The New Orleans Lakefront Airport

T he New Orleans Lakefront Airport is a public use airport located five miles northeast of the central business district of New Orleans, in Orleans Par- ish, Louisiana. Built at a cost of $4.5 million, the 473-acre Airport opened in 1934 on a man-made peninsula jutting into Lake Pontchartrain on the eastern side of the Industrial Canal, which links the lake to the Mississippi River. To make land available for the project, the Orleans Levee Board, which owns the Airport, drove a 10,000 foot retaining wall into Lake Pontchartrain and pumped in six million cu- bic yards of hydraulic fill to raise the field above the water. Originally the major commercial airport in the New Orle- ans area, Lakefront Airport relinquished that role in 1946, when commercial airline service began from Moisant Inter- national Airport, now known as Louis Armstrong Internation- al Airport, a significantly larger facility located in the nearby suburb of Kenner. In the 1950s, Lakefront was designated as a general aviation airport, with three asphalt runways that serve private, corporate, and military traffic. A NEWORLEANS TRADITION AT A GLANCE THE NEWORLEANS LAKEFRONT AIRPORT WHAT: A public use airport WHERE: Orleans Parish, Louisiana WEBSITE: www.lakefrontairport.com