The Wisner Tract is the part of New Orleans City Park that Katrina left behind and nobody reclaimed. The former East Golf Course took on severe flood damage in 2005 and, unlike the rest of the park, was never redeveloped in the years that followed. City Park’s board formally designated the 150-acre property as Passive Recreation in 2017, reduced its mowing schedule, and began removing invasive trees to let the native bottomland forest reassert itself. The old golf cart paths stayed in place, and regulars started using them as walking trails through an ecosystem that was quietly rebuilding on its own terms.
What has grown back is a patchwork of habitat types compressed into a single site: bottomland hardwood forest, cypress swamp, open lagoons, overgrown shrub fields, and stretches of live oak canopy that shade the old fairway lines. The trails are unmarked and can run muddy after rain, so boots are the practical choice. A small gravel parking lot sits on the south side of Harrison Avenue just past the traffic circle over the lagoon bridge, and from there the most popular walking route runs about 1.15 miles through the interior.
The birding here draws serious listers for reasons the rest of City Park can’t replicate. Painted Bunting nests on the Wisner Tract specifically, a distinction it doesn’t share with the adjacent Couturie Forest or any other site in the park. The lagoons, which are more numerous here than anywhere else in City Park, hold American White Pelican and Double-crested Cormorant through winter, Anhinga year-round, and wading birds across every season. Mississippi Kite and Red-shouldered Hawk nest on the property, and Osprey, Cooper’s Hawk, Bald Eagle, and Red-tailed Hawk move through consistently from fall through spring. The site’s eBird checklist stands at 184 species, including a documented list of rarities and vagrants that keeps birders coming back.
For non-birders, the draw is different but equally real. The Wisner Tract is one of the only places inside the New Orleans city limits where the landscape feels genuinely unmanaged, where the path ahead isn’t obvious, and the tree cover closes in on both sides. The rest of City Park is beautifully maintained, which is part of what makes the Wisner Tract feel so different from it. The absence of programming is the point. Disc golfers use one section of the property, fishermen work the lagoon edges, and birders move through the shrub borders at dawn, but none of these uses overwhelm the space or each other.
City Park has been working with design firm Design Workshop on a long-range plan to formalize the passive recreation programming while maintaining the site’s ecological character, though as of early 2026, the tract remains in its current semi-wild state. The parking lot off Harrison Avenue is the main access point, with the trails accessible from the south side of the road between the traffic circle and Wisner Boulevard.
