City Park visitors discussed improving the park’s trails, reviving the cypress grove and adding fishing areas during a Wednesday (April 9) community planning meeting that will inform park redevelopment . Due to increasing turnout at the last two planning meetings, park leadership decided to hold two sessions — one at noon and another in the evening — to accommodate around 400 people who attended.
The meetings allowed attendees to provide feedback on dozens of proposed additions and changes to the park’s infrastructure and planning. City Park Conservancy, the nonprofit organization that runs the operations for the city’s largest park, is currently drafting its master plan, which will inform park programming and organization for the next decade.
The park’s planning process began in 2023 but ended abruptly in part due to public pushback against a plan to build a road through the popular youth program Grow Dat Youth Farm. After a 9-month pause, a change in CEO and the hiring of community outreach consulting firm Concordia, City Park Conservancy resumed community meetings last December.
Mid-City resident Janet Greenfield, who was at the noon session on Wednesday, told Verite News the new meetings are engaging and make her feel recognized. Greenfield comes to the park every day to walk her dogs and is especially fond of Wisner Tract, a part of the park that she said makes her feel safe. Reviving Wisner Tract and the park’s other natural areas by adding more bathrooms and recreational sports areas, among other changes, have become a priority in the park’s plan after community feedback.
“I’m just really excited about this, because everything looks amazing, and it looks like they’re not bulldozing us, they’re just they’re listening and implementing ideas that they’ve gotten from the community,” Greenfield said.
Attendees sat at round tables that had maps of City Park in the middle. Proposed changes to park infrastructure and programming were marked on the map, and attendees discussed the proposals with others at their table. At the end of the discussion, the table wrote feedback on the map, which will go back to leadership as they plan for the next and final meeting in June.
Warren Smith, a 17-year-old from Westwego who was at the evening session, said there is plenty of room for improvement in the park. He has attended all of the community engagement meetings since they started up again in December and said the park can improve its lighting infrastructure to make the area more welcoming at night.
“My friends don’t go to City Park because of the way it is. I feel like if changes were made and actually made, not empty promises, I feel like people would definitely want to come to City Park more often,” Smith said.
Rebecca Dietz, City Park Conservancy’s CEO, said she feels positive about the community feedback the park has been receiving, with over 200 people attending the first two sessions and over 200 registering to attend the April meetings, though the number of actual attendees hadn’t been counted in time for publication. The planning process is iterative, too, so suggestions taken from the community in January’s meeting were introduced to the residents in April.
“I think it’ll be nice for people to see what they’ve said reflected in the plan documents,” Dietz said. “Again, always checking to ensure that we’re staying true to what the community is telling us they want to see in the park.”
Tangee Wall, a resident of New Orleans East, said this is the first planning meeting she’s attended. She said the meeting was informative and that she is a fan of the changes, especially those that involve repurposing unused buildings. Wall said she has been coming to the park since she was a child and likes that it has something for all ages.
In the meeting, park officials said they hope to bridge the northern and southern parts of the park. To insulate noise coming into the highway and make people feel safer crossing from one end to the other, the park proposed adding a water garden to make the crossing more welcoming. Many of the proposals involved making the park safer for pedestrians by slowing down traffic and offering more parking.
Dietz said the actual implementation of these ideas is dependent on funding and that the master plan must first be approved by City Park Conservancy’s and City Park Improvement Association’s boards. She said the park will look to secure funding from the federal, state and local governments, as well as through philanthropic donations.
The next planning meeting will be on Wednesday, June 25 at the Pavilion of the Two Sisters in City Park.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that each community engagement meeting has had more people in attendance than the last. Each meeting has had over 200 attendees, but the number of attendees for the April meetings has not been counted in time for publication.