Slowly, the Rebirth of City Park Has Begun

The hundreds of live oak trees of landmark City Park have stood barren for months, covered in a monochrome brown muck. But like this city and the park, its graceful oaks showed new signs of life on this breezy, sun-splashed weekend -- sprouting leaves for the first time since the flood.

Before Hurricane Katrina, the 1,300-acre park, a centerpiece of the city formed in 1854, held the world’s largest collection of mature live oaks, some of them well over 500 years old.

The hurricane winds stripped the trees, which then bathed for weeks in up to 10 feet of toxic saltwater.

To see them bloom again was a comfort to a city in need of good news, said Steve Picou of New Orleans, standing Saturday outside the park’s renowned New Orleans Museum of Art as a small jazz band played with legendary local singer Uncle Lionel Batiste.

“The saltwater killed so much -- ornamentals and pine trees,” said Picou. “The [oak trees’] bloom is helping everybody get into the feeling of rebirth.”

Adding to that feeling this weekend, the art museum reopened with a series of concerts and with readings by local writers. Hundreds of people wandered the green grass. Parents held birthday parties for toddlers.

The Soul Rebels Brass Band blasted away beside a Henry Moore sculpture of a reclining mother and child at the Botanical Gardens.

The park’s golf firing range as well as Storyland, a children’s park, and a carousel also reopened this weekend. The first wedding in the park since the storm was set for Saturday.

“The museum and the park are really a beacon of hope and renewal” to the city, said E. John Bullard, who has been the museum’s director for 33 years.

Like New Orleans, City Park is only partway back.

Throughout the park are fields of uprooted trees, and muddy tent cities of contractors and workers from across the United States, including two groups of White Mountain Apache Indians from Arizona.

The museum, on a ridge above sea level, escaped flooding and damage to its collection. But the museum and the park had to lay off most of their staff, and the museum has been unable contact most of its 8,000 members, Bullard said. Both face enormous budget deficits.

Nearby, the Lakeview and Gentilly neighborhoods remain ghost towns of gaping houses and piles of debris. Many neighborhoods still don’t have electricity, and only a third of the city’s pre-Katrina population has returned.

Yet the new bloom of activity at City Park is a measure of how far the city has come.

The hurricane and flood uprooted 1,000 of the park’s 14,000 trees of all kinds. For months, the trees, as well as trash, lay covered in mud and strewn around the park.

Rains and an Army Corps of Engineers cleanup have helped the park return.

“It looked like a moonscape,” said Dennis Couvillion, a local attorney and photographer whose work will be on display at the museum next month. “Nature has an incredible way of healing itself.”

Next month, streetcars will begin traveling to the museum from downtown on tracks completed only months before Katrina struck.

Though the members of the museum’s old volunteer crew are scattered, a new group has taken its place, Bullard said.

“Everyone’s looking for something to do to get them out of the depression of dealing with their lives on a daily basis,” Bullard said.

Meanwhile, in April, he said, the first major convention since the storm will come to town, and residents will also have the diversion of a mayoral election to satiate their obsession with politics.

“Spring is beginning to come,” said Bullard. “Grass is getting greener again.”