Pontchartrain Park Historic District

Built after World War II as one of the first suburban-style subdivisions made by and for middle-class Black families in Jim Crow Louisiana, the neighborhood came with a golf course designed by Joseph Bartholomew, a noted Black course designer, and Southern University at New Orleans on its edge. Residents have included mayors Dutch Morial and Marc Morial, the actor Wendell Pierce and the political activist Philip Baptiste. In 2005 it flooded, first from the Industrial Canal floodwall overtopping and then through breaches along the London Avenue Canal.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — 4.2 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.
• The Cabildo — 4.4 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.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 4.4 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 Historic New Orleans Collection — 4.5 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

• London Avenue Canal Floodwall Breach — 1.7 mi
• Fort St. John (Spanish Fort) — 2.5 mi
• Fannie C. Williams / Valena C. Jones Elementary School — 3.0 mi
• Fair Grounds Race Course — 3.2 mi