How Audubon went from a rundown zoo to New Orleans’ ‘single-biggest attraction’
By Stephanie Riegel
Source: The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com
August 20, 2023
Ron Forman arrived at New Orleans City Hall at the perfect time to build a zoo.
It was 1973. The Audubon Zoo was so filthy and rundown that the federal government had threatened to close it. In response, New Orleans voters had just approved a property tax to help fund a $5 million renovation and expansion of the aging Uptown facility.
The Bureau of Governmental Research had issued a report that would become the blueprint for a new zoo master plan. Mayor Moon Landrieu needed someone to take the ball and run with it.
Though the zoo had its own director at the time, Landrieu hired Forman, then 24, to be his point person on the project, naming him as the city’s liaison to the zoo.
Within three years, the powerful board members of the Audubon Park Commission were impressed with the young Forman. They selected him over the mayor’s hand-picked candidate to lead the Audubon Zoo and carry the ambitious overhaul plan, by then under way, across the finish line.
Now 76, Forman has announced he will step down as the Audubon Nature Institute president and CEO at the end of the next year after 51 years at the organization, most of which was spent at its helm. During those years, the former Audubon Zoological Gardens transformed from an underfunded city asset into a nonprofit organization with a $60 million budget and a constellation of environmentally focused museums and attractions across the metro area.
It has also become one of the largest attractions in a city that is increasingly reliant on tourism to drive the local economy.
“Audubon is the single-largest draw for out-of-state tourists. It is our single biggest attraction,” said Stephen Perry, who headed the New Orleans Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, now New Orleans & Co., from 2002 until last year. “I can’t think of anything that means more to the community.”
It didn’t come easy, according to interviews and news reports from the time.
Uptown residents near Audubon Park, many wealthy and influential, objected to expanding the zoo’s boundaries. They worried about traffic and crowds in their neighborhood. They didn’t want to give up green space and tennis courts.
Their complaints and the negative publicity that followed hampered fundraising efforts for the zoo, Forman told the City Planning Commission at a 1975 budget hearing, though he was optimistic that “once the publicity dies down a bit, the fundraising will no longer have to be kept a low-key operation.”
The complaints did quiet down, and the tide of public opinion gradually turned as the newly renovated zoo reopened in phases — first with the Asian Domain in late 1978, then the World of Primates, followed by the Grassland Exhibit and, years later, the Louisiana Swamp and later still the Jaguar Jungle.
By the 1980s, the zoo was winning national awards. A growing number of tourists were venturing far from the French Quarter and adding the zoo to their itineraries. Today, the zoo comprises more than 50 acres in Audubon Park, has some 30,000 member households and attracts more than one million tourists a year.
Opening the river
While the zoo remains Audubon’s flagship attraction, it was the expansion of Audubon to the downtown riverfront that changed the trajectory of the organization and the contours of the city.
In 1990, the Aquarium of the Americas and Woldenberg Park opened at the foot of Canal Street, providing pedestrian access to the Mississippi River at that location for the first time.
Moon Landrieu’s administration had developed the Moon Walk across from Jackson Square in the French Quarter in the 1970s, and the 1984 World’s Fair had given locals a taste of what a recreational riverfront could look like.
But the Aquarium of the Americas took it to a different level, attracting more than 25 million visitors over the past 30 years. It also generated a revenue stream to pay for the park.
The new attraction came as the local economy was still reeling from the collapse in oil prices.
“We were losing the oil and gas industry and there was an outcry in the city that we needed new jobs,” Forman recalled. “There were conversations that tourism is an opportunity we could capitalize on. Some locals didn’t want more tourists. This helped us show what a tourist attraction could be.”
The aquarium, which was shuttered during the COVID pandemic and reopened earlier this year after a $41 million renovation, also opened the riverfront in a new way.
“The importance of opening the riverfront cannot be overstated,” said former Mayor Mitch Landrieu, Moon Landrieu’s son and now President Joe Biden’s infrastructure czar. “My dad had this really simple idea in the 1970s — open access to the riverfront — and Ron and others executed on it.”
Forman is working to complete the vision he and others shared for the downtown riverfront before he steps down next year.
It’s a $30 million conversion of two wharves at the foot of Esplanade Avenue—the Esplanade and Gov. Nicholls Street wharves—into a recreational area with green space, covered areas, an aerial promenade and a multiuse riverfront pedestrian path that will connect the Moon Walk upriver with Crescent Park downriver and create a nearly 2.5-mile contiguous pedestrian thoroughfare.
Building back better
Over its years of growth, the Audubon Nature Institute played as much of an educational role in the community as it did an economic or entertainment one.
Besides the aquarium and insectarium, Audubon expanded its portfolio in the 1990s and 2000s with the Audubon Louisiana Nature Center, Audubon Center for Research and Endangered Species, Freeport-McMoRan Audubon Species Survival Center and the Audubon Coastal Wildlife Network.
The organization also played a role in the recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Three months after the levee failures in 2005, the Audubon Zoo reopened, even as much of the city’s population was dispersed and its properties flooded.
Forman corralled volunteers and board members over the Thanksgiving weekend to greet weary New Orleanians, some of whom were coming home for the first time.
Thousands of people streamed into the zoo, so many in tears, Forman said, that he posted huggers at the front gates.
“In those years, there were people who wanted to give up on New Orleans and go to Houston and Atlanta, and Ron, with his unconditional love for New Orleans, was like, ‘This city is too important,'” Landrieu said. “And he was persistent in his soft inimitable but tenacious way.”
In the years since, Forman has talked about his decision to reopen and his mantra that New Orleans would build back bigger and stronger.
“It was important to give people something to do,” Forman said. “To give people hope and to let the world know that New Orleans was not giving up and was open for business.”
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