“I urge all parties to recognize what is at stake in Audubon Park. Now is the time for decision makers to have the courage to defer the current golf course project until a historically sound master plan is developed, and an effective format for ensuring ongoing public participation is instituted.”

Since that time, the work has continued unabated, but so has the opposition. Save Audubon Park, which started last September as a website (www.saveaudubonpark.org), has incorporated as a not-for-profit.

The emphasis on fund-raising in the management of Audubon Park goes back to its origins, which were described by L. Ronald Forman and Joseph Logsdon (with John Wilds) in their 1985 book, Audubon Park: An Urban Eden. It was acquired by the State of Louisiana in 1871 for $800,000, more than twice its estimated value, and the resulting public outcry thwarted development for a generation. It was then a low and featureless wedge of land extending inland from the river about five miles west of downtown, enlivened in places by the now magnificent oaks that had been planted by the Foucher family when this was their plantation. Activity came to the park in 1884 when the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition erected a group of enormous exhibition buildings, one enclosing 32 acres. But the fair failed to attract the anticipated audience, and its chief promoter, Major Edward A. Burke, fled the country. The city took some responsibility for the park in 1886 by creating a 24-member park commission but specifically prohibited them from spending any city funds. Ten years later, the state mandated a minimum annual expenditure by the city, and that emboldened the commissioners to engage the Olmsteds.

John Charles Olmsted had just become the head of the firm, following the incapacity of his stepfather and the death of Charles Eliot, and Audubon Park became one of his first independent works. He made an initial report in 1897 and completed his plan the following year, but it wasn’t released to the public until 1902. By that time the commission had turned over almost a third of the park (31%) to the private Audubon Golf Club, which landscaped it without reference to Olmsted. The struggle to realize the remaining plan was set back in 1903 when the president of the commission was murdered, and work did not get underway in earnest until 1916.

John Charles succeeded in giving the northern portion of the park much of the character he intended. This area of about 150 acres has its formal entrance on St. Charles Avenue, where it faces the campuses of Loyola and Tulane Universities, and extends south to Magazine Street, which bisects the park. Construction of a winding lagoon produced enough fill to shape a picturesque landscape with long vistas, some of them extending across the golf course, which substituted for the planned central meadow. Charles E. Beveridge, series editor of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, has written that the result was one of the finest of the many parks designed by the firm in over a hundred years of practice. Following J. C. Olmsted’s death in 1920, FLO Jr. continued the firm’s connection with Audubon Park for another thirty years, opening the 190-acre section below Magazine to more active recreational facilities, including the swimming pool (whose vicissitudes could be the subject of another article) and the Audubon Park Zoo. Audubon Landing is the third area of the park, 45 acres between the levee and the Mississippi River. Both John and Frederick Law Olmsted Junior had produced plans for the “batture,” as this tract is called, but it was not developed until after 1962, when the courts ruled against construction there of a state-owned port facility.

Because of its unusual history, the pressure to produce private sources of funding has remained a feature of Audubon Park’s management to an unusual degree, to the detriment of the Olmsted ideal of uncompromised natural beauty. “A true Olmsted park would prove to be an impossible dream for Audubon, or for any other modern park, for that matter,” Forman and Logsden wrote in 1985. “The lack of cash-generating activities resulted in dependence on governmental funds that never would cover maintenance and improvements.” Beginning with the nationally acclaimed but locally controversial rebuilding and expansion of the zoo in the 1970s (now 23% of park land), the efforts of park management have increasingly been focused on fund-raising, and Ron Forman has been in the forefront of this. He became executive director of the zoo in 1977 and in 1988 president and chief executive officer of the Audubon Institute, which was incorporated in that year from the earlier Friends of the Zoo. The name became Audubon Nature Institute in 2001. Forman likes to say that Audubon Park has not received any public monies for operational support for more than twenty years. In fact a special property tax has supported the zoo since the 1970s, and the park does not have a separate budget. For capital projects as opposed to operations, the Institute received almost $6 million from various governments in 2000 alone.

The question of whether Audubon Park was city or state property engaged the courts for many decades, and many people still think that the park’s governing body is a state agency. In fact, the state legislature attempted to take over governance of the park in 1982 and 1983 but was overruled by the courts, and the city’s Audubon Park Commission remained in charge. After the Audubon Institute was created, the Commission’s responsibilities grew far beyond the bounds of the park. Today the Institute operates a total of ten parks and museums scattered all over the metropolitan area, including the aquarium and IMAX theater at the foot of Canal Street, the park between there and Jackson Park, the nature center on Read Boulevard, and two centers for species survival on 1,200 acres of the West Bank. The Audubon Insectarium will open in 2003. The city charter was amended effective 1996 to drop the word “Park” from the Audubon Commission’s name and to add mention of these other facilities. Last fall, the Commission combined its four operating agreements with the Institute into one, lasting ten years, authorizing capital expenditures of up to $150,000 without the Commission’s approval, and giving the Institute’s CEO (Ron Forman) authority to execute documents on behalf of the Commission.

Decisions affecting the park are thus three steps removed from any publicly elected official.

One reason that the golf course project has produced such a heated response is that it appears to be a replay of the Zoo expansion a generation ago, with the same tactics and many of the same players but without the extenuating circumstance of suffering animals (suffering golfers don’t attract much pity). The urgency of the cause may be greater now, because as Charles Beveridge has observed, the proposed changes “theaten to cause harm to the park that may well prove to be irreversible.” Plans for the $6 million project have resulted in selling the old golf clubhouse, which was outside park property, and replacing it with a larger facility in the Olmsted part of the park. Two cherished walkways are being compromised, the Meditation Walk, which runs north from Magazine Street, and the Hurst Walk, which crosses the park at the north edge of the golf course and connects with the gracefully arched bridge. Due to flying golf balls, the Hurst Walk may not reopen. The golf course itself has been radically reconfigured, with shorter but more spacious fairways around four new lagoons, erasing the meadow effect Olmsted wanted.

The outcry over the lack of public participation has resulted in some modifications; the clubhouse will be slightly smaller than originally planned and relocated to avoid the need to run a road through a grove of oaks. As the bulldozers reach the end of their “improvements,” however, the “controversy” seems sure to continue, with litigation threatened on both sides.