During segregation, Lincoln Beach was the one place on Lake Pontchartrain In New Orleans where Black people were allowed to swim. Live acts like Fats Domino and Nat King Cole drew crowds to a recreation area that included a roller coaster and swimming pools. But with passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Black New Orleanians were finally allowed to swim at nearby Pontchartrain Beach. Lincoln Beach closed not long after.
The area fell into disrepair over the next 60 years. The three tunnels that once led locals under the railroad tracks to Lincoln Beach’s shoreline are fenced off and filled with storm water. Visiting the beach has long been prohibited, at least officially, although until recently the rules were rarely enforced.
But in the last few months, would-be visitors have been stopped by security guards, a signal of change on the horizon for Lincoln Beach.
In 2022, the city released a plan to redevelop the recreation area. Last year, it announced nearly $25 million in funding for the project. Then, this spring, Representative Troy Carter, a Democrat whose congressional district includes the beach, announced additional millions in federal redevelopment funds to preserve and revitalize the historic site. The city says it wants to open the beach “in a limited capacity” by next summer.
The city’s commitment comes after decades of work by community members who happened upon the beach and decided to save it.
Michael Pellet first saw Lincoln Beach in the late 1990s. Mr. Pellet, who goes by Sage, was walking his dogs near the lake’s shoreline when he noticed the beach area. His father and others had shared stories of youths spent at Lincoln Beach, and of its role as a space for the Black community. But by that time, nature and litter had taken the space.
“You hear all these stories,” Mr. Pellet said. “But I never really saw it.”
It remained in disrepair when Mr. Pellet returned in 2020, shortly after losing work as a barber because of the pandemic. At first on his own, Mr. Pellet began nursing the beach back to health. Days smeared into weeks and months as he bagged enough garbage to create a pile nearly two stories high. Mr. Pellet often camped there.
More locals gradually joined him.
Reggie Ford, an artist who sells his work near Jackson Square in the French Quarter, had heard of Lincoln Beach since he was a child and discovered it on his own on a cold winter day in 2016.
When he saw Mr. Pellet on the local news in 2020 for his effort to restore Lincoln Beach, it only took a few days before Mr. Ford began cleaning the beach too. Eventually, he, Mr. Pellet and other volunteers installed lighted pathways and trash bins. They filled thousands of bags of trash with debris scattered by Hurricanes Zeta and Ida. They built permanent fire pits and a drainage system using PVC pipe that helps keep the area manageable after flooding. They also removed brush, fallen limbs and trees, as well as steel and concrete remnants of the beach’s former infrastructure, like the dilapidated pool and stage.
The improvements drew visitors, sometimes as many as 1,000 in a weekend.
“We decided not to wait,” Mr. Pellet said on a visit to the beach in 2023. He pointed to the seashell-paved paths and the solar-powered lights they installed help visitors see at night. “We transformed this to a place that we want our families, our elders, our children to come to.”
Vanishing Black history
Places like Lincoln Beach are disappearing across the United States. Some simply disintegrate beyond recognition, while others are gentrified. With them go pages of national history.
In Atlantic City, N.J., what was once Chicken Bone Beach — named for the leftovers discarded by its visitors — and its neighboring mom-and-pop businesses have been taken over by a mixture of casinos, hotels and parking lots. Highland Beach in Chesapeake, Md., on the edge of Chesapeake Bay, was founded by Frederick Douglass’s son and later became the first incorporated African American municipality in the state; today, the same shores that once hosted the author Langston Hughes and others are accessible only through private entrances.
In 2022, the National Park Service published a theme study — a narrative historical guide — on the nexus of race, recreation and leisure in the United States that focused on the past and present conditions of sites like formerly segregated beaches. The study found that despite their historical importance, many remain underrecognized and unprotected, furthering a legacy of unequal distribution of recreational resources to Black vacationers.
Providing further representation for such sites will not only help close the “nature gap,” but also help in the “making of a more environmentally sustainable and racially just future,” the study’s authors concluded. A 2018 study by the park service found that Americans who identify as Black, Hispanic or Native American are less likely to use public parks and outdoor recreational areas.
The nonprofit Trust for Public Land also found that people of color are less likely than their white counterparts to live close to parks with properly functioning amenities, like bathrooms and water fountains. Last year, the trust announced an initiative aimed at broadening preservation efforts of Black historical spaces through renovation, like the more than $4 million effort to restore Atlanta’s Prince Hall Masonic Lodge, which once housed Martin Luther King Jr.’s office. The group estimates that only 3 percent of nearly 100,000 sites on the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places center on Black American history.
The growing calls to revive spaces like Lincoln Beach are “coming in response to decades in which these areas and the people who owned them have been dispossessed of so much of this land, and the memories that surrounded it,” said Andrew Kahrl, an author of the park service study and a professor of social, political and environmental history at the University of Virginia.
One example of success came in 2002, when Amelia Island’s American Beach, near Jacksonville, Fla., was designated a historic district. Similarly, Biloxi Beach in Mississippi has experienced a rebirth; there, from 1959 to 1963, Dr. Gilbert Mason Sr. held some of the civil rights movement’s most memorable wade-in protests to desegregate Gulf Coast beaches. Before the protests, the beaches were claimed as private property by neighboring landowners. Today, thousands of young Black Americans gather along those same, now publicly owned, shores to celebrate Black Beach Weekend in April.
Disintegrating remains
Before the security guards were in place, visitors who made their way to Lincoln Beach were forced to hop a concrete barrier, where a makeshift ladder led them down the levee. From there, they climbed between rail cars and walked over railroad tracks until a portal of unkept brush tugged at their clothes. Finally, the scrub gave way to the sight of sand.
There they could wander among the disintegrating remains of the beach’s concrete pool deck and its crumbling pier, which told the story of a place that had seemingly been forgotten by official caretakers like the city.
In 2022, New Orleans for Lincoln Beach, a community-led nonprofit, and the Water Leaders Institute, an organization that helps communities adapt to climate change, released a vision report to help guide the beach’s restoration. The report explores Lincoln Beach’s potential role in helping Louisiana shorelines adapt to climate change while combating coastal erosion — the state has lost nearly 2,000 square miles of coast since the 1930s because of erosion exacerbated by oil and gas activity and leveeing off the Mississippi River.
The rebuilding effort would be nothing without the project’s volunteers, said Aron Chang, a landscape architect and a founder of the Water Leaders Institute who helped draft the report. What the Lincoln Beach volunteers have done is “astounding,” Mr. Chang added.
“They’ve been able to move the gears of city and state and national machinery to the tune of millions of dollars to advance a project,” he said.
The beach reborn
Volunteers like Mr. Pellet and others feel as if their campaign has paid off. In 2021, the area was recognized as a space of “cultural significance” by the city of New Orleans. Last month, Lincoln Beach was also added to the National Register of Historic Places. The status qualifies it for additional grants and other funding sources. The city says it is committed to making it an “economically and environmentally sustainable destination,” according to the office of Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
As for Mr. Pellet, he’s also begun looking ahead to his own future. In 2022, he officially moved on from his work as a barber and began working full time as a climate justice organizer with the environmental nonprofit Healthy Gulf.
But much work remains for Lincoln Beach to thrive again. That includes resolving how to redevelop the recreation area. Proposals include building a waterfront entertainment complex, with a restaurant, a rooftop pool and a drive-in movie theater, as well as amenities like a food hall, kayak launch and urban farm.
“Why travel to Florida?” Mr. Pellet asked, standing on Lincoln Beach’s shoreline. in 2023 “This is a destination spot right here. ”
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