illegal drugs, firearms, weapons, smoking or cooking are allowed.

Community centers and neighborhood organizations interested in hosting a movie should contact Christina Pappion at the recreation commission office at 658.0316 for available dates. For more information on Movies in the Park, visit http://www.nola.gov/Residents/NORD/Movies-in-the-Park/.

General Program Information:
• All outdoor public movie screenings require a license even if they are free to the public.
• Showtime is at dusk (7:45 pm) weather permitting.
• Movies may not exceed 2 hours 15 minutes in length.
• Format for movies is DVD only (no VHS or 16mm).
• All movie selections are made from the Swank, Inc. inventory.
• NORDC will purchase the license through Swank, Inc.
• If Movie Night is cancelled due to weather, call 504.658.3016 for make-up dates.
• Participants are asked to bring blankets or lawn chairs. Bug spray is optional.
• Movie Night is a good time to promote your neighborhood organization, recruit new volunteers, and advertise community events.
• Parking is limited, please consider walking or carpooling.

Event Logistics
NORDC will provide:
Portable Movie System
DVD & Licensing
Security
Trash Receptacles (next day pickup)
Satellite Restrooms
Host will provide:
Event Coordinator (work with NORDC)
Concessions (strongly recommended that host group serve refreshments as it makes for a more festive atmosphere)
Volunteer Cleanup crew
Table showcasing neighborhood services & upcoming events
Event Guidelines:
MITP is free & open to the public.
Event security & staff hold the right to deny admittance and remove patrons.
Participants under the age of 16 must be accompanied by an adult at all times.
No pets allowed.
Alcoholic beverages are prohibited.
Illegal drugs, firearms, and weapons are prohibited.
MITP is a smoke-free environment.
No cooking or grilling on the premises.
Cooler/bags and snacks are allowed. (Subject to search)
Tents or any other objects that would obstruct the view of others are prohibited.
No reserved seating. First come first serve basis.
Inclement weather is cause for cancellation.
Dates available for 2011
Fridays & Saturdays starting August 26, 2011 through November 26,2011.

Movie Listing
See NORDC website for available movies.

To Reserve your Movie Night
• Call the NORDC Office at 504-658-3000 ext. 3016 to confirm an available date.
• Complete the attached reservation form which can also be faxed to
(504) 658-3050.
• Mail or deliver reservation form to:
800 Race Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
• Reservations will be booked on a first-come first-serve basis until all available dates are filled.

Questions?

Call: 504-658-3000 (ext 3016)
Email: cfpappion@nola.gov

Movies for Children & Families
Swank Motion Pictures
Animation
101 Dalmatians
A Bug’s Life
Antz
Beauty and the Beast
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Despicable Me
The Emperor’s New Groove
Flubber
Gnomeo and Juliet
Happily Never After
Happy Feet
Kung Fu Panda
Mulan
Open Season
The Princess and the Frog
Shrek: 2, Forever After, and the Third
Space Jam
Toy Story: 1, 2, 1nd 3
WALL-E
Where the Wild Things Are

Adventure
Bedtime stories
Bridge to Terabithia
Charlotte’s Web (2006)
Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
ET The Extra-Terrestrial
Jurassic Park
Spy Kids
Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2
Up

Classic
A Christmas Story
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Goonies
The Wiz
The Wizard of Oz

Comedy
Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2
Daddy Day Camp
Freaky Friday (2003)
The Game Plan

Holiday
The Haunted Mansion
Santa Buddies

Musical
Enchanted
High School Musical 1, 2, and 3

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: bayou st john, faubourg st john, fsjna, movies, movies in the park, neighborhood, New Orleans, NORDC, park, recreation

Copyright © 2022 · BG Minimalist on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in