The City of New Orleans opened the Bywater portion of the 20-acre Crescent Park on 24 February. Crescent Park is the first built project of the 2007 Reinventing the Crescent master plan that detailed the reclaiming of the larger 6 mile long New Orleans riverfront, post-Katrina.
The linear park threads a narrow 1.4-mile band downriver of the French Quarter, between the Mississippi River, active rail tracks and floodwall. The park provides crucial public access to the river that has been the exclusive domain of thriving commercial wharves and accelerating industrial decay. Hargreaves Associates was lead designer of the park, collaborating with architects Adjaye Associates, and Michael Maltzan Architecture, in addition to local executive architect and long-time collaborator, Eskew+Dumez+Ripple.
In an article for the The Times-Picayune, Doug MacCash writes, “The long awaited Crescent Park that hugs the riverfront in the Bywater neighborhood is a landscape design masterpiece…The shadows and architectural severity lend the park a certain existential quality. The monumental burned skeleton of an adjacent wharf remains picturesquely in place at the waterline. Some of the running paths enigmatically dead end into the river.? Read more