Crescent Park

This guide to Crescent Park in New Orleans starts with dockworker Chris Hammond's memory of running from a snapped cable on the wharves that once stood here. You'll meet the screwmen who jammed cotton bales into ship holds, and the segregated longshoremen's unions that worked the same piers under separate contracts until 1980. John McSwain's own close call on these docks threads through the guide too. Look down at the wharf apron underfoot as you listen; the rusted rail and steel beams there are the real iron they worked around.