A Thumbnail History of City Park

By Lillie Petit Gallagher

1878 Pike Estate Auction in New Orleans...Baton Rouge Mayor, Leon Jastremski, bought just a little over 126 acres, a small part of the Richland Plantation, for a sum just shy of $2000.00….....one thousand, nine hundred and one dollars and twenty-five cents to be exact… for what would later become City Park.   

1878, Mayor Jastremski did not envision a recreational use for his newly acquired city property.  Rather it was a calculated purchase, one designed to entice Louisiana State University to remain in Baton Rouge.  Fire had destroyed the buildings of the “State Seminary of Learning” in Pineville. For the previous ten years, the Ole War Skule had found a temporary home at the State School for the Deaf and the city wanted to keep it tethered in town.  The mayor, and the city council, had been casting about for a way to do this. What better inducement for an agricultural and mechanical college than a gift of land for farming? However, the proffered donation was not excitedly embraced by everyone. At least one member of the then Board of Supervisors whose remarks are reflected in the City Council minutes, indicated, “that the land should be put into better condition before turning it over to the school”. 

1879, (April 5th) Ruffled feathers were apparently soothed and the mayor turned over to the school the deed for the land. But wait, there was one, little-noticed, legal string…..a retriever.  “Should the property be diverted from the purpose for which it was given, (farming), then said property would revert back to the city” read the clause. 

1909:  Hubert Wax, District Attorney noticed the Diverted from Purpose proviso in the 1879 land donation from the City of Baton Rouge to LSU. Wax wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper explaining what he had found out, and stating that this acreage would be an ideal place for a city park. It took 15 years more and an intervention from a sitting Governor (Parker) for the City to regain its property.

1923, Fast forward. Standard Oil of New Jersey had chosen to build its refinery on the river in 1909 and by 1924, Baton Rouge, the sleepy little river town was growing….. bursting out of its city limits.  LSU moved from its downtown location to its present day location in 1923.  People followed.  A civic-minded group of Baton Rougeans, led by Commissioner of Finance, L.J. Ricaud, began looking for a suitable site on which to build a 2nd municipal park to serve the growing neighborhoods south of the city. And guess what, someone ‘stumbled’ upon the old city council minutes and a record of the 1879 gift with the ‘retriever’ proviso uncovered.  The City immediately set about trying to persuade LSU to return the property.  The University was reluctant.  Negotiations stalled and an appeal was made by the city to Governor John Parker to intercede.  He did and was successful in convincing representatives of LSU that the university had forfeited its right to the property by not farming the acres and by establishing its new campus ‘outside’ the city limits.  What a blow!  But all was not lost.  A recreational area for both town and gown was conceived and within three years, the contested area was transformed into a pleasure-ground.  

1923 H. Myron West, a widely respected landscape architect and owner of the American Park Builders of Chicago, was hired by the city to design a municipal city park which would include a nine-hole golf course, a swimming pool and clubhouse and eventually a zoo, carousel, gym, tennis courts and children’s playground. In 1916, American Park Builders and Myron West had designed Victory Park with which the city was well pleased. The new City Park would include:  

The Club House was designed by Louis Groz, an architect who had moved to Baton Rouge from New Orleans after serving as a maritime architect in the Navy during WWI.  Louis Groz designed a number of Baton Rouge schools of the era and several private homes in the Garden District, along Dalrymple Drive and around the lake. 

The Swimming Pool was built and opened in 1928 when all of the elements of City Park were completed....  Many Baton Rougeans spent long days at City Park 

Swimming, playing golf and riding the flying horses.  

The Carousel was owned and operated by Bartholomew Murphy who’s family had been wood carvers and immigrated from Ireland to New York and later came to New Orleans to operate the carousel at Spanish Fort.  In 1927 the Spanish Fort carousel was brought to Baton Rouge and operated by the Murphy family at City Park until 1947 when they lost the lease to make way for a gym (The story is told......   N.O. City Park celebrated its 100th anniversary....of its ‘flying horses’.   (Baton Rouge was short sighted) 

The City Park Zoo started off with Hinky Dinky....a black bear cub mascot, once the property of Catholic High. A small menagerie of animals evolved at City Park as citizens whose pets outgrew their cages got ‘donated’ to the zoo.  City Park was even the temporary home of Mike the Tiger ....a very famous photo of the Bonnett twins (later known has Mrs. Wade O. Martin and Mrs. John Hainkel, exist where these two LSU cheerleaders guarded the Tiger cage all night long before one of the Tulane/LSU football games.  

And... In the new 20th century, America’s interest in golf as a sport exploded. Golfing memberships were available in private country clubs but municipal golf courses were limited. The sport was largely reserved for the wealthy. That is, until municipalities began to build and support small public golf courses. The city of Baton Rouge was among the early cities to build a public course, consequently, a parade of Baton Rougeans, who would not otherwise have had an opportunity to learn to play, did.   

1923-1926 ....Working with Myron West, was the Scot, Thomas Bendelow, who was a well-known and prolific designer of golf courses. In a 1926 brochure West stated, 

“Mr. Tom Bendelow, golf architect for the American Park Builders, has been engaged uninterruptedly for thirty years in the laying out of golf courses.  He perhaps has had more experience in handling this line of work than any other man in the country. Mr. Bendelow has for several years been lecturer in golf design at the University of Illinois and is known from coast to coast not only on account of his adeptness in arranging golf plays to a given terrain, but for his sterling quality of integrity which has won him the confidence of hundreds of patrons “ 

Appropriately, the first golf course that Thomas Bendelow designed in America was for Charles Pratt, who, along with J.D. Rockefeller, was one of the founders of  Standard Oil of New Jersey,  In 1895 Charles Pratt placed an ad in the New York Herald Tribune for someone to teach his family how to play golf on his Long Island estate.  Bendelow, a Scottish golfer, newly arrived in New York and an employee at the Tribune, answered the ad.  Not only did he teach the Pratt family how to play golf, but it is documented that he designed and built a golf course for them on their Long Island property as well.  

Thirty years later, that same Scotsman was designing a golf course for a municipal city park in Baton Rouge,  a community that was now home to what was to later become one of Standard Oil’s largest oil refineries. Throughout the years, plant managers, young engineers and operators, along with their families played City Park Golf Course. I am certain they were totally unaware of the early connection with one of the founders of Standard Oil later to be known as Esso, Humble, Exxon and currently Exxon-Mobil.

Bendelow was a naturalist.  He believed in letting the land ‘speak’ to him as he followed the natural rhythm of the terrain while he ‘walked’ his course.  And oh, what a course he had to walk at City Park!  Blessed with a natural geological fault line, there is an elevated dimension that adds character and beauty to the course. 

City Park Golf Course is Louisiana’s first golf course to be placed on the National Register.  However, Susan Smead and Marc Wagner in a recent article for the National Park Service magazine state, “…. that understanding the importance of a golf course as a cultural resource in a community is rapidly increasing”...  They further said, “That a golf course is a laboratory of landscape architecture and design of an earlier era.  It speaks to the continuing attraction that the environment has on people.  Golf courses can also function as a record of important social development in a community”.  

Unlike many early golfing landscapes in America which have evolved over time in use and redesign, City Park Golf Course remains an historic gem, unspoiled by change.  It stands as testimony to the vision of Baton Rouge’s forefathers, the inspired work of its historic designers, Tom Bendelow, Myron West and Baton Rouge’s own, Steele Burden.  It has been home to a legion of golfers who have walked its length and breath as well as to innumerable passersby, commuters, joggers, travelers, non-golfers, who enjoy the serene beauty of the space, the kind of green expanse that only a golf course can provide in a dense, crowed urban society.  It stirs and nourishes the soul.  

City Park Golf Course is one of the rare public spaces in Baton Rouge, a visual living room, if you will, which affords the golfer as well as the passerby, a treat for the soul.  People have come to appreciate the pleasing effect that a large, expansive area, free of dense, visual intrusion, save for trees, lawn and sky can have upon the senses of an urban dweller.  

Myron West, the landscape designer of City Park, had been schooled in the turn of the century Waugh school of landscape design at the University of Massachusetts. This college, whose campus Fredrick Law Olmstead prepared a design for, was the second, (after Harvard) to establish an official school of landscape design.   

West’s teacher, Frank Waugh, was an accomplished musician as well as a landscape designer. In his thesis of 1973, Joseph A. Dicarla, Jr. said that Dr. Waugh taught his students that it was important to bring music and art into the concept of design.  As much as possible during his classes he would try to relate music to landscaping.  He would play his flute for his class and then have them try to incorporate what they heard into a landscape design.  Dr. Waugh tried to teach his students about the spirit of the land.  He thought that one should go to the site, experience it, live on it and learn its spirit.  He considered this the most important step in design.  He took his students on field trips at night during storms to experience all of the qualities of the land.  Dr. Waugh was constantly trying to relate every aspect of the human experience, physical, emotional and spiritual to landscape architecture.  

Waugh’s design philosophy in his book, Landscape Beautiful, stated, “....the power of the environment upon every living species has come to be accepted as a fundamental law of life….For we are environed night and day, from birth ‘til death, by the landscape.” At the beginning of the 21st century, that design philosophy is not too unlike the one that was embraced at the beginning of the 20th century.  

Myron West had the enviable opportunity to be a student during this time of landscape design enlightenment and upon graduation he was one of the few people in the country who had been formally trained in landscape design. Dan Burnham, the legendary force behind Chicago’s budding city plan and park system snapped him up.  

When West died in 1951, he was much acclaimed by the Chicago newspapers of his day. His obituary stated that he had contributed mightily to the design of Chicago’s grand and spacious boulevards as well as to the city’s prized Forest Preserves.  He was the superintended of Lincoln Park and charged with its design. He reclaimed much of the land that is now Chicago’s Lincoln Park and outer drive from Lake Michigan. This experience was not totally unlike the one that he would later encounter in his work at City Park.  At the eastern end of the proposed golf course, a marshy slue and draining basin challenged the designer. 

Steele Burden, the legendary Baton Rouge landscape designer, in a 1976 interview, told me that he worked for LSU at the time that City Park was being built.  He was engaged to plant all the trees according to the design of the golf course which had been laid out by Tom Bendelow.  And then in an almost “ah shucks” kind of comment, Burden went on to tell me that he had also gone ahead and planted all the oaks, now a beautiful mature alee, along both sides of the part of East Lakeshore Drive which abuts City Park.  

The city park golf course was always a welcoming public, community golf course.  Up until the late 1950s it was the only public golf course in Baton Rouge.  It provided a golfing venue for scores of young and old people who wanted to learn to play as well as to later enjoy the sport.  Many a young Baton Rouge G.I. in World War II found their R&R enhanced because they were familiar with and could enjoy the sport. They had learned to play at City Park. 

Local golfing greats Art Hanneman, the Zachariahs, Eddie and Emile, the Ed Rosses, both Senior and Junior and  Ed Ross Sr’s present-day grandson, Mike Johnson, (DiGuilio Brothers Restaurant) are all local, legendary golfers associated with the course. The Neese name, Harry, Jimmy, and Bobby, is synonymous with City Park golf. Marion Scobell, in his day, was golf pro extraordinaire. Bobby Duhe was an aficionado and passionate about the golf course, having learned to play golf on it e. Despite becoming a private country club golfer, he faithfully continue to play City Park, almost daily at sunset. 

Through the years City Park has played host to a number of well-known golfers. In their political peak, Governor and Mrs. Robert Kennon were regulars as was Mayor Woody Dumas in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Cornell Christoph, Dave Toms, Jenny Litback and her mother, were among golfers who played frequently. It is even reputed that Huey Long played the course.

 Willie Nelson almost played. In his touring heyday, Nelson saw the golf course from his bus  while riding on the interstate and directed his driver to get off so he could play a little golf. When he got to the City Park pro shop and inquired about the availability of golf clubs, he was told that there were none and directed to Webb Park. Willie just got back on the interstate and went along his way. 

Babe Zaharias, a well-known golfer on the women’s golf pro circuit in the 1940s, stopped in to play City Park when traveling to and from her Beaumont home.  

The string of golfers goes on. Ernest and Phyllis Harrison, Ernest being an   internationally recognized jazz clarinet music professor, played daily in Ernest’s retirement from LSU. He and Phyllis both directed their ashes to be scattered on the golf course in the little pine grove close to hole #9. This is the same grove of pine trees that Charles Birnbaum, founder of The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), identified as significant in the golf course’s application for recognition by the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. 

Young and old, regardless of gender, ethnicity, golfing ability, or socio-economic background continue to enjoy playing golf at City Park.  

We are the stewards of this community place maker... Advocate and preserve it for this and other generations.  SAVE HISTORIC CITY PARK GOLF COURSE....   

In the 1950s BREC destroyed a piece of its heritage, the Carousel, which in many cities today is a treasure....  Unlike Overland Park in Memphis, in the 1960s BREC relinquished its land for a ribbon of concrete...the Interstate Highway system. The highway destroyed Victory Park and to some degree City Park....   In the early 21st century, an effort was made to repurpose and destroy the historic golf course at City Park.... Thankfully it was saved....but sadly, now twenty years later.... BREC is again posing the question.  Do we want to save City Park Golf Course?....  As John Turner, a local philanthropist, and Friends of City Park supporter, in a public meeting asked BREC officials why can’t BREC commit to the preservation of the City Park Golf Course?  Those of us who are preservationists and see value in this treasure say a resounding YES.... and I hope you will join us and tell BREC as it prepares its strategic plan that it is imperative that it save the City Park Golf Course..... An icon, a place maker in the community and the cradle of golf in Baton Rouge.