"Privately owned public spaces"

Weird legal territory we're getting into with this stuff.

When the Occupy Wall Street demonstration began on September 17, protesters were quickly blocked from Wall Street and settled into nearby Zuccotti Park for their occupation. But as this morning’s near-eviction by New York Police at the behest of owners Brookfield Properties made clear, Zuccotti isn’t a public park with all the free speech protections that come with public property; rather, it’s a privately owned public space.

Privately owned public spaces have proliferated in the past several decades—there are almost 550 in New York City—as a result of zoning concessions the city grants to real estate developers: in exchange for setting aside a nominally public space, property owners such as Brookfield are allowed to bypass height or setback restrictions on their buildings.

But the problem with privately owned public spaces is that they’re no substitution for purely public spaces, because First Amendment protections don’t really apply when the owners of a space are non-governmental.

I don't think any private enterprise owns Duncan Plaza which means, then, that the #OccupyNOLA protesters haven't been faithfully emulating their New York counterparts. Where could they relocate such that they are more in sync with the movement? Where are New Orleans' "privately owned public spaces"?

Piazza D'Italia is interesting in that it is more or less the inverse of what we're looking for. It is owned and maintained by a city run "Development Corporation" but mainly serves as an adornment to the Lowes Hotel making it more of a publicly owned private space.

Our beloved Mr. Peanut Park comes close but it's really more of a billboard than an amenity.

K&B Plaza is just a privately owned office park. Also nobody ever goes there.

Then there's Champions Square which is mostly a state-financed operation through the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District and overseen by SMG. All of which is to say it's a free-money-for-Tom-Benson machine and therefore a publicly financed public space producing a private profit at a vast public expense.

So I'm still kind of stumped here. Is there a local analog to Zuccotti Park's "public-private" partnership? Where in New Orleans do we find the appearance of a public space except with no real obligation to respect the rights of citizens a public good carries with it? That sounds sort of like what Mike Bloomberg is paying Kira Orange-Jones to do to our public schools. The concept is being imported from New York after all.