Once upon a time, about 60 years ago, there was a grand plan for
a six-lane expressway that would sweep down Elysian Fields Avenue and run alongside the Mississippi River. While it would alleviate the perennial problem of French Quarter traffic, it would also cut off pedestrian access to the river from Jackson Square. Sound preposterous? It had the backing of city fathers, the Chamber of Commerce and this newspaper until two young lawyers,
Bill Borah and Richard O. Baumbach Jr., set out in the mid-1960s to thwart that plan, enlisting architects, engineers and preservationists to join them. They even moved to Washington, D.C., for three months to carry their crusade to congressional committees and regulatory agencies. They won. In August 1969, Transportation Secretary John Volpe announced that the expressway had been removed from the interstate highway system.
Riverfront Expressway Model. This much of the story was familiar to James Papia, 67, an architect and lifelong New Orleanian who has always been fascinated with the city’s history. But there were other details, such as
a tunnel beneath what is now Caesars New Orleans Casino and
the eradication of the oaks along North Claiborne Avenue, that Papia wanted to know more about, especially after a friend was skeptical when he told her the fragments he knew about the tunnel. So he approached Curious Louisiana.
Traffic vs. neighborhoods
This New Orleans story doesn’t begin in New Orleans, but in New York City, with a man named Robert Moses, a planner whose obsessions included building broad expressways, even if they obliterated long-established neighborhoods. (His life and work have been documented in Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.”) By the mid-1940s, Moses had achieved a reputation as a visionary, so Louisiana’s Highway Department hired him, along with the consulting engineering firm Andrews & Clark, to devise a strategy to streamline New Orleans’ transportation system. The result — the Arterial Plan for New Orleans, produced in 1946 — contained recommendations for projects that eventually became part of the New Orleans area, including Union Passenger Terminal, the first span of the bridge now known as the Crescent City Connection and the Pontchartrain and West Bank expressways, the Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella wrote in this newspaper in 2021. The report also recommended what became known as the Riverfront Expressway. In his report, Moses said that thoroughfare would “lift cars off the streets” of the French Quarter. While “heavy traffic would pulsate along the docks,” Moses said St. Louis Cathedral, the heart of the Vieux Carré, “would still be wedded to the Mississippi, but its precincts would not be choked with needless through traffic.”
Riverfront Expressway drawing. To complete a ring of elevated roadways around New Orleans’ core, the City Planning Commission recommended an expressway along North Claiborne Avenue that would cut through the predominantly Black Tremé neighborhood.
Black voices 'all but unheard'
While opposition to the Riverfront Expressway attracted a steadily growing cadre of mostly White supporters with political clout, North Claiborne Avenue boasted no comparable band of advocates. At that time, Campanella wrote, Tremé residents had other things on their minds: “They were in the midst of fighting for basic civil rights, such as voting and equal access to public facilities, and their voices were all but unheard in the halls of power.”
Circle Food Store, shown Nov. 14, 1954, at the corner of St. Bernard and North Claiborne avenues, before highway construction destroyed the canopy of live oaks on Claiborne Avenue (visible at left). So in February 1966, workers with the city Parkway Commission started removing the oaks as part of the preparation for the foundation of Interstate 10. That elevated highway still stands, although there have been intermittent calls to tear it down. While the pilings for I-10 were being driven, planning continued for the apparent inevitability of the Riverfront Expressway, despite the groundswell of discontent with that thoroughfare. Preparations included widening Poydras Street and building
a tunnel near the foot of Canal Street that would take expressway traffic beneath the International Trade Mart and the Rivergate Exposition Hall. There have been changes since then — the International Trade Mart has become a Four Seasons Hotel, and the Rivergate has been razed and replaced by Caesars New Orleans casino — but the tunnel remains. It’s about 700 feet long, running from Canal to Poydras, and it’s 20 feet high and wide enough to accommodate three lanes of traffic in each direction, Campanella wrote for the newspaper in 2014. The tunnel, which is accessible from the South Peters Street side, is used for employee parking and overflow valet parking, said a Caesars employee who asked not to be identified because he isn’t supposed to talk to reporters. He said he didn’t know of plans to do anything with the rectangular space, which Campanella likened to “a gigantic men’s tie box, built of steel and reinforced concrete and set into the deltaic muck.” Contact John Pope at .
