Battery Bienvenue is a ruined coastal gun battery located in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. It was built as part of the harbor defense of New Orleans, and located at a strategic fork where Bayou Bienvenue and Bayou Villeré join. Bayou Bienvenue, from Lake Borgne, was the route used by the British late in 1814 to approach the city.
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2.5 km
Bayou Bienvenue is a 12.1-mile-long bayou and "ghost swamp" in southeastern Louisiana. It runs along the political border between Orleans Parish and St. Bernard Parish to the east of New Orleans. The Bayou Bienvenue Wetlands Triangle viewing platform in the Lower Ninth Ward provides expansive views of the bayou and also serves as an educational resource about restoration efforts in the area.
A part of the central wetlands system that ran from the Lower 9th Ward all the way to Lake Borgne, today only roughly 400 acres remain of the once thriving cypress swamp. Like other freshwater bayous throughout the Mississippi River Delta, Bayou Bienvenue consisted of old growth cypress and many native species of plants and animals; "What is now open water used to be an old–growth swamp that was filled with cypress trees, water lilies, and freshwater wildlife such as fish, alligators, otters, birds, and crawfish. The cypress trees were once so thick you could pull yourself along in a canoe or pirogue just by reaching out to grab cypress knees."
Beyond its ecological significance, Bayou Bienvenue has served cultural functions to the populations of the surrounding areas throughout the area's history of human occupation. Archaeological digs have yielded evidence that indigenous peoples of hunter-gatherer societies inhabited the area as far back as 400 A.D. The arrival of French explorers in the late 1600s began nearly two centuries of disagreements, disputes, and armed confrontations between French, Spanish, British and later American interests as the colonial era of North America progressed. Bayou Bienvenue gained its name during the initial French occupation; 'bayou bienvenue' is French for "welcome bayou".
From the beginning of European exploration of North America, slave labor was used to facilitate the interests of the colonizing powers. Under French rule, the enslaved population included indigenous peoples as well as Africans brought to the Americas in the Atlantic slave trade. By 1828, New Orleans was center of the United States slave trade. With its location five miles from the center of New Orleans, Bayou Bienvenue became home to a community of Maroons, freed slaves. Who were Maroons, and what was their relationship to [the landscape of Bayou Bienvenue]?
Maroons were self-described liberated enslaved people who lived in the wetlands. For Europeans, the wetlands were associated with death and fear, but for Maroons they held the possibility of new life. Liberated enslaved people, especially of African origin, would escape into the wetlands because of the similarity to the landscapes of their origins. Maroons lived alongside Indigenous communities that were there before them, like the Chitimacha and Choctaw Tribes and Acadians, who had arrived when Britain colonized Canada. These societies developed various techniques for living in the wetland environment without damaging it, including raised housing, small watercraft-like pirogues, and a new cuisine of alligator and turtles. Each group brought their knowledge of cooking, animals, plants, medicines, and building.
Eventually, industry and plantations began to exert pressures on these communities and how they used the landscape. To earn money, Maroons made wares with grass-weaving techniques they had learned from the Chitimacha. Enslaved people whom Maroons had relationships with would take the wares and sell them at the slave market in New Orleans. Lumber companies would also bring enslaved people into the wetlands to harvest cypress for building materials. Through the connections between the enslaved and Maroons, lumber companies would pay Maroons, who were deeper in the wetlands, to cut timber. However, this practice was not beneficial to Maroon communities because the logging participated in the destruction of the wetlands that protected them. As the wetlands became navigable with more shipping channels and canals, the Maroons were increasingly hunted down. Maroon communities still existed in wetlands elsewhere, like Brazil and Jamaica, but in Bayou Bienvenue their communities ceased to exist either through capture or destruction of the landscape that had sustained them.Though in 1769, the Spanish government abolished the enslavement of indigenous people, the Maroon communities of the swamps surrounding New Orleans were a major source of anxiety for the powerful leaders of Spanish Louisiana. The Maroons' reputation grew to mythical proportions, though their numbers were significantly lower than what the Spanish government believed. Jean Saint Malo led a group of Maroons in the areas west of Bayou Bienvenue between 1780 and 1784, when Spanish Lieutenant Governor Francisco Bouligny was ordered to eradicate the Maroons, including Saint Malo's group. After Saint Malo's capture and subsequent execution, Maroon communities were largely driven out of the greater New Orleans area, including Bayou Bienvenue, by the late 1700s.
The area remained significant throughout for its connection for ships to travel between the New Orleans area and Lake Borgne, creating a shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico, throughout the transition to American rule after the Louisiana Purchase. This proved of significant benefit to the British during the Battle of New Orleans in 1814. "The British had done the impossible. Two officers, disguised as locals, had found the one bayou leading from Lake Bourgne to the Mississippi River that the Creoles, ignoring Jackson’s repeated orders, had failed to block. Suitably named Bienvenue, it had welcomed the midnight passage of General Keane, 2,080 men, and two guns to firm ground on the Villeré plantation along the Mississippi. At dawn on December 23, they had surrounded and taken prisoner the militia detachment supposedly guarding the bayou."The British were defeated after the Battle of New Orleans, waged just five miles downriver from New Orleans and just beyond Bayou Bienvenue at the Chalmette Battlefield in St. Bernard Parish. A short distance from the Lake end of Bayou Bienvenue, the remains of Battery Bienvenue still guard the eastern approach to the city. This fortification was built shortly after 1815's Battle of New Orleans to prevent any future invasion of the city by way of the Lake and Bayou.
The growth of New Orleans in the early 20th century led to part of Bayou Bienvenue being drained for expansion of the city. In the 1920s, the dredging and installation of locks creating the Industrial Canal, which connected Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River, marked the beginning of the man-made interference that lead to the eventual demise of the Bayou Bienvenue cypress swamp.
The creation of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet in the 1960s "funneled directly into the bayou from the Gulf, and quickly killed the cypresses, oaks and almost every other tree, as well as much of the shrub and grass. The wildlife vanished with the habitat ... the area has been decimated, eroded and virtually marinated in salt water." Today a "ghost swamp", the only visible remnants of the Bayou before its man-made destruction are the skeleton-like, limbless trunks of the dead cypress trees rising out of the brackish water.
The bayou crosses the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, before ending in Lake Borgne, a shallow estuarine lake branching from the Mississippi Sound.
3.0 km
The Inner Harbor Navigation Canal Lake Borgne Surge Barrier is a storm surge barrier constructed near the confluence of and across the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet near New Orleans. The barrier runs generally north–south from a point just east of Michoud Canal on the north bank of the GIWW and just south of the existing Bayou Bienvenue flood control structure.
Navigation gates where the barrier crosses the GIWW and Bayou Bienvenue can be worked to reduce the risk of storm surge coming from Lake Borgne and/or the Gulf of Mexico. Another navigation gate has been constructed in the Seabrook vicinity, where the IHNC meets Lake Pontchartrain, to block a storm surge from entering the IHNC from the Lake.
5.3 km
TACA Flight 110 was a scheduled international flight operated by TACA International Airlines, traveling from San Salvador to New Orleans, with a stopover in Belize City. On May 24, 1988, the flight encountered severe thunderstorm activity on its final approach to New Orleans International Airport. As a result, the brand new Boeing 737-300 suffered flameout in both engines, but the pilots made a successful emergency landing on a grass levee adjacent to NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility, with no one aboard sustaining more than a few minor injuries, and with only minor hail damage to the intact aircraft. Following an on-site engine replacement, the jetliner took off from Saturn Boulevard, a road which had previously been an aircraft runway at Michoud. The aircraft was subsequently repaired and returned to service until it was finally retired in 2016.
5.5 km
The Michoud Assembly Facility is an 832-acre industrial complex for the manufacture and structural assembly of aerospace vehicles and components. It is owned by NASA and located in New Orleans East, a section of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States. Organizationally it is part of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and is currently a multi-tenant complex to allow commercial and government contractors, as well as government agencies, to use the site.
MAF is one of the largest manufacturing plants in the world with 43 environmentally controlled acres—174,000 m2—under one roof, and it employs more than 4,200 people. From September 1961 to the end of the Apollo program in December 1972 the site was utilized by Chrysler to build the S-I and S-IB first stages of the Saturn I and Saturn IB rockets, later joined by Boeing to build the S-IC first stage of the Saturn V. From September 5, 1973, to September 20, 2010, the factory was used by Martin Marietta for construction of the Space Shuttle's external fuel tanks. Today, MAF is used by Boeing to fabricate and assemble the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket and by Lockheed Martin to build the pressure vessel of the Orion spacecraft.
6.6 km
Michoud is an area in Eastern New Orleans, part of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, Louisiana, located at latitude 30.03°N, longitude −89.925°W.
The battery was first constructed in 1815 and improved over the years. The initial armament was planned for one 24-pounder and two 18-pounder cannons. In 1826, the plan expanded to twenty-four 32-pounders and two 13-inch mortars with a garrison of one artillery company. Eventually four buildings occupied the parade ground: barracks, officers quarters, a guardhouse, and an artillery magazine. The battery was about 600 feet wide, with the guns pointed toward the mouth of Bayou Bienvenue (toward Lake Borgne) and was surrounded by a moat that connected to the bayou. The battery was abandoned a few years after the American Civil War, in 1872.
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