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West Lake Forest, New Orleans

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West Lake Forest is a neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. A subdistrict of the New Orleans East area, its boundaries as determined by the City Planning Commission are: Interstate 10 to the north and west, Read Boulevard to the east, and Dwyer Road to the south. West Lake Forest has a mixture of single-family detached homes, apartment complexes, and townhomes. The neighborhood was developed mostly during the late 1960s and 1970s. New Orleans and the state of Louisiana experienced an economic decline in the late 1980s, which slowed development. Lake Forest Plaza, an 80-acre (320,000 m2) 1,200,000-square-foot (110,000 m2) shopping center in the heart of West Lake Forest, was hit hard by the downturn. The opening of newer, larger malls in the Greater New Orleans area also depleted its customer base. By the 1990s, the neighborhood saw an increase in the number of low-income residents as public housing developments in other parts of the city were closed. The total population of West Lake Forest rose 5.75% between 1990 and 2000, while New Orleans as a whole declined by 2.5%. West Lake Forest was significantly impacted by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Over 70% of residential properties as well as nearly all commercial properties in the neighborhood received flood damage, wind damage, or both. Approximately 33.4% of West Lake Forest's pre-Katrina household population had returned to the neighborhood as of June 2008.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article West Lake Forest, New Orleans (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

West Lake Forest, New Orleans
Lake Forest Boulevard, New Orleans New Orleans East

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Wikipedia: West Lake Forest, New OrleansContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 30.029 ° E -89.983 °
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Lake Forest Boulevard 9399
70127 New Orleans, New Orleans East
Louisiana, United States
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Lakefront Airport
Lakefront Airport

Lakefront Airport (IATA: NEW, ICAO: KNEW, FAA LID: NEW) is a public airport five miles (eight kilometers) northeast of downtown New Orleans, in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, United States. The National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems for 2011–2015 categorized it as a general aviation reliever airport.Originally the airline airport for the New Orleans area, Lakefront Airport relinquished that role in the summer of 1946 when airline service began from Moisant International Airport (now Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport), a larger facility in the nearby suburb of Kenner. Lakefront Airport continues as a general aviation airport with charter, private, and occasional military operations. Airline service is also available to destinations in the Gulf South Region. The terminal building's interior retains much of its original lavish 1930s decoration, and the Art Deco exterior, obscured for decades by a "bomb-proof" facade installed after World War II, has been returned to its original appearance. The terminal building houses a restaurant frequented by nearby residents, the Walnut Room. The sculpture in front of the terminal, Fountain of the Four Winds by Enrique Alferez, is a local landmark. Lakefront Airport was damaged by hurricane-force winds and the storm surge of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and a number of the hangars and outlying buildings were destroyed. While the airport soon resumed functioning, restoration of the terminal building and other facilities proceeded slowly. With the exterior of the main terminal fully restored, however, the classic Art Deco building was used as the headquarters of the fictional company Ferris Aircraft in the 2011 action hero film Green Lantern starring Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. Since 2014, Lakefront Airport has hosted the WWII Air, Sea & Land Festival. The three-day airshow hosted by the National WWII Museum, Commemorative Air Force, and the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation honor the men and women of WWII through aviation displays, vehicle displays, and re-enactments.

Danziger Bridge shootings
Danziger Bridge shootings

On the morning of September 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, members of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), ostensibly responding to a call from an officer under fire, shot and killed two civilians at the Danziger Bridge: 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison. Four other civilians were wounded. All the victims were African-American. None were armed or had committed any crime. Madison, a mentally disabled man, was shot in the back. The shootings caused public anger and further eroded the community's trust in the NOPD and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina overall.The NOPD attempted to cover up the killings, falsely reporting that seven police officers responded to a police dispatch reporting an officer down, and that at least four suspects were firing weapons at the officers upon their arrival. Rev. Raymond Brown, the local head of the National Action Network (NAN), described the shootings as "...a racial tragedy."On August 5, 2011, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted five NOPD officers of myriad charges related to the cover-up and deprivation of civil rights. An attorney for the U.S. Justice Department described the case as "the most significant police misconduct prosecution [in the U.S.] since the Rodney King beating case". However, the convictions were vacated on September 17, 2013, by U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt due to prosecutorial misconduct, and a new trial was ordered. The Justice Department appealed the decision to vacate the convictions, but a federal appeals court agreed that a new trial was warranted.On April 20, 2016, the five former officers pleaded guilty to various charges related to the shooting, and in return received reduced sentences ranging from three to twelve years in prison. Three of the officers are white and two are African-American.