Tag: Bayou St. John Aquatic Park

BSJ’s STUBBORN SHIPYARDS

Shipyard. Note: not on Bayou St. John.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, thanks in no small part to the New Deal, Bayou St. John got a huge makeover.

No more mudflats and sunken garbage! No more crumbling levees! No more broken shell roads! No more houseboats and boathouses and ramshackle wharves! All of those things, after all, do not befit the name “Bayou St. John Aquatic Park,” which is what the weed-choked small craft parking lot, crisscrossed with outdated bridges, would become over the course of a few short years.

This is not to suggest the “old bayou” didn’t go down without a fight.

Perhaps the most heated argument to come out of this transformation occurred between Walter Parker, President of the Bayou St. John Improvement Association, and Joseph Dupuy, owner of the last remaining shipyard between Esplanade and Hagan Avenues. You see, the bayou’s makeover wasn’t only cosmetic; its essential character and function needed an overhaul as well. Its very role within the city, according to those at the helm (no pun intended!), needed redefining. After all—the Carondelet Canal, which once extended the bayou to the French Quarter along the path of today’s Lafitte Greenway, was no longer in use, and by 1938 was completely filled in. Without its manmade limb, the bayou served very little commercial purpose. And yet, old habits die hard. Along with the vestiges of other miscellaneous industries once connected with the waterway, two large shipyards remained active along the bayou’s lower banks by the time its makeover was proposed.

What’s wrong with a couple shipyards, you ask?

In short, they require the wrong kind of bridges.

In order for bigger boats to travel to the shipyards for repair, they needed the bayou’s drawbridges to open—most notably, the old Esplanade Bridge and the present-day Magnolia (or Cabrini) bridge. But Parker and the rest of the BSJIA did not envision drawbridges in the new Aquatic Park: they interfered with City Park-bound traffic, and, as is illustrated below, required much planning and many resources to operate.

According to Parker, opening the bridges required the services of a “specially trained crew” of at least five men (members of the Public Service Organization, and therefore not available to the city at a moment’s notice), often took upwards of 30-45 minutes to complete, and required notifications of the police department (for assistance detouring traffic), the Public Service Transportation Department (to reroute buses), Charity Hospital ambulances, and the fire department. Traffic had to be detoured to the Magnolia Bridge, and then, half an hour later, rerouted again so that the Magnolia Bridge could be opened. All, as Parker added for emphasis, so that “one boat can go to one boatyard for repair.” [1]

By the early 1930s, the Mullens Shipyard (near Esplanade Avenue) had agreed to be moved, but up until 1936, much to Parker’s chagrin, Dupuy refused to be relocated. But how would they finish their revetment work? And how would they install the proposed “fixed-span” bridges, with enough clearance only for canoes and other such small “pleasure craft”?

It wasn’t until Congress declared the bayou a “non-navigable stream” in 1936 that the city finally claimed the right to put its foot down. Eventually, the Dupuy shipyard was forced to move lake-ward. The bayou, goshdarnit, was to be recreational! I have to admit to having a soft spot for this shipyard, or at least the memory of it. Every time I pass by Dumaine Street’s intersection with the bayou, I imagine its skeletal hulls-in-progress, its busy workers, its stubborn desire to stay put.

1. City Engineer’s Bridge Records, 1918-1967, City Archives, Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library.

WHAT THE BAYOU HAS TAUGHT ME SO FAR

What I’ve learned from my first week of research: enter research institution with a full stomach and an empty bladder; do not attempt to plan how long you’ll spend with any given source—you’ll never know what you’ll find, or where it will lead you, or the time required for s​uch adventures; I can’t remember what else I’ve learned, because I’m exhausted.

This past week I read about a ghost cemetery that once existed alongside the bayou, near the Lafitte Greenway. Not a cemetery full of ghosts—those are all over New Orleans—but a cemetery that has become a ghost itself: briefly in use in the mid-19th c. and then “filled in” (What does that mean? What did they do with the bodies??) after just two or three decades, due to a land dispute I need to learn more about. The cemetery was intended to be half Protestant, half Catholic, with each half further divided into sections for whites, free people of color, and slaves.

Mostly, I’ve been rifling through boxes filled with folders filled with tissue-thin letters written on typewriters from 1933-1936 about the WPA-funded Bayou St. John Aquatic Park Project—when that mucky, rubbish-filled, houseboat-infested water was swept clean of its refuse, dredged, leveed, straightened, decked out with grassy banks and flowering bushes and newly paved highways, strapped with fixed-span bridges.… No more ragamuffin children in underwear jumping from broken bridges! Only gondolas, and ladies in nice hats!

I don’t mean to make fun of those fine men whose letters back and forth to one another (letters, I imagine, that were dictated to secretaries as said men paced the floor, gesticulating wildly, like in the movies) I’ve been immersed in all week. The historian’s role is not to judge (but this is a blog, after all…). I actually might miss Walter Parker, Chairman of the Bayou St. John Improvement Association, once I have to move on to other sources. Walter Parker—a man with vision and persistence and the ability to persuade, who is largely responsible for the bayou we all know and love today….

P.S. I’m in the market for a cheap canoe, or a reliable floating-something of any kind, and a single paddle. (Oh! And a doggie lifejacket, size small!)

Photo credit: Lauren Gauthier. Magnolia Bridge, looking up.