AHC: New Orleans

According to the 1840 Census, New Orleans was the 3rd largest city in the Union behind NYC and Baltimore. Your challenge is to keep New Orleans within the Top 5 largest cities up to the present day.
 
Gonna need to deal with a lot of hurricane issues, soil-sinking issues, and ensuring it becomes a huge rail depot like other places did a la Chicago, Dallas, Cincinnati, etc.
 
It would help if the city ever had honest, competent leadership. But even with the self-inflicted wounds, keeping the city in the top 5 would require an ASB, because you would need a geologic POD.

The metro area is too boxed in. Lake Pontchartrain to the north and wetlands in the other three directions. Contrast that to cities like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta which can grow endlessly in every direction.
 
For starters, don't blow the levees during the 1927 flood, causing tons of bad press and pissing off the rest of the state in the process. Clean up the city politics too which were insanely corrupt even by the standards of the time.
 
It would help if the city ever had honest, competent leadership. But even with the self-inflicted wounds, keeping the city in the top 5 would require an ASB, because you would need a geologic POD.

The metro area is too boxed in. Lake Pontchartrain to the north and wetlands in the other three directions. Contrast that to cities like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta which can grow endlessly in every direction.

New Orleans had already expanded and removed bayou Saint-Jean and many other bayou nearby. Expanding is not impossible into the bayou, most certainly. Houston likewise has issues to growth and cannot grow in all directions either. In fact, New Orleans can grow across Pontchartrain into LaCombe and other places on the north shore.

New Orleans simply must maintain its importance by remaining an epicentre for a nation, say the CS or keep its position with good politics and industrialization, which must occur to allow it to keep up with cities that overtook it, such as Chicago.
 
Better reconstruction would help as this would help avoid or at least mitigate the Great Migration. This in turn would keep the city having a larger population is one thing that you could do.

Making New Orleans a transportation Hub in general(both via the Mississippi and via rail) would also be important. as is better flood and hurricane control.
 
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