Audubon Park, 1892

(New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 10, 1892)

Persons traveling uptown—Carrolton way—in the St. Charles Avenue street cars arrive in the course of human events and by the grace of the un-electrified mule at an open space that has been called by courtesy Audubon Park.

There are certain signs by which it is impossible for anyone to miss the park, that is if they feel in any danger of passing it in the night. At the end of the park there are the monumental gates ajar. This noble gate is probably left standing as a guarantee of good faith, and also to point the moral that it is easier to collect money than it is to spend it wisely.

However, there the gate is, about as handsome and picturesque as an inspired toadstool, and as there is no fence flanking the gate, it has the sort of irresponsible, superfluous look, reminding one of the "j" we used to see attached to Wilhelmj’s name.

At the other end of the park is one of those little red shops at which are sold apples and cabbages and lollipops. The shop is more useful than ornamental, but as it affords some honest body a means of livelihood, and since it does not belong to the park at all, we can afford to condone the lack of aesthetic attention. By the side of the shop, however, and really on the park ground is a noble bed of artichokes. Artichokes are a wholesome and fashionable vegetable, and it is good to see their culture increasing, even if a corner of our Audubon Park has to be dedicated to the service.

Midway between the gates ajar and the artichoke garden are two of the noblest old, moss-hung oak trees in all the state. They stand like two lonely sentinels left over from a forest that has been cut down and turned into houses and coffins and ashes, that once settled on long dismantled hearths.

By a piece of total depravity a winding park road has been made to out-skirt these trees. It is at present the main entrance to the park. Anybody can see with the wink of an eye that far-sighted fate left those two grand trees standing for a park entrance, but it is possible the present road was laid out by some artistically lopsided individual who had leanings away from beautiful green trees.

When I told a sedate citizen of New Orleans the other day that Audubon Park, for all its undrained ditches and wooden bridges, contained some beauties finer and more grand than anything possessed by any park in Europe that I had ever seen, he gave me a queer, side-long look that expressed, to put it politely, sympathy for my local patriotism. Nevertheless, it is true. In the river side of the park are several avenues of oak trees that rival in beauty, if not age, the famous elm rows of Windsor or the forest depths of the Hague.

Oak trees are common to us—just as to be out of doors is no luxury. But if Central Park in New York had such cathedral aisles of moss-draped oak trees whose fluffy, fern-like stalactites swing in the air with every breeze that blows, when we drove through that park on our semi-occasional visit to the big city, we would be sure to remind the driver to take us to see the oaks.

A few years ago Horticultural Hall, now containing a collection of the fern families that would attract attention even in the great English Kew Gardens, was put up at a cost to the people of $79,000. It was a showy-looking glass house, but the other day the Park Commissioners found out that it had been built absolutely without any foundation—that it was as rotten as the schemes of a dishonest ward politician, about to collapse and about to fall into a state of innocuous desuetude

It is a beautiful building containing many superb and rare varieties of tropical plants, palms and ferns, and the Park Commissioners at once set to work to save it from destruction. Entering the park from the Magazine Street cars it is refreshing to turn one’s back on the unsightliness collected about the turntables of that end of a street car route, and see the broad, white walk, the lawn, the clustering labyrinths of roses and hillocks of green pittosporum, and beyond, the wide entrance to the great fern garden with its vistas of palmetto and palm and passion vine, where wild singing birds have domesticated themselves and taken a life lease on their leafy tenements.

Audubon Park, named after the mighty bird hunter and tree lover, is a level tract of wedge-shaped land, extending from St. Charles Avenue to the river, and crossed at one place by the double tracks of a street car line. The park contains 270 acres of fine land, two small artificial lakes, that someday can be made beautiful, and is intersected, as it always must be, by open drains. These, however, will in time be bordered with ornamental vines and flowers, crossed here and there by rustic hedges, and become running brooks of beauty, rather than the resorts of crawfish and crawfishers.

At present, the park’s chief attractions are the Horticultural Hall, the three grand avenues of oaks, the interesting experimental farming station, leased to the government for ten years, and about two and a half miles of roads that, since they are only twenty-four feet wide, are just about twenty-six feet too narrow.

A few years ago the Audubon Park Commission—a recognized commission attached to the city government—was formed. It is composed of a number of patriotic and generous gentlemen who, without much encouragement, are doing the best they know how to make th park a credit to the city, a fit place to show to strangers, and a delightful place for home people. If they do not seem to have accomplished much, it must be remembered the improvements have, at first, necessarily been needful rather than ornamental, and that no benefactor is likely to die of enlargement of the heart brought on by giving the commission a sum of money sufficiently big to be useful.

The first thing the commission did was to buy a plan, for which they paid $500, of a Chicago man named John Bogart. Or, that is, they bought $500 worth of plan, as the money gave out before the mapmaker had put in any tree sites or locations for footpaths.

The plan, however, with its two big entrances, one at each corner of St. Charles Avenue side, is very good, as far as it goes, which is a long way. It provides for six miles of driving, including a broad avenue on the levee fronting the park, with a music stand and colonnade on the levee, at which carriages may stop and people congregate, just as they do near the big fountain on the fashionable Pincian Hill in Rome.

To this plan the commissioners have added the route for a bridle path, to follow along the lower or city side of the "Long Drive," which is to extend from the big gate on St. Charles Avenue quite to the end of the park. This path is to be called "The Lady’s Mile" and it will be, like the "Long Drive," just one mile long. Between the "Lady’s Mile" and the "Long Drive," trees in avenues and clusters are to be planted, and benches will be placed for the benefit of foot passengers.

Every park must have its characteristic features. It will not do to confound a park with a garden, and it is not the intention, I trust, of the commissioners to spoil these noble expanses of land between the drives by cutting them up with puddles of pansies and ash geraniums, however well such flowers may do around Horticulture Hall or in ornamenting the corners of the entrances. The features of Audubon Park are to be its carriage drives, its bridle paths and foot paths, and its trees.

The perfected plan provides for a forest-like effect from the river embankments and from the park gates. Inside the park the impression of distance and space is to be intensified by unbroken stretches of sward in whose angles trees in clusters are to be planted.

Somewhere in the park there will be room for a statue to Audubon, which, by the way, no one seems anxious to give, and near the Horticultural Hall is projected an aviary. Last year, this aviary was started by some philanthropic gentlemen, who stocked it with a pair of golden pheasants, probably in the belief that if nobody gave any more birds at least nature would take its course.

Last year, roughly stated, the park income was as follows: Membership fees, $3,418; yearly subscribers, $325. To this the city added two appropriations, one of $1,000, the other of $5.000 from the reserve fund of ’87. To this must be added $200 or $300 for rentals and sale of grass, also moneys from donations and entertainments. These make the total for the year ending May 31, 1891, $14,132, of which, after expenses were paid, there remained at that time on hand $5,622. The commissioners still have on hand almost enough money to pay for the mile of gravel road that is not being built for them by the company that contracted to finish it some time ago. The contractors seem to be able to carry out their private work, but they claim they cannot get any cars to haul their gravel; which is really too bad, considering the admirable railroad facilities of New Orleans.

The present improvements include the repairing of Horticultural Hall, repairs at once intricate and expensive, the cutting of drains, building the "Long Drive," and putting up an inartistic and unpicturesque residence for a gardener, which the commission finds to be cheaper than hiring a night attendant for Horticultural Hall.

During one year the city of Boston authorized loans to build and beautify its parks amounting to $1,512,000. The park acreage of Boston is 2,000 acres.

Audubon Park, the great breathing place and playground and resting place for a city of 260,000 people, is feebly trying to grow into a thing of beauty on an income of not more than $5,500, of which two-thirds are membership fees given by patriotic citizens who think well enough of the town in which they earn their money to make some effort to beauty it.

One night, while playing to a particularly unenthusiastic audience, the great actor Edmund Kean all but broke down, and merely walked through his part. When asked about it he said it was such an audience as would have extinguished Etna. Our park, that ought to be a place of incomparable loveliness, is struggling along under similar conditions—in the face of an indifference that in some instances amounts to actual opposition.

The man who is opposed to the improvement of Audubon Park, who will not give it his personal help because some other man’s property is nearer the park, had better pack up and move off the earth, since every time he whitewashes his front fence, he adds an appreciable value to the houses and lands all about him, and since he cannot possibly benefit himself without benefiting some others as well.

It is very difficult to make a park, to plant trees and set flowers to growing for a people who do not care whether the work is done or not. It is very difficult to get small contributions from poor people when the city’s contributions will not pay for half a mile of roadway a year, and when our really rich men and women firmly refrain from writing checks for the improvement of the park.

It is, to say the least, an undignified and uncertain way of getting money for a great park by depending on chance donations and more or less successful entertainments. The 300 good men and women who give $10 a year to improve the park should be increased to 600. The city government either cannot or will not assume any responsibilities in the matter. If New Orleans is to have a park it will come, like so many other public benefactions have come to us, straight from the people.

Some day, it is hoped the sweet girls of Sophie Newcomb College may put in the city’s park a statue to the foundress of their college. And some day the students of Tulane University will put there a statue of Paul Tulane in his quaint skull cap and picturesque garb. And perhaps all the school children may be inspired to place in this park the statue of statues—Audubon’s.

While we sleep trees grow. While we are idle they unfurl their green flags and put forth in flowers a vari-colored hostage to fortune. If Arbor Day, or tree-planting day, which is to take place at the end of February, had only been celebrated five years ago, some portions of Audubon Park would have been by this time irretrievably reclaimed from the howling wilderness.

Mr. Jouta, the well-known florist, has volunteered to locate the position of the trees to be planted on Arbor Day. It is responsible work—once done, it is done forever; and it is certain to be well done, with an eye to future effect, when the trees shall have grown tall and become indeed "ancestral oaks."

In one of the royal gardens of England there is an avenue of trees planted by the members of the royal family. When a sovereign visits this garden he is asked to plant a tree there. There have been many sovereigns and there are many trees, and the queen’s garden on the Isle of Wight is worth crossing the channel to see.

In our city we have many queens—every bride is a queen during the honeymoon, at any rate—and why may not we borrow a beautiful old world custom and ask each young couple setting up a vine and fig tree in this town of ours, beginning their new life together, to plant in the rich heart of Audubon Park a tree in the royal avenue.

In the old world the children plant their Christmas trees; here we may have orange avenues and a "bird cage walk," prettier than Queen Ann’s, tented all over with a canopy of pink crepe myrtle in Audubon Park.

CATHARINE COLE

NOTE: Horticultural Hall was built for the World’s Industrial and Cotton Exposition of 1884-85 in what was then Upper City Park. (The site was renamed Audubon Park in 1886.) The glass-framed structure was the one building at the exposition designed to be a permanent ornament of the park, but as Catharine Cole describes, it began to deteriorate soon after the fair closed because of poor construction. It lasted until 1915 when a hurricane damaged it so severely that it was demolished.