Monkey Hill, the Mound a Flat City Loved

New Orleans sits on a delta so flat that a pile of dirt became a landmark. In 1933 and 1934, Depression-era workers with the Civil Works Administration dug a 1,200-foot lagoon to drain a wet thicket near the river in Audubon Park and heaped the spoil a few hundred feet inland. Children found the mound, ran up it, rolled down it and named it Monkey Hill. Popular memory credits the WPA and says it was built to show local children a hill. The geographer Richard Campanella notes the mound was nearly finished before the WPA existed, and that it was a byproduct rather than a goal. For decades segregation also kept Black children out of the park. When zoo planners proposed in 1974 to fence it off for grazing goats, schoolchildren wrote letters of protest, and the hill was kept. Long called the city's highest point, which it is not, it stands about 27.5 feet above sea level.