Lake Pontchartrain

The lake is a brackish estuary of about 630 square miles that averages 12 to 14 feet deep, and people have lived around it for at least 3,500 years. The Industrial Canal opened in the 1920s, and lakefront land dredged behind a new floodwall expanded the city. The Causeway to Mandeville, built in the 1950s and 1960s, is described as the longest continuous bridge over water. More than thirty years of oil drilling in the lake caused significant pollution before the state placed a moratorium on it, and the lake reopened to recreation in 2006.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — 5.0 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 5.1 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• The Cabildo — 5.4 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 5.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Lakefront "Seawall" — 0.7 mi
• New Basin Canal — 0.7 mi
• Fort St. John (Spanish Fort) — 1.1 mi
• 17th Street Canal Floodwall — 1.4 mi