Strolling down to a lagoon, across an overgrown former South Course golf fairway, Julia Bland said the serene City Park setting, complete with moss-draped oaks, a stout 1939 Works Progress Administration bridge and boys kicking soccer balls, seemed a perfect backdrop for teaching children and parents in fun ways.

It could become the setting for an elaborate new complex for the Louisiana Children's Museum, which has flourished in the Warehouse District since 1986.

A 12-acre City Park site, which may include building construction over lagoon waters, would be easy for families from Mid-City, Gentilly and Lakeview to reach. And museum officials aim to attract families regionally with an array of ramped-up programs to educate parents and teachers about childhood development, Bland said.

City Park's board on Tuesday endorsed -- with restrictions -- the idea of redeveloping flood-ravaged golf courses with the help of the nonprofit Bayou District Foundation, and a Louisiana Children's Museum proposal to build a new "early learning village" museum complex on the Roosevelt Mall.

But the board rejected a request by Louisiana Public Broadcasting and the WLAE public television station to build a studio in the park near Tad Gormley Stadium, saying the studio wouldn't be the sort of cultural facility typically seen in a park setting.

After two months of speculation and public discussion on three proposed amendments to the City Park master plan, the park’s board met this evening and made their decision: the television studio is out, a children’s museum is okay with certain restrictions and there’s no need to decide yet who will manage the golf courses.

In its bid to create an ambitious mixed-use development at the site of the St. Bernard public housing complex the Bayou District Foundation, a nonprofit with financial ties to restored City Park golf courses, might be accused of post-Katrina fantasizing.

Golf and public housing may seem like odd bedfellows. But the plan uses as its model Atlanta's East Lake housing and golf development that replaced a notorious Atlanta public housing complex with what by all accounts has become a thriving mixed-income neighborhood. That unique project taps the golf revenue to finance education and recreation programs for families in subsidized housing.

ATLANTA --The skyscraper magnate faced a political gantlet, a seemingly impossible sales job sure to raise suspicions of a rich developer profiting at the expense of the poor.

His team faced dozens of potentially explosive appearances before wary public housing residents. They needed support for tearing down Atlanta's East Lake Meadows public housing complex to make way for a mixed-income development -- one linked to, of all things, a restored golf course next door. Not just any course: a private, rich man's golf course, a potent symbol of a realm foreign to the East Lake residents.