Crescent Park

For more than a century, this stretch of riverfront was fenced off — the working edge of a port city that had turned its back on the water that made it. Crescent Park opened in 2015, a 1.4-mile linear run along the abandoned Piety Wharf, reconnecting Bywater and Marigny to the Mississippi for the first time in generations. Hargreaves Associates designed it as part of a $50 million public investment in post-Katrina riverfront access, the kind of reckoning a city does when it rebuilds and decides what it needs back. The signature structure is a rusted-steel pedestrian bridge arcing 30 feet above active railroad tracks. From that span you see the downtown skyline and the river in one view — the freight lines that kept people out now pass underneath your feet. The bridge frames what New Orleans has always been: a Mississippi River city, built on silt the river deposited starting around 2200 BCE, grown into the largest port in the South by the nineteenth century, exporting the nation's cotton and farm products to Europe and New England. The water made the city. For a hundred years, the working port kept residents away from it. Now you can walk the bank again. Entrances at Piety Street and Mazant Street. Open daily sunrise to sunset. Free admission. Go at dawn or just before the light drops, when the river is silver and the industrial scale of the thing — the barges, the cranes, the far bank — makes sense of why it took so long to get this back.