Willie Hall Playground Breaks Ground Again, This Time as a Flood-Fighting Sports Hub
For years, the old Willie Hall Playground sat in limbo—an empty reminder of a place that once anchored the St. Bernard neighborhood. Now it’s finally moving forward, reborn as a major public works and recreation project: a roughly $35 million athletic field complex built on top of a massive underground stormwater storage system designed to help relieve chronic flooding nearby.
City leaders gathered at McDonogh 35 High School last week to mark the official start of construction. The message from officials was clear: this is about building infrastructure that matches the reality of living in a flood-prone city, especially in a community that took on severe water after Hurricane Katrina. Instead of treating flooding as an occasional disaster, the city is trying to redesign key public spaces so they can absorb and manage stormwater when heavy rain hits.
The first phase focuses on what you won’t see once it’s finished. Beneath the roughly five-acre site, crews will install huge storage tanks capable of holding up to five million gallons of stormwater. Those tanks will tie into the city’s drainage network and act like a pressure release valve during major storms, easing the strain on aging pumps and tight drainage capacity.
On top of that underground system, the site will become a new home for everyday community use. Plans include a football field next to McDonogh 35, along with lighting, bleachers, and other game-day basics. Later phases push the project beyond a standard field upgrade, adding features like rain gardens, a kayak launch, walking trails along Bayou St. John, and a multi-use recreation facility—improvements meant to serve both the neighborhood and the city at large.
When everything is complete, the fields won’t belong to just one group. The New Orleans Recreation and Development Commission and McDonogh 35 will share access through a partnership with the Orleans Parish School Board, with the school taking priority when scheduling conflicts come up. The operating plan also spells out how the property will be used after school hours, including specific time windows for public access and shared logistics like evening parking.
This project also sits inside a bigger, long-running effort: the Gentilly Resilience District, a network of “green” flood control projects backed by a $141 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded in 2016. That funding was supposed to accelerate stormwater solutions across Gentilly, but delays have piled up. In fall 2023, HUD labeled New Orleans a slow spender because only about 15% of the grant had been used at that point, putting more pressure on the city to show real progress before the deadline to spend the money in 2029.
Willie Hall became one of the most visible examples of how complicated and slow these projects can get. The original agreement between NORD and the school board dates back to 2018, and early designs aimed to store around two million gallons of stormwater. Engineers later concluded the tanks needed to be much larger, which sent projected costs soaring and forced the city to seek federal approval for the change. On top of that, the project had to clear a series of routine but time-consuming steps—environmental and archaeological reviews, plus property research to settle jurisdiction questions.
Even with all that, momentum still struggled until the agreement neared expiration. Community pressure helped revive the effort, and the terms were revised and extended, outlining a clearer shared-use plan and setting the project up to move from paperwork to construction.
There’s also a deeper history attached to this site, which is part of why the groundbreaking matters to longtime residents. Willie Hall Playground dates back to the 1960s, created to serve Black children during a time when New Orleans parks and recreation facilities were segregated. After Katrina and the intense flooding that followed, the playground was moved to Pontchartrain Park, and St. Bernard was left without a comparable green space. Meanwhile, the neighborhood has changed, with major investments like McDonogh 35’s newer campus building completed in 2015, but the loss of that shared outdoor space lingered.
For NORD leadership, the return of Willie Hall is personal as well as practical. NORD’s CEO, who grew up nearby, described the site as a formative place—one of the few safe green spaces that served thousands of kids before Katrina. From his perspective, bringing it back isn’t just a construction milestone; it’s restoring something the neighborhood has been missing for a long time.
The first phase of construction is expected to take about 18 months. If the project stays on track, the St. Bernard area won’t just get a new field—it’ll gain a piece of infrastructure that quietly does heavy lifting every time the clouds open up.
