Tulane Sets PACE With Walking Path

November 20, 2007

Keith Brannon
kbrannon@tulane.edu

Thanks to a community-led partnership with Tulane University, residents of the historic St. Roch neighborhood won’t have to go far to find a place to walk. A new $450,000 walking path is a neighborhood effort with Tulane’s Partnership for an Active Community Environment (PACE).

Recently crews started work on the half-mile walking path designed to help residents get some exercise as they rebuild and repopulate their neighborhood. Crews spent the better part of a week pouring concrete for the six-block path on the neutral ground along St. Roch Avenue from the back of the former St. Roch Market to Independence Square, which is currently being used as a trailer park community for residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

“With sidewalks in disrepair and playgrounds used as trailer parks, residents have few places to go outside to exercise,” says Kathryn Parker, PACE program manager. “Creating a walking path that will function as a linear park will encourage residents to step outside and take a walk down St. Roch Avenue.”

The 50-foot-wide neutral ground is lined with oak trees and it is a natural fit for a park space, Parker adds. In recent years, however, grass along the area has given way to dirt and the area has been littered with parked cars, trash and construction debris, leaving it nearly impossible for residents to use it for recreation, she says.

Staff members with PACE interviewed approximately 100 residents and nearly 95 percent said they would use the neutral ground for outdoor activity if there were a walking path through it.

A followup survey is planned by PACE to measure the project’s impact on residents’ activity levels after the path opens in January. The project is funded through recovery grants from the City of New Orleans and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The core research project of Tulane’s Prevention Research Center, PACE is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and is dedicated to studying the impact of physical and social environments on obesity and health.

The Prevention Research Center is a program in the Department of Community Health Sciences in the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine that works with communities in assessing the effect of changes in the social and physical environment on health and healthy behaviors, and designing and implementing strategies for prevention.