Bucktown Harbor & Marsh Boardwalk

In the 1850s, fishermen built stilt camps over Lake Pontchartrain and called the settlement Bucktown — either for the young bucks who came looking for trouble, or for a local fisherman named Oliver "Buck" Wooley. During Prohibition, speakeasies lined the waterfront, and Jelly Roll Morton wrote "Bucktown Blues" about them. The village has outlasted the storms and the bootleggers both. The harbor sits where the 17th Street Canal meets the lake — the same canal that failed during Hurricane Katrina. What endures now is a 75-acre park with commercial and private boat slips, three lighted pavilions facing the water, and a 1,000-foot boardwalk crossing a 3.5-acre man-made wetland. The marsh was built to do what the city has always needed: hold back water, filter what comes through, make solid ground out of what wants to sink. Deanie's Seafood and R&O's sit at the harbor's edge. Go for the boiled seafood, stay because the pavilions catch the breeze off Pontchartrain and you can watch the boats come in the way people have for a century and a half.