When Braylan Wharton was describing the lay of the land at Grow Dat Youth Farm and got to the “T-field,” he stopped and asked, “Do you know why we call it the T-Field?” I guessed they grow things to make tea there, or it’s like a little Cajun French ‘tit field. Both were wrong. “The reason we call it a T-field is that this part of the farm used to be a golf course. And this field now is where you used to tee off at. That’s why they call it tee field,” he said.
Braylan is a 17-year-old senior at Warren Easton, one of 70 young people enrolled in various programs at Grow Dat. He describes himself as shy, but was very eager to describe the place and what it means to him. One of the things he liked most was peeling the layers of the land back, to see how things used to be, and to see how they can be transformed. “This whole thing used to be a golf course,” Braylan told me. “And now it’s a beautiful farm where we give food to people. And it’s just crazy to think about that, how quickly things can change.”
Today, he said, the tee field hosts celery, kale, and cabbage, all just seedlings today, but soon they’ll be part of the 50,000 pounds of produce that Grow Dat distributes each year, according to their estimates. Eighty percent of the food is sold across the city in CSA (community supported agriculture) veggie boxes, and 20% is given away to community groups and taken home by the youth who work to grow it.
Only nine months ago, things looked bleak for the youth farm. Back in March, City Park leadership pushed hard to get rid of Grow Dat. Their plan was to move out the farm, reclaim its land, and replace it with a road. The move was part of City Park’s master planning process, and the park dug in its heels amid public outcry and tried to push through a vision of the park’s future that did not include Grow Dat.
But on the sunny November morning I talked to Braylan, his spirits were high. Grow Dat leadership had just signed a new long-term agreement with the City Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that runs the park. The farm was staying put. In the toast he gave that day at a party celebrating its future, he talked about what the farm could mean to the people he sees hauling their groceries for miles on foot from the Walmart on Bullard Avenue. Instead, he said, “Imagine if there was a Grow Dat Garden around the corner. You know, groceries cost an arm, a leg, and an eye these days. You could have a Grow Dat community garden and go around the corner and pick you something—pick you some pineapples, pick you some collard greens, get whatever you might need.”
His optimism is refreshing, and these days it feels rare. But one wonders how that optimism, that capacity for a vision of something else, would have suffered if City Park had been successful in getting rid of Grow Dat. It’s astounding how close we came to this collective “paved paradise” moment, not just for the physical place, the banana trees and citrus orchards and award-winning sustainable architecture, but for the psyche of a huge network of young people who care deeply for the place. What were the forces that created such an unpopular plan, and how did opponents come together to resist it so successfully?
A Clusterfuck
When City Park released a bright new map in March and Grow Dat wasn’t on it, Nikki Thanos remembers the sense of disbelief around the farm. “I think there were some folks who were looking at that moment and saying, ‘You know, let’s hope this is just a mistake.’” Thanos is a longtime supporter and volunteer at the youth farm, and remembers the early days when the farm was just an idea. But as Grow Dat’s supporters realized that this was no accident, disbelief turned to shock and rage. Thanos thought, “You gotta be kidding me… Why are we having to defend a program that has such an established track record?”
The map in question was a new vision for the wilder north side of City Park. It was the product of more than a year’s worth of planning by City Park and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, a powerhouse landscape architecture firm with offices in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. On the map, Grow Dat’s citrus orchards were gone, along with neighboring rows of crops and the green tetris-like education buildings. The youth farm had been replaced with a road.
Thanos has been around Grow Dat since the beginning, when the program took a slice of overgrown land along the interstate and started coaxing out a little oasis for the young people of New Orleans. The farm grows food but also offers mental health support, job training, and an anti-oppression pedagogy rooted in the history and ecology of the land.
“It’s not easy to build nonprofit infrastructure for our youth leadership development project, and it’s certainly not easy to build up good soil to run a sustainable farming practice. And as I look at what we have in New Orleans and what we don’t have for young people, there’s so many more resources that we need to be creating for young folks, like after-school programs and places for kids to hang out, and basketball courts. We shouldn’t be having to spend hours and hours of time defending things that the community has already co-created,” Thanos lamented.
Thanos quickly mobilized with current and former Grow Dat students, parents, clergy, urban farmers, and others to save the farm. In late March, these supporters stormed a public meeting about the master plan at Dillard University wearing 200 bright pink “Friends of Grow Dat” shirts that were screen printed by volunteers. They encircled a giant model map of the park being displayed by the planners with a bright yellow road running through Grow Dat. Over 30 people stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the map, fanning outwards into the crowd. On a wall where the public was asked, “TELL US BELOW!” about their input for City Park, people wrote on sticky notes, “NO ROAD,” “Listen to the locals,” “Keep Grow Dat where it is,” and “Splash pad!”
Immediately following the action at the planning meeting, Councilmember At-Large JP Morrell published a scathing letter opposing the plan to displace the farm, 5,900 people signed a petition, and TV crews descended on the farm. But despite the obvious public opposition to the project, the administration of City Park stood firm. When supporters of Grow Dat emailed to express opposition to Grow Dat’s removal, City Park Conservancy officials responded by blaming the farm for its own demise, citing unpaid rent and dubious claims that the farm’s use of fertilizers was polluting waterways. “The fertilizers claim was just very bizarre,” Thanos said, “particularly in a park that uses egregious amounts of pesticides; you know, the golf course, for example.” Regarding claims of unpaid rent, Thanos understood that a new rental agreement had not been ironed-out after longtime City Park director Bob Becker had left his role, and she said Grow Dat was blindsided by the claim.
City Park Conservancy spent quite a bit of money to increase community distrust, according to Sue Mobley, another active member of Friends of Grow Dat. When asked how the master planning process could have gone the way it did, she said, “The level of clusterfuck that this was is very hard to overstate.”
Digging Up the Past
Braylan Wharton describes an eye-opening experience of learning what City Park was like in the past, even before the golf course. “We have workshops where they actually teach you things, the history of the land,” he said. “I didn’t even know that these bayous were handmade. I didn’t know that there was a plantation here [at Grow Dat].”
The lagoons of City Park were mostly hand-dug by some of the 20,000 people employed by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s who shaped much of the landscape we recognize today. Before that, in the late 1800s, when the area was a sloppy wetland, prisoners were leased out as laborers as the city tried to clear the land and create some semblance of a park. And before that, there were as many as 14 plantations operating within the boundaries of City Park, where enslaved people grew sugarcane and indigo and tended livestock. In the exact place where Grow Dat was wrested from a post-golf course landscape in the early 2000s, enslaved people created arable land for the Lorreins Plantation in the 1760s by felling trees and digging canals through the backwater. Some of their names are known, thanks to a partnership with historian Kalie Ann Dutra; many more aren’t.
A program where young people, who are mostly Black, learn leadership skills by farming land that was once a plantation does come with tension—a tension between past and future that is neither lost on Grow Dat nor acknowledged in brief. At the heart of Grow Dat’s programming is its “History of the Land” curriculum, which unearths and turns over the things that once grew on that same soil, along with the stories of the enslaved people who grew them, such as two women named Catalina and Carlota, who were enslaved on the Jung sugar plantation, about where the Louisiana Children’s Museum sits now, south of Grow Dat. In 1781, the two women were emancipated upon the death of the woman who owned them, according to her last will and testament. But when the brother of the woman contested the document and tried to keep Catalina and Carlota enslaved, the two women appealed to the city’s Spanish judiciary to fight for their freedom and won. Other resistance stories of those once enslaved in the current boundaries of City Park don’t end so positively. Grow Dat, according to its website, calls the pedagogy “an ongoing conversation that calls us to face our history, learn from the past, and imagine our future in diverse community.”
For young people, expressing the tension within a landscape, between its restorative potential today and its hidden past, can be the difference between a sense of exclusion and inclusion in places like City Park. According to longtime environmental educator Kitty O’Connor, when students of color visit Louisiana’s outdoor spaces, they often perceive dark histories hidden within them, regardless of whether these histories are taught or explained on signs. Whether it’s a park with mature oak trees or expanses of marsh grass, she said, “Almost always there’s a comment or a question, like, ‘Were there slaves here?’ Or, ‘I can tell there were slaves here.’” Programs where trusted adults can work with students to decolonize the history of the land are necessary if relationships with the land are to be restored, she said.
Otherwise, old power dynamics continue to be perpetuated. It’s well-documented that people of color are less likely to have access to and visit parks and greenspaces. For youth of color, it’s even worse. When adolescents, regardless of race, do visit parks, they are scrutinized and made to feel unwelcome. Patsy Owens, a landscape researcher from UC Davis, writes about the assumptions adults have about sharing parks with adolescents: that young people mean trouble. “This guarded treatment of youth is not universal or uniform,” she writes, “Groups of youth are treated more severely than individuals; boys more suspiciously than girls; and youth of color more harshly than whites.”
When these adults are cops, the danger escalates. Kitty O’Connor recalled, “I’m thinking of one student in particular, who lives on his bike outside of school. He rides up and down Crescent Park—right when he gets out of school, he is on his bicycle. And he also gets harassed by the cops a lot because they see a young Black kid on a bicycle and they find a reason to search through his backpack. They just assume he’s up to no good.”
The late writer Tom Dent recounted a strikingly similar experience from over 80 years ago in an interview with Michael Mizell-Nelson. Recounting his childhood, he said, “I remember once we were riding our bikes in City Park. Policemen came through and threw us out. We weren’t even supposed to ride through the park.”
A Change of Plans
Another very specific solution towards addressing this history is to increase participation for how public places are planned for the future. There are books on it. It works. It turns outsiders into insiders, and it builds trust.
When Sue Mobley was drafted to get involved with Friends of Grow Dat, she quickly realized that there was something off about how City Park was engaging the public. “Like, fundamentally off of the national trend,” she said. “I was just like, wow. It had not occurred to me that you could do this little outreach and call yourself doing something participatory,” she said. She works as the director of research for Monument Lab, which uses a collective approach to envision new public monuments. She knows the importance—and the difficulty—of making a truly participatory process.
“So as is often true when I suspect that there hasn’t been proper engagement, or that people are fibbing about how much they’ve been doing, I put out a poll,” she said, laughing. Through her own research, she found that very few people had heard about the City Park master plan, and could only find one person who had found out about it through their school, church, or neighborhood organization. She was baffled to find that the park had not tracked the race, gender, or socioeconomic status of the people they contacted. When she combed through the data of the surveys, she found an underrepresentation of youth voices, zip codes of Black neighborhoods, and people living in poverty. “In a city where 20% of the population is under 18,” she told me, “only 7% of respondents were under 24, which isn’t what you want to see when looking at the future of your largest urban park!”
Mobley helped draft a withering letter calling the planning process into question. It was quickly signed by 150 leading architects, planners, and urbanists from New Orleans and around the country and sent to City Park leadership in April. The letter singled out the park’s CEO at the time, Cara Lambright, and chief planning officer, Randy Odinet. The two had been employed together during a major planning process for Houston’s Memorial Park, which was faulted—and eventually corrected—for over-representing the priorities of white, affluent park visitors, despite Houston’s diverse population. The authors of the letter drew “unsettling parallels” between the Houston and City Park processes and wrote: “The responsibility to deliberately and specifically engage Black, brown, young, elderly, and lower income populations is a core competency of modern governance and urban design, in New Orleans and across the nation,” but “outreach for City Park’s new master plan never happened, certainly not in any comprehensive manner.”
In April, City Park started listening. The master planning process was put on hold, its final public meeting was canceled, and the “Ideas Youth Committee” was launched, meant to solicit input from young people aged 15 to 25. In early June, it was announced that park leadership and Grow Dat had renewed negotiations. And by the end of June, Lambright had resigned, citing a job opportunity in Texas. Rebecca Dietz, who had served as the park’s chief administrative officer, quickly took over as CEO. This led to renewed negotiations about the future of the farm, culminating in August, when City Park and Grow Dat reached a new cooperative endeavor agreement. The lease runs until 2030, with the option of extending until 2035.
City Park’s Vice President and Chief Planning Officer Randy Odinet declined ANTIGRAVITY’s request for an interview, but recently-appointed CEO Rebecca Dietz spoke to the magazine in October, just as a revamped master planning scheme was released. She said that the Park’s new leadership spent the summer asking, “How can we ensure this doesn’t happen again?” She acknowledged the plan needed more participation, especially from young people and those with barriers to using City Park and said, “Our hope is that combined with community ambassadors, combined with online opportunities, we’ll start to hear from people that maybe have barriers to using City Park.”
Dietz made it clear that a new road for cars up the middle of the park is “no longer under consideration.” Other routes such as accessible walking paths or bike paths are possible, and these were presented at a recent community input meeting on December 11. But, she recognized, “We didn’t present this promenade, this pathway, in the right way. We presented it as if it was going to be another Filmore or another Harrison. But I think the intent was that it was a very slow moving pathway.”
“The intentions of building a plan that was based on community input were genuine, and they still exist now,” she said. “But we have trust to rebuild with the community, so this enhanced strategy is intended to rebuild trust. And I will say that we will take the time we need to get it right.”
She asked for input and asked that ANTIGRAVITY readers attend the public meetings and be vocal. “Stay with us through the process and certainly check us whether we’re getting it done or not,” she said. “The plan should reflect, again, the commonalities of our entire community. That’s the goal.”
The Experience of a Win
When Braylan Wharton talked about his connection to the landscape around Grow Dat, he lit up. He described a sense of change that is wide-angle, visible, tangible, smellable, and edible. Part of the magic of what Grow Dat does is to expose some of our community’s most difficult layers, to look honestly at what the landscape used to be, and to use the power of this honesty to grow something else.
It would be interesting to see what that kind of ethos, applied to City Park’s Master Plan, could create across the 1,300 acres of the park. The changes might seem small. An outdoor basketball court, for example, measures 0.1 acres, and City Park has none. There are soccer fields, tennis courts, horse stables, and an old woman who lives in a shoe, but there are zero outdoor basketball courts. This fact is perpetually brought up by Grow Dat students, according to Nikki Thanos. In a city like New Orleans, Thanos calls it “a huge blind spot,” and evidence of who does and doesn’t make decisions about the space.
To try and rectify such blindspots, City Park recently launched the Ideas Youth Committee to increase youth participation in the master plan. Wharton is a member, and he likes that the park is asking for input. He wants to see better rides in the amusement park. He wonders if there could be a ball exchange, like a free library where kids could borrow sports equipment. Others in the committee, he said, suggested things like “less golf,” an expanded botanical garden, and more bathrooms.
But he is also impatient to see changes. This wariness gets at a risk of participatory planning: that it promises too much, the changes don’t come to fruition, and trust gets further damaged. Wharton seemed well-aware of the risk, saying, “They have a lot of big ideas. I want to see them put it into action.”
After everything that happened, Nikki Thanos came away with what seemed like a genuinely positive take: “A whole generation of youth of color got to be a part of a development fight about a piece of land that is really deep and that they have a lot of connection to, and they got to know the experience of a win.”
There will be a Community Engagement Meeting on January 29 at the Pavilion of the Two Sisters in City Park. For more info, check out growdatyouthfarm.org and neworleanscitypark.org/master-plan-community-input.
photos by Tammie Quintana
