On Higher Ground: The University of New Orleans at Fifty

 

 

by Dr. Robert Dupont

Nonfiction

ISBN: 0-9728143-5-3

Fall 2008

 

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In the early years of the twentieth century, passengers on the deck of the New Camellia, an excursion steamer working the north-south route on Lake Pontchartrain, saw the Milneburg lighthouse upon their return to the south shore. This conical brick structure, built in 1859… stood near the end of a long wharf that provided a landing area for the steamer.  Passengers avoided the 2,200 foot walk to the shoreline by boarding the local steam railroad which extended onto the wharf and met those returning from the excursion as they disembarked.  A brief ride to the south brought riders to the heart of New Orleans.  As they began their ride, those who glanced to the west viewed a motley collection of fishing "camps," weekend homes, dance halls, music clubs and cypress swamps.  It is not likely that anyone on the train would have looked at that landscape and imagined that such a site would be converted not only to dry land but to a U.S. Navy air base and then to a thriving university campus of nearly 200 acres with dozens of structures and thousands of students. Yet the origins of the University of New Orleans go back to the ambitions of an eccentric Scottish immigrant…, Alexander Milne [who]… owned large tracts of land along the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. [He]… established a "village" [Milneburge] in 1831 at a point where Elysian Fields intersects the shoreline. 

 

Milne envisioned a thriving commercial operation—Port Pontchartrain—as an alternative route whereby cargo would be transferred from lake vessels to a new steam railway and then conveyed to the heart of the city.  The city council agreed and granted a twelve-foot right-of-way to the Pontchartrain Rail-Road in 1830.

 

[The] new settlement of Milneburg prospered. Excursion boats began to take passengers from the south shore to various communities to the north, especially Mandeville where local streetcars met passengers at the landings.  For New Orleanians who remained on the south shore, the long wharf that carried the railroad provided the base for smaller piers that ended in more or less elaborate structures built over the water.  Boudro's restaurant, mentioned by John Kendall in his 1922 History of New Orleans, hosted the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (who dined on bouillabaisse) and the Swedish opera star Jenny Lind while visiting New Orleans during her 1850-1851 tour of the United States.

Consistent with Milne's hopes, construction increased along the shore, and by the early 1900s the area included a hotel, various restaurants, music venues and a police station.  Twenty-five cents would buy a ticket on trains drawn by quaintly named locomotives:  "Smoky Mary" or "Puffing Billy."  From downtown New Orleans, a twenty minute ride would bring a New Orleanian to the heart of Milneburg, by now well-known as a local resort, serving the growing population of the largest city in the South.

 

In 1922, fifty years after the promulgation of the first plans for flood control, the New Orleans Levee Board announced an ambitious plan to reclaim land from Lake Pontchartrain along its south shore… The wharfs, piers, camps and vestiges of the cargo operations of Milne's village would be sacrificed to flood protection, recreation areas and land for new homes... The Milneburg lighthouse–once 2,200 feet from shore–now sat on dry land, just south of the new seawall.

 

A new use for [the] vacant land along the lake emerged toward the end of the 1930s as military preparations quickened prior to and after the start of World War II.  The Naval Reserve sought to increase its training capacity and began building new bases in 1940.  The Navy leased the newly reclaimed area...  Engineers designed runways and taxiways along a southeast to northwest axis.  Barracks, hangars and supporting structures rapidly took shape, with most buildings clustered on the northeast (lake) side of the runways.  Officials commissioned the base in July, 1941 as a Naval Reserve Air Base.  The earth-shattering events later that year provoked additional expansion, and for the next two years instructors delivered initial flight instruction to potential Navy aviators.  In 1942, the Navy designated the base a Naval Air Station.

 

Nearby land along the lakefront to the east held additional wartime military installations: a U.S. Army Air Corps base, POW camp and sites for National Guard training.  Along Franklin Avenue near the lake, the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Company constructed seaplanes for the war effort.  And the lake itself became a training site for Higgins boats manufactured near City Park, along the Industrial Canal and in New Orleans East.  Activities waned as the war came to a close, but it would be a decade or more before the military would vacate the sites.  The dreams of the city for residential development could then be pursued.  But in the case of the Naval Air Station site an unanticipated sequence of events driven by politics, military decisions and chance intervened.

 

Had the New Camellia been able to rise up and return to Milneburg in 1957 (the steamer sank at Mandeville in 1920), its ghostly passengers would have seen a new shoreline and tracts of newly-reclaimed land on either side of Elysian Fields.  The shoreline peninsula that had bulged slightly northward at New York Street and Elysian Fields now extended to include to a wide motorway (Lakeshore Drive) and a traffic circle near the lighthouse.  There was no port; the lighthouse served as office space for an amusement park. There was neither wharf nor railroad to convey the passengers to the French Quarter; the tracks on Elysian Fields had been removed. To the west, no... camps or music halls or dance pavilions. [In 1957, passengers would see] no activity across the 178-acre site except a small sign portending great promise: Future Home of Louisiana State University in New Orleans.