New Orleans East is capitalizing on water, music and views

21st August 2017   ·   0 Comments

By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer

A revival on the New Orleans East waterfront is rippling from the Lakefront Airport and a nearby complex planned by Tipitina’s owners Roland and Mary von Kurnatowski to the possible restoration of Lincoln Beach and visions for condos, hotels and other new businesses. Planners are encouraged by the gradual return of the East’s residents and an absence of major storms in the twelve years since Katrina.

For over 20 years, elected officials and developers have considered reviving Lincoln Beach, an African-American recreation area that was shut in 1964 during desegregation. On December 14, 1998, cultural committee members of the state’s House of Representatives toured the beach, with an eye towards restoring it. Ownership issues and Katrina’s vengeance in 2005 thwarted those plans. But reviving the beach might be more viable now.

Last year, the Non-Flood Protection Asset Management Authority, a state Division of Administration unit formed after Katrina to manage real-estate assets of the Orleans Levee District, considered restoring Lincoln Beach. In a meeting of the full NFPAMA board a year ago, commercial real-estate committee chair Eugene Green said the authority was working on a possible joint venture with the City of New Orleans to bring back the beach.

Fast forward to this past January 12, when NFPAMA’s commercial real-estate committee met. Minutes from that gathering describe the 15.4-acre Lincoln Beach site as a tremendous asset and a valuable parcel that has sat vacant for over 50 years. Title to it passed to the city from the Levee District during Mayor Ernest Morial’s tenure. The beach is ready to be developed. But without a joint venture, NFPAMA would need to have control of it. Procuring the property from the city could be difficult, however, according to the meeting’s minutes. And under the state’s constitution, the city can’t donate the land.

But the board could authorize the commercial real-estate committee to encourage state legislators to consider a land swap for the parcel, chairman Green said at the January meeting. Hopes for reviving the site are alive today.

Compared with other cities, the greater New Orleans waterfront is probably the most underutilized in the nation, Schaffer Mickal, senior realtor with Latter & Blum in New Orleans, said last week. “Most recently, you can blame it on Katrina,” he said. “Everyone was gun shy for awhile.” So several years ago, officials were particularly pleased when Tipitina’s owner Roland Von Kurnatowski expressed an interest in the former Bally’s riverboat casino site and South Shore Harbor Marina near Lakefront Airport. The casino’s spot had been vacant since 2005, and what Von Kurnatowski proposed was a New Orleans-style facility with music, water and views, Mickal said.

At the moment, the $12 million Lakeshore Landing complex, being developed by the Von Kurnatowskis on 19 acres, is the biggest project on the East’s shoreline. Plans include several event spaces, with stages and an amphitheater for live music for audiences of 50 to 800 people, Sandra Benenate, head of operations for Tipitina’s Foundation, said last week.

“We’re currently in the project’s Phase 2, which entails construction of a fuel dock and a bar and grill and getting permits from the city,” Benenate said. “The project is evolving.” In the first phase, conditions for the site’s use were approved and a boat house was completed. Passenger tours on a restored World War II PT-305 boat began in March, she said. Volunteers working at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans spent 10 years refurbishing that vessel, built in 1943 at a Higgins Industries yard near City Park.

“We’ve had lots of community involvement in this lakefront project, and we want to meet the needs of the public, including interest in a farmers’ market and an art market,” Benenate said. “We don’t have an opening date scheduled for the amphitheater.”

Four years ago, the 1930s-era Lakefront Airport, built on a man-made peninsula jutting into Lake Pontchartrain, had been mostly redone at a post-Katrina cost of over $80 million. Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration and private investors provided those funds. Work was overseen by NFPAMA. By this spring, the airport’s 1936 Works Progress Administration murals by artist Xavier Gonzalez had been restored. Along with aviation, the airport is a place for dining and relaxing. “Sunday brunch, while looking out on the runways, is one of the best-kept secrets in town,” Mickal said.

In May, Royal Brewery New Orleans opened a production facility and tap room south of Lakefront Airport.

After a recent, $14.5 billion upgrade to the New Orleans-area levees, flood walls and pumps by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, risks to many properties, including those in the East, are lower. The Lakefront Airport’s man-made peninsula, also home to South Shore Harbor Marina, is outside of this defense system, however. Last fall, when FEMA released new flood insurance-rate maps, the city said that over half the properties in Orleans had been removed from designated hazard areas, thanks to the new protection.

Jonathan Walker, owner of Walker’s BBQ on Hayne Boulevard in the East, last week said, “We’re just across from a levee that was raised by the Army Corps a few years ago. The top of the levee was improved, and it’s used for walking and biking and has trash cans now. We feel safer than before.” But he added that having grown up in New Orleans East, he’s aware that even after all this work by the Corps, a disaster could still occur.

The East has eating spots near the water, along with bars and dance clubs—both near the lake and further inland. Its nightlife today, however, pales compared with evenings in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Lincoln Beach hosted Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Papa Celestine’s Dixieland Band and Fats Domino. Clubs on Chef Menteur Highway featured local and national performers.

Today it’s a lot easier to get out to the lakefront though. “Build it and they will come,” Mickal said of the planned developments in New Orleans East. Since Interstate-10 was finished in the 1960s, this big swath of the Ninth Ward is much better connected to the rest of the city.

This article originally published in the August 21, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.