Heart of the East to Bayou Sauvage
In between residential neighborhoods arrayed along the Chef Menteur Ridge and the lakefront is the Heart of The East, an area rich with civic assets and commercial real estate. The Citrus Redevelopment Zone and Eastern Water Walk can anchor commercial redevelopment in this area. Integrated lakes and wetlands can strengthen the basin’s canal network, which provides connections from the Heart out to the wetland habitats of Bayou Sauvage.
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- This transect includes the Citrus Redevelopment Zone, Eastern Water Walk, Orleans East Neighborhoods, Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, and the Eastern Wetlands.
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- Developers and businesses play an important role in shaping the city. In the Heart of the East, large vacant areas that were once regional shopping destinations are sites for redevelopment. Water features on each property connect to reconstructed streets and new lateral canals, where visible flows of water can link each development to the canals that drain the basin.
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- Lake Forest Boulevard is an important and once vibrant commercial corridor that bisects the Citrus District.
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- A redeveloped Lake Forest Boulevard brings water to the fore, with rain gardens, trees, and bioswales enhancing stormwater retention and establishing a high quality environment and identity for the area.
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- At the core of the Citrus District, the proposed Lake Forest Boulevard improvements and the development of a district-scale stormwater system with detention and retention features on every property that store the first 2.5 inches of rainfall can provide a new model for sustainable commercial development for all of Greater New Orleans.
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- The strength of New Orleans East lies in its neighborhoods and the families that have made their homes in the basin’s subdivisions for generations. With the lakes, parks, and open spaces that already exist in the basin, Orleans East has the potential to become the first basin in the city to store safely all the excess water from a ten-year storm, without the addition of any new pumping capacity.
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- Small scale retrofits to the streets of neighborhood streets can help achieve this goal. Bioswales, rain gardens, and water-loving trees can reduce the volume of runoff from each neighborhood, filter that runoff, and provide shade and better air quality for residents.
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- Vacant areas throughout the basin provide additional opportunities for increasing the storage capacity of the basin’s canal network. Designed as wetland basins, these areas can store and filter stormwater while serving as habitats and recreational amenities that anchor new commercial and residential development areas.
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- This urban wildlife refuge, the largest in the United States, should be integrated into the identity of New Orleans East. This remarkable asset features habitats ranging from hardwood forests to natural bayous and fresh and brackish marshes. The Orleans East lowland canal network can draw water from the Industrial Canal, circulate that water west to east across the basin, and empty that water into the wildlife refuge through extensions of the Morrison and Dwyer Canals. These restored flows can strengthen the hydrology and ecology of the entire basin.
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- Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge anchors a corridor of wetlands, fallow properties, industry, and communities that stretches from Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River. This corridor holds opportunities for ecological restoration, system-scale stormwater management features, industrial development, and recreation.
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- The lakes of Orleans East are central to the identity of the basin. Many of the basin’s finest neighborhoods are built around these privately-owned bodies of water, which collect runoff from adjacent properties and overflow into the basin’s canal network. Connecting these lakes to the canal network so that they can be operated as detention basins can increase the storage capacity of the canal network, which reduces flood risk and the need for pumping.