A Place to Play: The First Years of NORD
1947-1948
“A place to play, a chance to laugh and swim or simply sit under a tree and breathe fresh air – these are attainable goals for every citizen if public officials will recognize their need. For I know of no public works investment that pays greater dividend per dollar than recreation facility. . . . Organized, supervised, well-though-out recreation is a permanent function of local government. It must not be made to stand at the end of the line begging for a handout. It must not be forgotten and abused.”
-Mayor deLesseps Morrison, 1949
Mayor deLesseps S. “Chep” Morrison spoke these words in an address before the National Recreation Congress in New Orleans in September 1949. The New Orleans Recreation Department, better known as NORD, was Morrison’s brainchild, and it had just completed its first thirty months of operation. NORD made huge strides in this first year and a half, and the program was widely acclaimed as a model for the rest of the country.
Life magazine published a pictorial study of the Department in that same month and proclaimed that the New Orleans program was “the most progressive in the U.S.” Life also pointed out that since its creation in 1946, “NORD built 58 new play centers and eight swimming pools. It used whatever facilities it could, including a firehouse, public meat markets and two abandoned city jails.” And, NORD claimed, it lowered the city’s juvenile delinquency rate by nearly 50%.
Baseball
“PLAY BALL – the traditional call which initiates major league baseball play each April isn’t heard in New Orleans until early June, but then five thousand eager youngsters sing it out in chorus and the roar is heard in every neighborhood in the city. For June means school is out and ‘Junior’ and his pals from down the block begin a daily trek to the neighborhood playgrounds and parks for the NORD Kid Baseball games.”
— New Orleans Recreation Department Progress Report, 1947 through 1951
NORD’s city-wide baseball clinic, held on May 29, 1948, was attended by more than 2000 kids, who received instruction from members of the New Orleans Pelicans and the Memphis Chicks. After the clinic, the participants were invited to stay on to watch the game between the Pels and the Chicks.
NORD’s first baseball clinic for African American boys, pictured above. The 140 participants were coached by members of the New Orleans Creoles of the Negro Southern Baseball League. The Louisiana Weekly reported on the clinics, calling them a “great move” to prepare African American boys for “the opportunity that awaits them in the field of professional baseball.” The rise of Jackie Robinson through the ranks of professional baseball had “spurred the spirit of thousands” of African American youth to pursue professional baseball. Following the clinic, the Creoles played an aggregation of all-stars picked from local teams throughout the state. The Creoles put a whipping on the All-Stars, 14-3.
We can’t forget, however, that in 1946, New Orleans was still a strictly segregated city, and like every other public institution, NORD had separate facilities and programs for black and white participants – separate but, of course, not equal. While the city did add playgrounds, swimming pools, recreational complexes, ball fields and other new facilities for African American citizens (the most notable of which was Shakespeare Park), neither the number nor the quality ever equaled that of those available to the white population. Many of the photographs in this exhibit illustrate this fact.
Swimming
“The 1947 recreation program for the youth of New Orleans was the most outstanding in the entire history of the city. This was particularly true of Negro children who have long suffered from the lack of adequate recreation facilities.”
— Morris Jeff, Department of Recreation City of New Orleans, First Annual Report, 1947
Football
Two exhibition games were played at the beginning of the Bantam season in 1947 – one before the Tulane-Auburn game on October 25 and a second before the Tulane-Florida game on November 15. Regular games during the season were played at the “Recreation Stadium” (later named Harrell Stadium) at the corner of South Claiborne and Leonidas and at City Park Stadium.
The Bantam league was open to boys under age 15 and under 125 pounds. The city fielded six teams in each weight class. In 1947, the city champions were the Desmare Jackets (100 lbs.) and St. Roch Rockets (125 lbs). NORD (including the Negro Division, which did not have a Bantam program in 1947) also sponsored a much larger touch football program, conducted on each playground and on the playgrounds of the public schools associated with NORD.
The Toy Bowl game originated in Birmingham in 1946 as a fundraising event. The game pitted the champions of Birmingham’s Bantam football league (in two weight categories – the “Fleas,” weighing not more than 90 pounds, and the “Flies,” not more than 105 pounds) against the Bantam champions from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. In 1947, Birmingham issued the invitation to New Orleans, and NORD enthusiastically took up the challenge. The New Orleans Bantam All Stars travelled to Birmingham on December 12, aboard a special Toy Bowl train, along with Mayor Morrison, the 100-piece NORD band, and scores of fans. Unfortunately, the New Orleans team lost, 13-7. Shown here are the New Orleans Flies – the bigger boys.
Lincoln Playground was located near the intersection of Broad and Calliope Streets, the buildings in the rear are part of the Calliope (later renamed B.W. Cooper) housing development. In 1950, NORD dedicated the new Rosenwald Center, the city’s only recreation center for African Americans (there were ten for the white community), at the Lincoln Playground site.
“The New Orleans Recreation Department has acquired a national reputation on the green turf of its neighborhood football fields. There pint size prospects, with burning ambition to someday play collegiate football, receive their first lessons in the popular autumn sport and from those fields the youngsters have carried NORD’s colors into distant states where today people use superlatives to describe their gridiron talents.”
— New Orleans Recreation Department Progress Report, 1947 through 1951
“The new Department of Recreation received its first national publicity during the meeting of the Association of Sportswriters and Broadcasters of America. The group met in New Orleans during the month of May, 1947. . . . It is needless to say that the visitors were impressed with the progress being made in New Orleans at that time.”
— Department of Recreation City of New Orleans, First Annual Report, 1947
NORD Play Day
In addition to the checkers matches pictured here, kids were invited to sign up for events described in the June 27 Times-Picayune as “potato and heel grasp races, 50-yard dashes, over and under, skip rope relays, dodge ball, bean-bag circle games, and almost any other game played by kids everywhere.” The youngsters traveled to City Park via special buses, streetcars and trucks. Mayor Morrison provided ice cream, cake, and soft drinks and, according to the August 6 Picayune account, 10,000 scoops of ice cream were consumed.
NORD wasn’t only about sports. The 1947 Annual Report says: “We are told that an athletic program will, normally, attract 70% participation and interest in a recreation program.” To pull in the other 30% (and whatever portion of the 70% who might be inclined toward dual participation), NORD developed programs in arts and crafts, drama, music, and dance.
NORD’s arts and crafts program operated year round at playgrounds and centers, focusing on three general phases of activity: general arts and crafts projects, special event projects (e.g., costumes for NORD plays, place cards for a baseball banquet) and seasonal event projects (Mother’s Day, Halloween, Christmas, etc.). The New Orleans Public Library has located one of its branches in the Dorgenois Center to serve young people with a varied selection of literature.
Ida Weis Friend was a civic and social leader in New Orleans, who was awarded (among other honors) the Times-Picayune Loving Cup in 1946. When her 18-year-old son, Henry (“Bunny”), died of pneumonia in 1924, she donated funding for the purchase of a playground in his memory, along with money for its initial maintenance. Once the lights went on that night, on-lookers watched an Irish musical revue by NORD’s Traveling Theater troupe and a softball game between the playground team and the Sauro Stars. Mayor Morrison threw out the first pitch.
Over the next twenty years, as the grip of segregation loosened, the phenomenon of white flight came to have a dramatic effect on the Recreation Department and on other public institutions, which fell into a steep decline. Then, Hurricane Katrina all but finished off the NORD system entirely. But recently, NORD’s fortunes have begun to look up. In October, 2010, New Orleanians voted to amend the Home Rule Charter to reinvent NORD as the New Orleans Recreation Development Commission, a public-private partnership designed to manage — and reform — the city’s recreation program. NORDC is just getting started on the road to bringing about a renaissance of public recreation in the Crescent City.
This exhibit is not intended to be a history of NORD. It is designed simply to recall the people, activities, and facilities of NORD during its first two years of operation, 1947-1948 — to show New Orleanians in that “place to play” that NORD attempted to provide. The exhibit uses photographs from two scrapbooks in the City Archives collection. They came to the Archives in 1999, thanks in large part to long-time NORD staff member, Benny Jefferson, who recognized their importance to the history of his agency and insured that they would be preserved.
The physical exhibit was designed and mounted by staff of the Louisiana Division/City Archives in 2013, with a digital exhibit completed soon after. This digital exhibit was reimagined and edited by Brittanny Silva in 2024.
