If you want to find out what New Orleans City Park looked like before it had a sculpture garden, a carousel, or a golf course, you can start by walking the Festival Grounds multi-use path and looking at what surrounds it. The one-mile asphalt loop skirts the perimeter of a 50-acre open green space that has hosted Voodoo Fest, visiting circuses, and enough large-scale events to earn its name, but the land underneath it has a longer story.
City Park operated its own horse racing track from 1905 to around 1918 on grounds near the current Tad Gormley Stadium, marketing itself as “the most modern racing plant in the South or West” and drawing enough business that the Fair Grounds Race Course agreed to alternate racing dates with it every two weeks. When the Locke Law banned racing in Louisiana and the track closed, its three-story steel grandstand was dismantled and moved to the Fair Grounds to replace one destroyed by fire, and the land was donated back to the park in 1920.
The path runs through a transition zone that rewards patient walkers. The interior side opens onto the wide Festival Grounds lawn, where Red-tailed Hawks and Mississippi Kites hunt the open field during migration, and Great Blue Herons move between the adjacent lagoons and the grass throughout the year. The exterior edge pushes up against denser live oak and shrub cover, and that edge habitat is where the birding gets more specific — warblers and vireos working through the canopy in spring and fall, with clear sightlines over the open field for watching raptors on thermals overhead.
The path has dedicated lanes for cyclists and pedestrians, which keeps it functional for both uses without the friction that comes on the park’s higher-traffic routes near the museums and botanical garden. Most mornings, it runs quietly, with dog walkers and joggers making up the bulk of the traffic. During Jazz Fest weekends in late April and early May, the Festival Grounds fill, and the path closes to general access, so timing matters if birding is the main draw.
The Festival Grounds path connects naturally to the rest of the park’s trail network, including the Zemurray Multi-Use Path around Big Lake and the mulch trails of Couturie Forest and Scout Island to the north and east. Running the full sequence in a single morning covers most of the park’s distinct habitat types without backtracking. Access the path from multiple points along Marconi Drive or from the park interior near the Botanical Garden.
