New Orleans City Park Clean Up

New Orleans City Park, a large non-profit park 1 mile wide by 3 miles long, was completely flooded by the hurricane. This park in the heart of New Orleans receives no funding from either the city or state. It is said that every person who grew up in New Orleans rode on the kiddie train at some point in their youth!

Our work in the park for this project was done as a way to help give the people of the city a place where they could go play for a little while and escape the hardships of the rebuilding efforts. In particular, we worked out at the park's driving range - painting and pressure-washing the areas where people can go to hit a bucket of balls for $5.00.

"Everyday we worked at City Park, at least 10 different groups of people came up to us and told us what a great job we were doing. They all thanked us for coming down to help and each person said that they were eager to see what our painting job would look like when we were finished. I started to realize after a while that painting the driving range did not just make the city a more beautiful place, it also promoted normalcy. When you go to the city of New Orleans you are constantly reminded of the destruction of the hurricane that hit the city. But, if you now go to the driving range, you will see new paint on every piece of wood and no water lines that constantly remind you of the destruction that katina caused. The driving range can now be a place where you can forget about the desctrution of Katrina and just work on your golf swing." [Dana Baillet, student]

	Our crew scraped, painted, and primed 92 stalls.
	Some of the paint we used was donated by the head of the paint department at Lowe's, after he heard that we were volunteering over our spring break.