31 August, 2016. HOUSTON
Stallings Playground - A Place of Fond Childhood Memories
Back in the days of my youth, there was a place I used to visit often enough. It was a neighborhood playground, located in the 7th Ward of New Orleans, near the Fair Grounds race track, called Stallings. (We never called it that, though; we called it "Staww-linns", in the local back-o'town pronunciation of the day.)
On a midsummer afternoon, I'd leave my grandparents' house on N. Gayoso and walk around the corner to d'Abadie Street, being sure to say hi to the neighbors who were to be found in their yard or sitting on their porch. They all knew me - and I knew them - every last one of them.
I'd get to N. Dupré and turn right, and walk the brick sidewalks under the shade of crêpe myrtle and camphor trees, past my Aunt AnnaMae and Uncle Gene's. When Blackie was around, I made sure to stop at the side gate and pet him for awhile, and say hi to the folks.
In the next block, I'd cross the street because there was this one house that had a jungle for a yard - and in the yard were huge, long-necked geese. They saw me coming, waddled toward the fence, and started honking up a storm. I'd stop a while and listen to the cacophony of raucous noise, and get a kick out of the silly faces that only a goose could make.
Soon enough I passed Onzaga St., and stopped when I got to Lapeyouse. In front of me was a high chain-link fence, and I had arrived at 2700 Lapeyrouse St, New Orleans, LA 70119. I mentioned the tall fence, but, as if a neighborhood child himself had requested it, there was, right there, a small, unofficial entrance to the playground, just big enough for a kid and his bike to get in.
Now, I wasn't like the other kids - I never got into any of the baseball games or whatever that they enjoyed. No, not me. I went to this often busy area to seek solitude in my own thoughts. There was a swingset there, and for hours I'd swing and think and enjoy the shade of the huge trees that covered the dusty lot.
☼While the others kids played ball in the hot sun on the baseball field, or shot hoops on the basketball court, I was lost in thought, high aloft on my swing. Way up there, swaying back and forth, I solved the world's problems, went off on adventures that Walter Mitty would have been proud of, or simply imagined myself walking hand-in-hand with some cute girl I met in school. Stuff like that. This was my alone time.
No matter how hot the day got, between the cooling shade of the huge trees overhead and the swinging, I never paid it any mind. Sometimes, though, it would suddenly get cooler, and a real strong breeze would blow. The sky darkened and I'd hear that deep rumbling from a distance. I always loved to be outside just before a thunderstorm came up. The dust blew up from off the ground, and a few leaves and miscellaneous candy wrappers likewise got caught up in the wind. I could smell the rain in the distance!
Then, I'd feel a drop on my forehead......and then another. Another thunderclap let me know my visit was over, so I jumped off the swing and ran home - just in time to avoid the deluge!!
Later, as an adult, I learned then that the playground was not "Stallings" - it was officially called the "Olive A. Stallings Playground." I wondered who she was, so I looked her up.
Just as Victor Anseman is known as the Father of the City Park, Olive A. Stallings is known as the “mother of playgrounds in New Orleans”. In 1906, she established the first “play center” in New Orleans, the Poydras Playground, at her own expense and continued to maintain it for two years. When the Playgrounds Commission was established in 1911, she served as its first president, a post she held continuously until her death in 1940. At her death, she left one-fourth of her estate– $ 150,000 – to the playgrounds system, soon to become the New Orleans Recreation Department."
Stallings Playground was built in 1938 with support from Olive Stallings. It is to her that I owe a debt of thanks. The land upon which it sits was once a streetcar barn, housing a couple dozen dinky little trolley cars providing badly-needed transportation for those in the area when automobiles barely existed, and streets were paved with mud.
The carhouse was called the "Cream Cheese Barn" by local residents. Originally, in the latter part of the 19th century when the nearby Fair Grounds was a brand-new attraction in the then "suburbs," dairy farms dotted the scrub landscape, and on this spot, a dairy did business for many years. The substantial structure, located roughly on an oddly-shaped section of ground bounded by Lapeyouse, Paul Morphy, Gentilly, and LaHarpe, was taken over when first horsecar lines and then electric streetcars were run from downtown to serve the new race track.
Directly across Gentilly Blvd. from the streetcar barn, in a newly-built shotgun house in a row of similar structures, lived a family, an acquaintance of my grandfather - whose daughter would capture the attention and hearts of America in years to come. Little Mary Leta Dorothy Slayton, known affectionately as "Dottie" would change her name to Dorothy Lamour.
Just across Grand Route St. John from Dottie's house, a movie theater was relocated and built. It featured a balcony, and was a favorite neighborhood spot to watch the latest movies - especially those of local celebrity Dorothy Lamour.
Just down Grand Route St. John from the Bell Theatre lived a young boy growing up who developed asthma. Young Pierre laFontaine was urged to take up a musical instrument to help his breathing, so he began to play the clarinet in the McDonnough 28 school band, and grew up to change his name to ♪ Pete Fountain.♪
Winds of change were blowing in the world, as they do constantly. The city did not stay just as it was. It never did! Street railway companies consolidated, and the streetcars housed in the old dairy barn were moved to another facility at Canal Street and North Gayoso. Some time later, the huge old wooden structure was demolished.
Enter Olive Stallings Playground.
Chinese wise-man Confucius is per ported to have said: "PATIENCE: In time the grass becomes milk." With the passage of time, it seems, the milk changed into streetcars, and now it has come full-circle and become grass again!
It's been many years since I lived in or frequented the old neighborhood, and even longer since I walked the dusty grounds of Stallings Playground. Times change, and so do we. We go on with our lives, while things made of concrete and steel tend to deteriorate, and fall into disrepair, and eventually are swept away.
They wind up joining the swelling ranks of things that we look back upon.
A few years ago, I drove past the old place, and, to my surprise, it was more or less the same as I remember it. I am happy to say, this is one of the very few things of my youth that still stands, .....well, except that the swing where I spent so many happy hours on hot summer days. That was gone. Figures.
NOTES: A turn-of-the-century Sanborn insurance map of the Fair Grounds and vicinity shows the Orleans Railway streetcar barn. It was nicknamed the Cream Cheese Barn by locals, because it was once a dairy. The dairy closed or relocated and the existing structures afterward became a streetcar barn, housing several lines.
Stalls that took care of cows now kept horses, because in 1865 there were no electric streetcars yet. The Fair Grounds opened in about 1872, and streetcar lines brought horse racing fans and workers to the area from downtown and elsewhere.
The streetcar lines electrified in the 1890's, and the area, still considered a suburb, began to develop. By the 1920's, street railway companies began consolidating and centralizing. Trolley cars from the Cream Cheese Barn were moved to Canal Station at Canal and N. Gayoso.
Then, in the same parcel of ground where cows were milked and later horse cars and trolley cars were housed, the land was converted to recreational use.
Fledgling NORD (New Orleans Recreation Department) began to make playgrounds.
In 1922, the Olive Stallings Playground was established in what once was a dairy.
There was even a nice swimming pool!
