Airline to City Center
For residents and visitors alike, Louis Armstrong International Airport is a major entry point into southeast Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta. From there, the historic Airline Corridor brings travelers to and from downtown New Orleans. There are many opportunities for strengthening this corridor as an important gateway to the region, while addressing system-scale stormwater management problems across the Jefferson-Orleans Basin.
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- This transect includes the City Arrival (Metropolitan Park Zone), Elmwood District, and Elmwood Water Lanes and Fields demonstration project.
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- The Metropolitan Park Zone links the airport to the Central Business District of New Orleans. With new water features and improved urban design, this corridor can become a place where the importance of water to the region and the urban landscape is made visible from the moment a person sets foot in the region.
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- Today, the western half of the corridor is primarily an infrastructural zone with large areas of vacant and underutilized land, located between the backslope and lowlands of Jefferson.
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- Airline Highway once served as the main entry to the city for those arriving at Louis Armstrong International Airport, and can serve that purpose once again. Strategic parklands and the light rail can enhance the infrastructural role of the corridor, and serve as the basis for redevelopment.
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- In the eastern half of the corridor, what is now a tangle of highways, rail lines, disconnected local streets, vacant lots, and industrial areas can become a proud point of arrival, a place for public gatherings and the festivities that manifest New Orleans culture, and a key corridor for private reinvestment.
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- New urban water plazas can serve projects that are in progress, such as the 1,500 acre New Orleans BioDistrict, as well as new mixed-use and institutional development.
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- Elmwood District is a vital area within the Airline to City Center transect. Elmwood is an auto-oriented, primarily commercial and industrial area characterized by wide expanses of asphalt, concrete that contribute to high levels of runoff and to street flooding.
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- Elmwood can become instead a vibrant commercial district distinguished by verdant “fields” and “water lanes” integrated into its streetscapes.
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- Parking lots are especially important. Instead of shedding runoff into the drainage system, each parking lot can be redesigned to infiltrate stormwater using pervious paving materials, rain gardens and bioswales, and subsurface storage chambers that allow the parking lots to store tremendous quantities of stormwater.
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- The typical street section can be adapted to incorporate “water lanes,” or bioswales into the existing right-of-way, where there is space permitting in turning lanes or alongside the edges of the streets. These form a network of channels that can infiltrate stormwater and convey runoff to “fields,” which are retention areas formed out of both vacant parcels and existing parking lots.
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- Located at the base of the Huey P. Long Bridge, Elmwood is a highly visible and important center of commerce. It has the opportunity to become a leader in sustainable stormwater management as well, with retrofits to its streets, parking lots, and rooftops to address localized flooding and to reduce stormwater runoff from the district.