City Park

Under the live oaks called the Dueling Oaks, men fought more than ten thousand duels under the antebellum code of honor. The count comes from a single source and may be exaggerated, but the oaks are real and ancient, and the duels happened. New Orleans in that period was the largest port in the Southern United States, exporting cotton to Western Europe and New England. The city had wealth and hierarchy and the violence that came with both. City Park is 1,300 acres, larger than Central Park, one of the ten largest urban parks in the country. Hurricane Katrina put eighty percent of it underwater in 2005. The recovery took a decade. What came back is a park that still holds the oaks and the formal end where the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden sit. The park itself is free. NOMA and the Sculpture Garden charge admission. The Canal streetcar line runs there.