Pontchartrain Park neighborhood is designated as a ‘historic place’
20th July 2020 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
More than six decades after it opened as one of the country’s trailblazing communities for middle-class Black Americans, Pontchartrain Park has received official designation on the National Register of Historic Places.
The honor was announced late last month, just about 65 years after Pontchartrain Park opened. Constructed for $15 million, the self-contained neighborhood on the lakeside of Gentilly featured 1,000 modern homes, a massive public park and golf course spread across roughly 400 acres.
Pontchartrain Park’s placement on the NRHP was long-sought, hard-earned and heartily welcomed by the people who’d fought for the official recognition for their beloved home community.
“It’s an honor and a privilege to represent such a remarkable neighborhood filled with so much history,” said Gretchen Bradford, president of the Pontchartrain Park Neighborhood Association. “The acknowledgment of Pontchartrain Park on the National Registry is significant because it is an additional contribution to African-American history.
“This moment for the residents of Pontchartrain Park is powerful because our history is finally being recognized,” she added. “I am honored to have lived my entire life in such a great community.”
Carrie Mingo Douglas, chairwoman of the PPNA’s Historic District Committee, said the national honor symbolizes the lives, stories, challenges and accomplishments of the residents, past and present, of a proud, influential neighborhood.
“This honor is a tribute to those first residents, the pioneers, who took a space and made it into a desirable community to raise their families, to educate their children, and live the American dream,” Mingo Douglas said. “Just knowing that I was a part of Pontchartrain Park getting national recognition makes me feel very proud.”
Plans for Pontchartrain Park developed following the end of World War II, spurred by a booming post-war economy that led to a growing, surging Black middle class anchored by the thousands of GIs coming home and their families.
This increased demand for middle-class housing, however, was bracketed by the sociopolitical reality of Jim Crow laws and customs that enforced racial segregation, another element that led to the creation of Pontchartrain Park. Designed as a way to provide more affluent and upwardly mobile African Americans in New Orleans while also keeping them separated from white New Orleans.
These factors – a rising Black middle class, shared racial and cultural identity, and the racist rigidity of segregation – led to a tight-knit neighborhood with an identity all its own.
“Pontchartrain Park developed into a neighborhood that other Blacks respected and saw as a step up, a better way of living,” Mingo Douglas said. “The neighborhood became a symbol of pride for many.”
That communal pride and cultural richness survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but barely in many ways. After the devastation wiped out many of what were original features of Pontchartrain Park, current and former residents of the community braced for a hard road to recovery while still firmly believing in the neighborhood’s past, potential and future.
In December 2005, National Public Radio senior editor and Pontchartrain Park native Gwendolyn Thompkins returned to the neighborhood to assess the damage and lay out prospects for its comeback.
Her report reflected on the neighborhood’s colorful, complex past.
“While New Orleans has always been an integrated city, perhaps more so than any other city in the nation, Pontchartrain Park was, at the same time, a step forward and a step back,” Thompkins reported. “It was a product of segregationist thinking, that Black people should live separately and equally someplace on the outskirts of town and away from white people. But the Park, as we call it, also gave Black New Orleanians all the benefits of suburbia within city limits: brand-new brick houses, freshly planted geraniums, the latest Tappan and Amana appliances and off-street parking.”
Soon after its opening in 1955, the grandeur and hopeful, forward-looking socio-political ambition contained in Pontchartrain Park earned attention and praise from across the country, with many media outlets calling it a shining symbol of Black advancement in America.
In October 1962, the Chicago Defender called Pontchartrain Park “one of the nation’s outstanding examples of a completely self-contained community, including a golf source, stadium, and located near a bathing area and the city’s largest shopping center.”
In addition to its significance to African-American culture and society, Pontchartrain Park helped revolutionize the business of land development. At the time, the neighborhood was one of the South’s largest communities built by a single developer; the Baton Rouge-based W.H. Crawford Corp., through its subsidiary Pontchartrain Park Homes, undertook the development and oversaw it for several years during its completion.
“The project is expected to be a super deluxe affair,” stated the Defender in December 1954 as work got underway.
Over the years, the community has featured churches, businesses, park areas, sports fields and fishing lagoons. It now includes Southern University at New Orleans, a branch campus of prestigious HBCU Southern University, as well as Wesley Barrow Stadium, which, after its post-Katrina revitalization and rehabilitation, now serves as home to one of Major League Baseball’s Urban Youth Academies, Little League and youth events, and the annual SWAC baseball championship tournament.
But, arguably, Pontchartrain Park’s jewel is the Joseph W. Bartholomew Golf Course. Named after its designer, the golf course was constructed between 1954 and 1956, when it opened as a nine-whole course.
Over the years the course developed into an 18-hole affair that has retained its original design inspiration and came back after its decimation by Katrina.
Bradford said several people and groups came together to propose and support the effort to bring Pontchartrain Park recognition on the NRHP. She said the PPNA’s Historic District Committee deserves thanks and praise; committee members include Mingo Douglas, Wiletta Ferdinand, Gaynelle Lawrence, Patrick Clementine, Wilfred Arnolie and Elder Delereze Perkins.
Bradford also expressed gratitude to the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, especially Danielle Del Sol and Nathan Lott.
Bradford also credited the prior generations of Pontchartrain Park residents and leaders for establishing the community and growing it despite the challenges Black New Orleans faced in the 1950s.
“Pontchartrain Park was very instrumental in shaping the lives of many,” she said. “We pay tribute to our Pontchartrain Park pioneers who lead the way for us.”
Mingo Douglas noted that the Pontchartrain Park neighborhood has produced many luminaries in the fields of politics, literature, music, entertainment and sports, including early civil rights activists Ernest Wright, Henry Hayes and later Nils Douglas; former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial; and artists Terence Blanchard, Dave Bartholomew, Herbert Hardesty and actor Wendell Pierce, who played a major role in the recovery of the neighborhood after Katrina.
After Katrina and throughout Pontchartrain Park’s economic, infrastructural and cultural revival, Pierce emerged as a leading voice in promoting the community’s challenges and accomplishments.
“What was great about this neighborhood is back,” Pierce said in a 2015 PBS interview, “which is families, churches, homes filled with homeowners, schools, all the stuff that makes for a really wonderful life and gives people a shot to build not only wealth in terms of finances, but wealth of love and family and just [a] sense of community.”
Mingo Douglas said that after 65 years of resilient, proud and accomplished existence, her hometown neighborhood has earned its place as one of the city’s most revered and influential communities.
“Pontchartrain Park is important to the history of New Orleans because the park brought forth iconic personalities who made significant contributions to the civil, political and cultural progress of the city of New Orleans,” she said.
This article originally published in the July 13, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
