City Park

This guide to City Park in New Orleans opens with a question: how do you turn a flooded, forgotten cattle pasture into a park visited by a quarter of a million people a year? It follows the Depression-era answer, when the Works Progress Administration put twenty thousand unemployed New Orleanians to work pouring concrete bridges and raising a stadium on what had been open swamp. Over twelve million dollars flowed into the project, carried out by carpenters, ironworkers and day laborers whose names appear on no plaque in the park today.