The City of New Orleans presented the initial designs for the redesign of Lincoln Beach in New Orleans East at public meetings over the weekend and is still seeking feedback from residents.
“We are very intentional and making sure that we're leveraging local participation,” said Corinne Villavaso, who has been contracted to lead the project’s community engagement effort.
Lincoln Beach was a segregated Blacks-only beach open from 1941 to 1964, when Black New Orleanians were shut out of the whites-only Pontchartrain Beach. Even though the beach is technically closed, people in the neighborhood have been using it informally. After many pushes to reopen the beach over the last few decades, the city has set aside $24.6 million to renovate and reopen Lincoln Beach. If successful, it will become New Orleans’ only public beach.
Fishing piers, water parks, urban farms and more
The city has contracted the architecture firm, Sasaki, to create designs for the beach. The firm presented three concepts at public meetings on Thursday and Saturday to gather community feedback.
“The schemes are really developed on a spectrum of the highest level of intervention to the least level of intervention,” said Josh Brooks, Sasaki’s principal architect on the project. “And by intervention, I mean built things, new buildings, new program elements, new activities that are there.”
The designs were born out of ideas from residents who attended public meetings for the project back in January .
Around 80 people were at each meeting. The designers had attendees examine the designs in groups, choose what features they wanted to see most from each of the three concepts and suggest anything they think is missing.
For those who could not attend the meetings or want more time to look over the designs, there is an online survey that will be open for two weeks. Residents are encouraged to get their children involved.
All of the designs incorporate an ADA-accessible bridge from the future parking lot across Hayne Boulevard to the beach. This was one of the biggest concerns from residents as the tunnel to reach Lincoln Beach is flooded, and currently people have to cross the busy street, climb a levee and walk across train tracks to get to the beach.
Sasaki also did an analysis that determined the parking lot can have between 500 and 600 spaces that will be free to access.
John Bagneris, a resident of New Orleans East who remembers going to Lincoln Beach when it was open, said what he most wants to see is features for children to cool off and have something to do during the summer time that keeps them out of trouble. He pointed out the options for a water plaza and a playground.
“It's about the kids. It's not about us,” he said. “You know, as an older person, I'm not going to do anything else. The kids have to be able to enjoy this, not me.”
Tricia “Blyss” Wallis, the head of the mayor’s Lincoln Beach Community Advisory Committee, is one of the advocates who pushed the city to reopen the beach. She said she’s happy with the large turnout at the meeting and hopes people stay involved throughout the entire process.
“I see a little bit of something that I like in each [concept],” she said. “I think if we focus on the nature of the space and understand that the space is actually the amenity, you know, keep that in mind, I think we'll be OK.”
The quick-open plan
The city plans to do a quick-open of the beach next summer after the basic construction reaches a point for beach-goers to recreate safely. The beach is currently closed to the public and security is now guarding the site.
The city is also soliciting feedback for two options for how to do the quick open.
“That's a really important thing that I would love to get community buy off on before we get too far along,” said Brooks.
The first option would be to open the beach for a short period of time, and then close it down completely when construction starts. The second would be to do construction on one side of the beach, while keeping the other half open, and then switching.
A historic landmark
Earlier this month, the National Parks Service added Lincoln Beach to the National Register of Historic Places. Architect Mia Kaplan, who put in the application, said the NPS is recognizing Lincoln Beach’s historic and cultural importance to civil rights history. She said Lincoln Beach is special because most other historically Blacks-only spaces like it are gone.
“They've been transformed beyond the point of recognition, and so you have a lot of tangible cultural black heritage being lost under the guise of progress,” she said. “And so it's kind of great because in this instance, the city hadn't touched the property, which turned it into kind of this beautiful ruin of the facility.”
The designation means that the city will have to continue to preserve those historic structures on the beach.
It will also open opportunities for additional funding. Currently, the city has devoted $24.6 million to the Lincoln Beach project, but it is actively searching for more money to keep up with residents’ requests and to keep the beach maintained once it is open. There isn’t an estimate yet for how much the entire renovation will cost.
“It's really about understanding what the community wants first and then figuring out how much it costs,” said Brooks, adding that the City of New Orleans has been successful with leveraging federal dollars.
He said Sasaki will take all the different forms of feedback and use it to create a design that will be presented in October.
