Avondale Shipyard Site

For seventy-six years, metal met river at Avondale. The shipyard ran from 1938 to 2014, building vessels that carried American power across water. At peak employment, 26,000 workers clocked in — the largest private employer Louisiana ever had. During World War II, the yard built landing craft used in the D-Day invasion. Later came Navy destroyers, Coast Guard cutters, and container ships. The work was continuous, the output steady, the employment real. The closure in 2014 was a major economic blow to the West Bank. Twenty-six thousand paychecks stopped. The site sits in Avondale on the West Bank of the Mississippi River, being redeveloped for industrial and commercial use now. You go to see what scale looks like when it ends. The river is still there. The work is gone. What remains is the question every industrial city asks: what do you build after the builders leave?